Citizen Sleeper Reviews
Citizen Sleeper can be some great solo fun for those who have played a similar Powered by the Apocalypse game. But, the game doesn’t offer enough to entice newcomers with no experience. Even then, it can be a little difficult to resist just cheating the system by min-maxing on certain skills.
A rich narrative adventure with light role-playing elements, Citizen Sleeper has some of the most evocative, well-written dialogue of any sci-fi setting in recent memory. Its world feels tangible, full of ideas and concepts that are easy to grasp but have deep and complicated implications.
Citizen Sleeper is a very compelling experience, with an enticing story supported by some solid strategy gameplay and barebones but still competent RPG mechanics. If you’re open to a Disco Elysium-esque visual novel that’s a bit lighter in tone (despite the dystopian setting) and emphasizes resource management more, it’s safe to say you’ll enjoy this.
Citizen Sleeper has captured my imagination in a way that few video games do. Thoughts of characters met and what could have been have percolated through my mind since finishing a playthrough after roughly five hours, which I did with an urgency not typical of me. If you're looking for something different, something that feels both fresh and timely and often beautiful and sometimes horrifying with its implications, Citizen Sleeper is all of those things and more.
The stories in Citizen Sleeper are worth hearing, but the fairly sparse and restrictive mechanics underpinning the game begin to buckle under the demands of that storytelling. More complications resulting from task categories may have expanded the possibilities here, but despite this, Citizen Sleeper remains a great cyberpunk diorama, and it’s well worth uncovering all its little details.