Citizen Sleeper Reviews
From its interesting design ideas to its rich world-building, Jump Over The Age's Citizen Sleeper is one of 2022's best surprises.
Citizen Sleeper is a breath of fresh air for a genre like science fiction, increasingly inclined to self-cite and enhance its aesthetics, leaving the content partially in the shadows. Its settings, although not directly observable, are alive, pulsating, and inside it is possible to intertwine with the stories of the inhabitants of Erlin's Eye.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Citizen Sleeper is a great narrative RPG where you escape the clutches of a corporation and must turn your life around into a brand new experience.
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.
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.
I’ll close the curtain on the behind-the-scenes look at games criticism and I won’t spoil any more of Citizen Sleeper, but this review in particular was a joy to write. More specifically, Citizen Sleeper is a joy to play. The Eye is crammed with wonderful stories, and it feels like it’s truly bustling with activity – far more than any Triple-A open world populated with soulless NPCs going about their same daily routines. The simple visuals allow your mind to fill in the gaps like a good book, and it’s a testament to Jump Over the Age’s storytelling that it manages to create such a rich world. I already know that I’ll pop back to the Eye for the rest of the year, maybe longer, just to experience stories I missed, to see how different decisions play out, but mostly just to spend more time there, soaking up the atmosphere in an obsolete body as I absentmindedly peoplewatch over a steaming pot of noodles.
The plot is the shining star of this game as you interact with a plethora of characters all developed with incredible backstories and details. The characters have their own unique personalities and charms, all laid out by expert futuristic writing. It is so beautifully pulled together through many twisting tangents that this space pirate-like community is very reminiscent of the cult class tales of ‘Cowboy Bebop’. Each cycle brings new and exciting revelations in the story.
Citizen Sleeper creates a strong universe and gives the main character an engaging story with plenty of choices. Erlin’s Eye feels like a small part of a well-designed narrative space that can support more exploration. The visual design fits in with the wider themes of the game and the characters never become preachy.
Citizen Sleeper crafts a gorgeously written and thoughtfully conceptualized Cyberpunk world using RPG mechanics inspired by the best in tabletop gaming.
Science fiction with themes of capitalism, identity, and oddly enough, mostly cozy characters in an environment that is not. Jump Over the Age's second title launches a unique experience with board game touches, focusing on relationships with other characters and a sense of belonging with a narrative so direct that it touches the heart in more than one of its multiple plots.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
We’d give Citizen Sleeper a strong recommendation to anybody who liked Disco Elysium or any general role playing games with a heavy emphasis on the role. A synthwave soundtrack, strong writing, and high-pressure gameplay make this a game that’ll be tough to put down once you get into it.
Much like In Other Waters, this is a game you simply need to sit down and play in order to fully appreciate, as no screenshot or explanation will fully do it justice, and having it release on Game Pass is just the ticket to entice interested parties to try their hand. We urge you to dive in here, as this is a game of real style and substance with multiple endings to mop up as you peel back layers and dig deeper into Eldin's Eye and its inhabitants. Citizen Sleeper is a unique and thought-provoking adventure that's truly taken us by surprise.
An evocative life-sim RPG you won't want to wake up from.
As regulars probably know well by now, I don't tend to be a fan of visual novels and even sometimes struggle with titles that are too heavily text-driven, but when they're done right its almost impossible not to take notice...
There is real anguish and intimacy here, real experience, real softness, pensiveness, complexity of thought, from the deeply clever, immaculately balanced systems to its extraordinarily well-realised art, static drawings of those characters that each feel like a glossy, coffee table magazine cover of their own, such is the incredible texture, colour, posture, pain behind the eyes. Citizen Sleeper is speaking to you, but in this case I really recommend you simply listen - not least because there's depth to be found in your own silence, and because the things it does have to say are absolutely worth hearing.
What Citizen Sleeper achieves in a fairly short hour count, though, is a sci-fi story that sticks.
With its emotional story and complex management mechanics, Citizen Sleeper is a game you don’t want to sleep on. You’ll be swept away by its beautiful and harrowing world-building and fall for the characters that breathe life into this already intricate world. You will die and the learning curve is steep, however it is all worth it for the philosophical story Citizen Sleeper intends to tell.
A decaying cyborg with a human mind struggles to survive aboard a space station in a superbly written, if not exactly original, slice of scuzzy sci-fi
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.
It's not often that a game grabs me in quite the way Citizen Sleeper has. By stripping a video game adventure to its barest components and then manipulating those components to create just the right balance of hope and despair it successfully conveys the drama and danger of its small slice of sci-fi storytelling. Top-notch writing, impeccable narrative design and inviting tabletop mechanics accompanied by gorgeous art and music serve only to elevate it even more. Play this bloody game.