The map expands, cycle by cycle, turn by turn, adding more and more choices, more places to spend your time. Working a few shifts hauling crates in the shipyard will open up the dock's assembly line where a better job awaits, alongside some new friends. People-watching in the Rotunda might unlock a new bar where you can buy cheap rations.
New places to visit are unlocked by spending time (and dice) in hub zones. How many cycles until a scrap ship will dock, or the countdown to the day on which that dirtbag bounty hunter expects another backhander for not turning you in. The dice limit how much you can do in a day, while little clocks count down all around, showing you other possibilities. You spend each day (or "cycle") bouncing around a pretty 3D map of the station, doing jobs, meeting folks, and trading "chits" for the robo-insulin you need to stay alive. In this universe, even robots need noodles. And you've got an energy meter to keep up, lest you starve.
You've got some dice to roll that determine the outcome of certain events (if you're in bad shape you get fewer dice). You've got a health bar showing your deteriorating condition (the corp who built you did it with planned obsolescence in mind). Or maybe it could be called "turn-based storytelling". Imagine if the laser-cutting protagonist of Hardspace: Shipbreaker did a runner to another solar system while still in tremendous debt, and ended up making friends with a bunch of visual novel characters.Ĭitizen Sleeper isn't really a visual novel, but it borrows from that template as much as it does the RPG. As an asylum seeker you are here to make a new life of sorts, far from the corporate masters you've escaped from. Huge chunks of its ring habitat are missing. You arrive as a robotic refugee on Erlin's Eye, a rotating space station that has seen years of damage and disrepair. You can be a motor-kicking Machinist, a hardened mining Extractor, or an Operator who likes to hack the planet. Even when the game's own systems of dice and clocks clash with its stories of human interest, it is the people who come out on top. Throwing off the shackles of a faceless process governing your life is a recurring theme in this blend of sci-fi RPG and interactive fiction, and it makes for a strong rags-to-ramen story of one robot on the run. Systems should not govern people's behaviour, he says, the people are what matters. In one scene he explains his deep anti-capitalist reasoning to you. He is not my favourite character in Citizen Sleeper but he is the one who best represents it. Feng is a zealous computers guy with less of an axe to grind and more of a guillotine to set up.
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