I found Citizen Sleeper gently moving. It’s one of those experiences that pushed beyond its game boundaries, for me, and spoke to deeper things I hold to be important in my real life: things like friendship and belonging, and helping people out while asking for nothing in return. It touched me on a deeper level, and even months later, I remember it.
But it’s a strange game to tell other people about, which is something I was reminded of this morning while finishing the last part of the new three-piece DLC story arc (which is free, by the way, and all episodes are out now). I tried to tell my partner what it was you did in the game. “Well, you go around the space station talking to people, and you roll dice to spend on doing tasks.” She looked at me blankly. “It’s not my kind of thing,” she said, and walked away.
I get where she’s coming from: Citizen Sleeper doesn’t seem, outwardly, very eventful. There’s some detailed character art but beyond that, everything plays out in text. There are no voice overs or animations or cutscenes. It’s all, to a large degree, in your head. And when you layer on top of that some clinical boxes for dice rolls, and pie-chart gauges, there’s an air of impenetrability about it, at least initially.
Yet, I’ve rarely found a more welcoming place. The actual experience of playing Citizen Sleeper is one of the most friendly and relaxing I’ve ever had. There’s no sense of punishment or being obstructed in your progression. In some ways it feels as though you’re swept along and controlling only the speed at which things happen, and success is predetermined. And for a while that bugged me because I didn’t feel the challenge and I didn’t feel the authorship I wanted over outcomes and events. Which isn’t to say you don’t have any authorship at all, because you absolutely do – making decisions about the outcome of things, of lives, of events, is absolutely what Citizen Sleeper is about. But often I felt like I was led rather than leading.