My Review of Citizen Sleeper

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SapphireE

In Love Lv4️⃣
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Member for 6 years
The plot of Citizen Sleeper is interesting. You play a "Sleeper". A sleeper is what happens when a corporation buys a person, scans their brain/mind, puts the copied mind into a robot body and then puts the original in Cryo sleep and has the robot version work off the debt. Afterwards the Original gets to go on with their life. The copy process isn't perfect. Not all the memories are there just fuzzy dreams. The robot also doesn't feel physical pain. For them pain is like when your character is injured in a video game. Your character hurts but all you, the player, experience is a red flash or hp gauge going down. The Sleepers are also designed with a failsafe in case they escape called "Planned obsolescence". The body is meant to fall apart unless not cared for by the company. The company wants any escaped sleepers killed. (It's never specified if an escape is counted against the Original) . The robot has three archetypes each with a plus one in one stat but a minus one in another (if your roll a five in an endurance your roll becomes a six if you have plus one but four if you have minus one. Rule of thumb. Upgrade the minus first chance you get) but by the end of the game you can have all the skills. You never see your character on screen as it's a visual novel except for the archetype menu. The game never asks your name cause everyone calls you sleeper and as a humanoid robot you're genderless and you will never ever ever know who the organic being you're a copy of is. This isn't a hosted games protagonist. You are a completely unique entity who your kind is based off could be man, woman, or non-binary you can make up the originals backstory in your mind but all memories are vague and unhelpful like you remember a rainstorm.

you are an escaped sleeper who ends up on a space station and needs to remove a tracker and find a way to not die meeting a colorful cast around the way.

The Gameplay is extremely tricky at first but eventually becomes Super Easy barely an inconvenience. Each day you wake up with dice pre rolled. You spend these dice on tasks from sidequests like babysitting to just making money. If the task is related to a sidequests there will be a circle with sections at the bottom. If you need to succeed a task three times there's three sections. Depending on what dice you use you'll either get a 100 percent positive outcome if you use a six, 3-5 nets a 25 percent chance of positive 50 percent neutral, 25 percent negative, and 1-2 is a fifty fifty neutral or negative. ( The game autosaves repeatedly so you can save scum by exit to the menu and continuing if you get a bad roll).

A tricky thing is some failures have consequences. If you get a negative outcome on repairing a ship you might get damage points toward your task. Example: the yellow pie (cause the units are like pieces of pie) is fix the ship and the red pie is permanently break the ship. If you fill the red pie you screwed up badly but you only get a red pie in certain cases like ship repair. Another thing is that when filling the pies. A neutral success usually gives you one yellow pie slice while a positive gives two to three. The Red pie isn't used for negative outcomes it can also be a timer. And if you have a job like repairing a ship finish it before the red pie fills or you fail that sidequest ( that happened my first playthrough). Alternatively if a chef says he'll have soup ready in three days you gotta wait three days for the yellow pie to fill.

now about the Dice. There's kind of a catch. As your system breaks down every day (and some negative outcomes) a bar above the dice depletes. When the bar is no longer over a dice section you lose that dice so you go from six actions a day to none when it fully depletes. With a perk you can use scrap to repair yourself (but it takes two upgrade points to unlock that skill so it's gonna be a while since you only really get exp from finishing sidequests) but mostly you'll be using Zombrex...I mean Stabilizer. Until you find the doctor you can't get any stabilizer which takes a few cycles (days) by the time you get your first dose you might be at one or two dice meaning you can't do barely anything which is extremely frustrating. When the bar fully depletes you lose all your dice and a skill you have breaks and costs an upgrade point to repair ( and upgrade points don't grow on trees so don't let it get that bad) however the day after you lose all your dice you get into the second and possibly last breaking bar ( i never let it fully deplete could be a three strike system) and get all dice back possibly as the games way of telling you " Get a job and buy some stabilizer"

(Quick Sidenote it may only be my TV's fault but I feel the need to mention that your inventory is at the bottom of the screen and for me the numbers are off screen. I'm on Xbox one. So if you notice this happen in your games prepare to never know how much of an item you have)

Another important detail is that you might feel discouraged when you wake up to low numbers (another two point skill is reroll all unused dice). However MOST of the data network activities require low numbers usually 1s and 2s. The physical ship tasks like working salvage get high numbers and the network gets low numbers so no dice is totally useless.

The game is actually set up for you to succeed so long as you use appropriate dice and manage to keep an eye on times tasks. What makes the game extremely interesting is that it gives you several opportunities to end and each of those leads to a credit. An fake example to not spoil anything so I'll make it fantasy instead

Example:

Lich lord: You want to work for me and become my undead slave for eternity?
Yes option: you become an undead slave roll credits go to title screen.
No option: roll credits and get a cut scene then back to work.

Then you save the princess and the options are to marry her or be a traveling warrior.

If you choose the obviously an ending choice you get credits and back to the title. If you choose the other choice you get to go back to the game but you still get the credit sequence. For obvious reasons both plot and gameplay wise that takes place entirely in one setting. Leaving the station is a permanent ending. I assume if you don't take any of the leave the ship options once you've exhausted your last opportunity that would be a return to title ending but I used the last possible one for reasons you'll understand if you play it.


While there are choices you can make some of them feel pointless because like I said before the game wants you to get to the end. So if you're feeling a choice might be agonizing before it even arrives. You might have counted your chickens before they hatched. There can be some tough choices but if you're a good judge of character (and occasionally tropes) you'll know when to say "this will work itself out". And not worry.

One problem you might have is the tone. Anything with big business usually involves someone getting screwed over. But most of the major NPCs are good with one possible exception. And there's a lot of hope.

Overall I'd say it's definitely worth playing (and available on Xbox game pass)
 
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