Game Thoughts: Citizen Sleeper
I bought Citizen Sleeper during a recent Steam sale -- I wasn't actually intending on doing a full playthrough, but wanted to check it out since it had some good reviews.
I subsequently lost 3 nights of sleep to the game's ingenious game loop and gorgeous character portraits. This game is fantastic.
The game plays out as half-visual novel (most of the "stuff" that happens just happens in text form) and half progress-quest where you literally just make some progress bars count up while others count down automatically day over day.
And it works! The developers somehow trimmed all of the fat out of the typical roleplaying paradigm, distilling common game mechanics to their purest form -- after all, what is an RPG when you pull back the veneer? You'll find it is, in fact, simply doing actions to progress to the next story beat.
Everything's balanced out so that you're simultaneously trying to keep your character alive while progressing several story threads -- each action you take is resolved by consuming one of 5 dice rolled at the start of the day. The longer you go between topping up your character's meds, the less dice/actions you get per day, applying even more pressure.
In between the progress bars you dictate your character's future and the future of the station you're on. You are a "sleeper" -- a humanoid cyborg (there's more to it than that, but I'll gloss over the details) fleeing the company that owns you. You find yourself on The Eye, a station in political and technical flux, and must eke out a living or find a means of escaping.
I was so drawn into this story I couldn't put the game down. I fell in love with the characters (the excellent portraits help), their stories, and The Eye with all it's grit and problems. The progress bars stopped being progress bars and became storytelling mechanisms, incentives, panic-inducing countdowns to dire events.
I do have to say I'm very glad that I got the game late in its life, as if the game had ended at one of the endings offered to me through the main campaign I would have been very disappointed. Fortunately, the game currently comes with 3 expansions (Flux, Refuge, Purge) which provide an extremely satisfying ending that ties up much of the loose ends of the game.
I honestly don't know how they actually made it happen, but all the small choices I had made throughout the campaign and particular characters I had liked and interacted with all pieced together perfectly in the finale. I had tears rolling with the credits -- definitely what I expected from progress bars!
I won't be revisiting the game for a second playthrough because I'm completely satisfied with the ending I got in the first run. I will, however, be keeping an eagre eye on the upcoming sequel.
This game taught me a lot about making magic happen with very little, and I hope I can take those lessons with me into my own eventual works!