“Wake up sleeper!” yes, wake up Sleeper, your time is finally now. “Citizen Sleeper” developed by Jump Over the Age is a futuristic, sci-fi RPG with so much to offer from narrative to gameplay. If you are a fan of RNG outcomes and umm well the ‘Fifth Element’ well this is a game that you can immerse yourself in you unravel mysteries across space.

Citizen Sleeper throws you into an interstellar role play where you take on the role of a cybernetic ‘Sleeper’ escaped from your mundane existence as a robotic slave worker. Being a Sleeper means you have a human psyche operating an artificial body that constantly needs upkeep all the while being mercilessly tracked by a bounty hunter hoping to reclaim you as property of his benefactors.

Set on the Erlin’s Eye space station, a dystopian society home to thousands, you must maintain the balance of your life force each cycle while solving the main mysteries of your predicament.

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.

In this cyberpunk world, a day is known as a cycle and in a very tabletop RPG-like fashion you must play out your day’s actions through the roll of dice. These dice negate the success of you completing each action. To maintain your life you must balance out your condition (health of your body) and your energy. The better you heap your condition up the more dice you will receive.

Some actions will deplete your energy and when it is all gone it will chip at your condition at an alarming rate. This isn’t an adventure RPG and is literally a point and click, survival management to progress a story so the controls and mechanics are simple and easy to master. You can also earn credits and materials to initiate actions or to progress objective timers. Completing actions will also earn the very rare upgrade points that may affect things like energy depletion times or even success percentages.

The graphics of the space station hovering out in space is simplistically beautiful and the cartoon artwork of each character is layered over it in a creative fashion. It gives off an almost uncertain air to it as a whole much like the uncertainty that each action will result in a positive. The style is very simple and some may be deterred by this but it really helps with absorbing the words rather than the images. The music is a mixture of chilled lo-fi and jarring sudden prangs when something goes amiss.

My only gripe really is the menu system. When you scroll between actions the bottoms can be a bit janky, often missing whole objectives as its scoots over some entirely. It’s just so clumsy somethings, more annoying it anything.

Overall, Citizen Sleeper is satisfyingly addictive with its gripping tale and challenging to manage but oddly satisfying gameplay. While appearing like a little indie sleeper RPG this is one game I couldn’t wait to plug back into the space station and boot up my systematics.

Written by: Stacey