It’s just a shame that Citizen Sleeper fizzles out at the point where it’s set to explode. It helps, too, that the music is superb, vaguely reminiscent of Blade Runner’s Vangelis soundtrack at times, and it changes subtly with the decisions that you make. The characters are so well drawn, literally and figuratively, that it’s tempting to spend as much time as you can in their orbit. You can easily reach one of the game’s multiple endings within a day or two – although you may want to dive back in for a second playthrough to see how different choices would have affected your journey. The finale is more of a sedate plod to the exit than a frantic dash to the finish line, as you saunter around the station tying up loose threads at your leisure. Yet the tension inherent in the first half of the game is largely removed by the end, as you gradually find solutions to your synthetic body’s various problems. But although Martin draws liberally on many well-worn sci-fi staples, including gruff mercenaries and evil space corporations, he pastes together a convincing portrait of life aboard a creaking space station that feels intriguing and unique.Ĭlues about the history of Erlin’s Eye and the characters aboard it are steadily drip-fed, and I was compelled to see how the twisting conspiracies and tragic character arcs are resolved. In a sense, there’s nothing new here: the central idea of human brains in artificial bodies has been explored extensively in other sci-fi works. But here the text is supplemented with some lovely character art by Guillaume Singelin, and the writing is gloriously evocative and compelling. As your body degrades, the number of dice you receive at the start of each cycle is reduced, piling on the pressure.Īs with designer Gareth Damian Martin’s previous game, In Other Waters, you mostly interact with the world through descriptions of the things around you, rather than graphical depictions. Each day your body will degrade further, and you’re constantly forced to choose between earning money to pay for food and serum, or exploring more of the station to find new opportunities and advance the plot.
But there’s never enough time, and never enough dice. Each job has a positive, neutral or negative outcome, and the higher the number on the die the greater the chance you’ll succeed. Each day, or “cycle”, you are given five dice, which you can assign to tasks around the station, such as unloading cargo from a space freighter or helping out at a space bar.
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