Citizen Sleeper

Published on 2025-03-19 by Kartikay Bagla


A text adventure with dice-based RPG and multiple endings set on a space station. You are a sleeper, a robot body with a human conciousness, on the run from the corporation who made you. Landing on a space station known as the Eye, you meet unlikely friends and some enemies as you try to make a life for yourself.

Citizen Sleeper Title Image

The story is the crux of the game. Meeting new characters, helping them to help you, deciding whether to trust them or not is where the real meat is. I don't think I can delve into details without spoilers but I really enjoyed the immersion provided by the game. All the characters were unique and fun, even if some of them were cliched. The atmosphere and the world building was also expertly done.

In terms of gameplay the dice allocation mechanic was interesting and provided some busy-work to do while you went through the story. Only thing was that I didn't face any negative consequences as a result of my dice rolls. Now this could be due to my expert play and dice allocation strategies, which I doubt, or random luck, or the fact that failure via dice rolling isn't an inherently big part of the game. Which can be looked at as a good thing or a bad thing, good because RNG (random number generation) plays a very small part in your story, bad because you don't have face any negative consequences. In fact, I only failed one mission in the game and that was due to my poor decisions and not RNG dice.

The dice game did begin to weigh on me a little towards the end and probably why I won't do another playthrough of the game as it just felt like busywork. To be fair to the game, you won't notice it until you've sunk a good amount of hours, or are actually reviewing the game. The energy and condition mechanic was solid and coupled with those having an effect on the number of dice available i.e. the number of actions you can do in a day (or cycle) forced you to actually make choices between resources.

Citizen Sleeper Characters

The music and the artwork was made up of stylistic choices which represented the world perfectly, each character dressed in unique ways with a lot of knick-knacks and flair. The music was primarily there to help immersion and it did that job just fine.


Overall: 9/10, except for the gameplay gripes above, I didn't like the controller scheme on the PS5 as selecting icons on the extremes required a workaround and sometimes getting to icons was just plain annoying. But apart from that it is a well-written experience that is worth devoting a weekend to.