The Weight of your choices in Citizen Sleeper
From a table to a monitor
The tradition of TRPG's (tabletop role playing games) is a long one, different themes and systems enable you to pretend to be a dwarf paladin while feeling kind of silly about it, drinking beers and having a good time on top of that. I used to think that what made these games tick revolved around the randomness, dice to be specific, roll the bones and you'll see the outcome of your choices, clearly there's a lot more than just that, weighing your choice based on luck is a part of it, take the plunge to see if everyone else grab their heads in disbelief when crazy stuff just works or fails and the GM (game master) has to improvise a solution to your madman ramblings, that is one part of the game, the other significant part is pretending. It doesn't matter how characters are usually poorly role played, we role players care about our characters and the NPC's even if they are silly and put together with duck tape, the emotional investment we make is the soul of a TRPG, dices are just the sugar on top. In Citizen Sleeper we play alone with our character, the feeling of sounding like an idiot when doing a robot voice instantly goes away, the pretending is materialized as graphics in a computer monitor, timed events and rolling dice is the rest of it, a simple representation of TRPG mechanics that turned out to be a great time for a TPRG player like me, mine and my friends’ availability is sparse, to gather a party and put one thick book on a table is not something as common as I would like, my collection of TRPG books just keeps growing but my amount of played sessions not so much, so here comes Citizen Sleeper to my rescue, a game that turned out to be a delight for my TRPG games lacking being.
Roll the bones
When we start a game of Citizen Sleeper we are prompted with character creation, a genre staple, in this game we'll have few character archetypes to choose, just three, but this is a meaningful choice, these characters will interact with the world with their own strengths and weaknesses, as such they will never have all the tools to make every situation easy for you or them, you'll have to make tough choices at some point and you'll find risky situations that are enticing, taking that in consideration choosing between an Operator, Machinist and an Extractor will just pre-define what kind of challenges are tougher to overcome, nothing will be impossible but a lot of things will be dangerous, the good part about it is that it doesn't matter if a choice looks and feels bad, you'll feel the urge to take it anyway because something meaningful story wise is behind it.
After making our character we'll find ourselves in the middle of The Eye, a giant space station that struggles to function as a living habitat, everything is constantly in need of repairs, troubles brewing between factions, your mechanical body is constantly degrading, at least food is easily attainable but of course not for charity. Everything sucks for your character at the start and the game has ways to convey that we have a timer on our necks, the ticking clock on our character is represented with a favorite of mine TRPG mechanic called "clocks", a clock in TRPG terms, is a way to count towards an event, for example our character’s energy is a clock that is ticking down a certain amount when we pass a cycle or when we do some kind of action that exhaust our character physically, thus we have less energy and eventually drop dead, as you can imagine clocks can go the other way round, if we feed ourselves we'll be filling the energy clock giving us more energy to do stuff we need to do. This game loves clocks, they are everywhere showing you how really useful they are at letting us know how the events around the station are transpiring in an abstract but readable way, some are dangerous events others opportunities, some of them tick down others up, there are the ones that tick on their own every cycle and others that we tick ourselves by doing some actions and succeeding or failing at it, the graphic design is on point too, clear on sight with color coded clocks that are completely understandable at a glance, you'll never miss a blink of The Eye as time and events here are plain to see.
Interacting with the clocks is when our dice rolls come in play, at the start of each cycle we roll a number of dice based on our health status, the more health we have the more dice we throw, then each die can be use to interact with events around The Eye, the higher the die higher the chance of success, the system is not as simple though, our character comes into play when we decide what actions we are going to do, for example a Machinist is better with engineering so they have a +1 on their dice but they lack the ability to interface with computers so they'll have a -1 penalty in those tasks, but that's not everything, when we use a die to make an action the resolution is not deterministic, there's another throw that goes behind the curtain, the number on our die only determines the chances of success and in most cases only a 6 or a 5 means no negative outcome, at the moment we put a die in the slot we are given feedback on the chances of our execution and most of the time it will split into a 25% positive 50% neutral and 25% negative outcomes, these outcomes do not only determine the success of the action but also our chances of triggering secondary effects, for example if we get lucky maybe we earn a little bit of money on the side, or if we have bad luck we tick a clock alarming guards of our meddling with company computers, this mechanic becomes extra spicy when we find that some events are marked as risky or even dangerous making them extra tough events where we might want to save our higher dices to assure the best outcome. There will be cycles when you're dwelling the dirty and cold streets of "The Eye" and you'll have only a few dice with a one or a two and you'll be needed in three urgent tasks at the same time and these kind of moments are when the game shines. But that leaves us with the question, what to do with bad a throw like ones or twos? the game has a brilliant answer to that, the whole interfacing with the station network when we are hacking computers and stealing data are handled with low dice, this is an incredible good design solution, if we didn't have this mechanic we'll be stuck with poor dice and feeling bad about it when we use them and fail constantly but if we have the choice of using them intentionally the game gives the player the power of doing something with all their resources, an amazing choice that allows the game to focus on what is really important, choices.
Both dice and clocks are bound together to make an engaging system that I found really interesting, particularly compared to the classic Dungeon & Dragons rules, all of this of course would be pointless if you didn’t make meaningful choices with it and Citizen Sleeper has tons of them, the narrative in this space sci-fi universe is grounded by the harsh truth that we are being worn down by the system, just like everybody else in The Eye, conversations are filled with the right amount of techno babble to make the universe seem huge but the real narrative behind it is the human part of the stories, we'll find workers struggling to pay rent, gang members filling out the police role out of necessity, desperate bounty hunters without a dime, and a family trying to get out of the station in hopes of a brighter future in a colony planet far away. Making the cast relatable humans is what ties the knot with this game, it makes you care about all the people behind the abstraction, maybe we don't get a high budget animation of our character taking care of a dock worker’s daughter while he works an extra shift, but the clock ticks up when we do it and when it’s complete we’re rewarded with sweet words about a struggle that is common and real, they say that a single picture is worth a thousand words but they never tell you that sometimes it can also go the other way.
Surviving on the edge of the system
In Citizen Sleeper we don’t own ourselves, as a Sleeper we inhabit a Frame, a bio-mechanical body made by the Essen-Arp corporation, the Sleeper is an emulated mind, a copy of a real one that sold itself to the corp, the original person is sleeping somewhere in a cryogenic slumber until their debt is paid up, you are their way of paying the corporation, this is not a choice made lightly cause you are no longer a person, you are now a tool. Sleepers are made to endure harsh environments, designed to do work that humans can't easily do, very dangerous shit that would kill anybody made of flesh and bone, sleepers are disposable after all. When the game starts the main character decided they had enough so they broke free escaping their contract in a pod that crashes into The Eye, we stole Essen-Arp toy robot putting a noose around our necks and the corporation doesn't mess around with their property, they will find you and they will dispose of you as they see fit.
The first person you meet in The Eye is Dragos an old school salvager working dismantling ships in a corner of the station, the old man takes pity on you an gives you a container to sleep and rest, he doesn't help you that much really, as your body is in need of sustenance and he's not going to give you anything for free, your firsts cycles in The Eye are about teaching you that you're not getting charity from anyone, you'll have to work for it. These people living in the station are trying to scratch their own backs, earning a few chits (the game's equivalent of money), eat and sleep, repeat again and again, the sad state of affairs in the capitalist future.
It doesn't take you too much time to find out that there's something else going on, the station is a place of struggle in governance, where there is power people will fight to control it, so we find out about the two major factions trying to take hold of The Eye, The Havenage and Yagatan. The Havenage is the administration in charge of the station, they are bureaucratic and slow, due process is more important than any emergency and their governance over the station is shaky. Yagatan are a gang that has their hold on the lower ends of the station where The Havenage can't reach, they are a criminal gang on the surface but they have members that truly believe that if they weren't there things would devolve into chaos. Between the two factions there's a balance that turns out in poor governance for the people, the administrators are barely functional and their law is barely enforced, on the other hand the gang doesn't have enough members to rule more than just the alleys in between the station streets and a lot of them are just in for the money, as for the the people they just live their lives the best they can avoiding messing with either of them if they can.
The more we learn about the station the more evident is that the traditional structures of power governance don't work, bureaucrats don’t have their best interest in people, sometimes for nefarious intentions, other because they are blind to the reality of life in the station. Meanwhile, the gang is in touch with the low ends and the needs of regular people but they choke them in their need of resources to keep their organization breathing, they can be sensible to people’s needs but they are blind to the bigger picture. The lack of a good government structure in the station is made worse by the fact that the whole station depends on resources and technology supplied by outsider corporations and trade, even the so called criminal gang has commercial deals with Essen-Arp, the reach of corporations on the station is total and the sleeper chances to escape their panopticon is slim at best.
Surviving in The Eye means meeting people in the same struggle, there are a lot of characters that we meet over the station and everyone is in need of help, help that you'll provide for other favors in exchange, after all we all need to survive, the interesting thing is that favors are not demanded by the sleeper, people just understand and offer what is fair in exchange, people know life is hard so they don't expect you to help them for free, they especially recognize that the sleeper life must be harder, after all they are stuck in a frame and hunted by a corp, all of this means people will start conversations with the sleeper in hope to build a relationship of mutual aid instead of advantage, they recognize that neither The Havenage or Yatagan are going to help them so the only thing left for them is to help each other, as the sleeper is cursed usually people who are malicious are going to stay the fuck out of their way, you don't want to get between a corp an their prey, nevertheless there are people who are not afraid and will try to hurt the sleeper and take advantage of them or sell them to the corp for a few chits, The Eye is dangerous after all.
One event is particularly interesting when we look at this game through the lense of politics in specific, a group of vessels in need come to the station with refugees, their ships are in a bad state, they don't have resources and they are counting the cycles until life support shuts down. The refugees are asking The Havenage to let them dock at the station, sadly the administrators are not fond with the idea of letting thousands of new people into the station, stressing the life support systems to the brink of failure. knowing this a couple of ex-corp workers are planning something to help these people, a supply run under the blockade and they are risking everything to help the refugees survive a couple more cycles, in the meantime a Havenage administrator talks to us, asks us to stop this supply run, the other bureaucrats are going to be mad if this operation is executed, they will take this supply run as a threat to the security of the station and stop any attempt of helping the refugees, maybe they will even try to kill them for the station safety. What would you do? Will you help the supply run knowing in full that bureaucracy constantly fails people in need? or will you go with the administrator trying to use the system for good? they both have a point, they can both be right, right? The politic views behind the game is not condemning any choice, this turns out to be a critic focused in how we can't see another solution to problems, how we are so system brainwashed that we cannot see beyond what seems to be possible, if both parties just dropped their prejudice about each other they would find common ground and a solution faster, but bureaucrats don't like suggestions from regular people and the people who want to help no matter what can't see how bureaucracy can help anybody so they stop asking the ruling class for help, a total failure of governance driven by lack of empathy and willingness of recognizing that some rules are in need of a change.
Citizen Sleeper doesn't shy away about politics and criticizing capitalism as the ruling system, the game directly shows us the consequences of letting it run through our society without any kind of regulation, the core of this story is in the relationship between this faulty system and the characters forced to live in it, how we deal with this terrible state of governance, what we do when we are put against the wall by the system. The cooperation between characters, to strive to make each day better by working together for each other, doesn't matter how futile it can feel we still are going to make it better somehow, this is the soul behind the game, people looking at the stars dreaming of a better future working together to get there one way or another.
The future is bleak, the future is bright
The focus on choices is remarkable in Citizen Sleeper not because the game has tons of them like other RPG's, what makes this game different is that the spotlight is on the emotional nature of the choice and how our choices affect other characters, when you play a TRPG the space of possibilities is practically unlimited, that's the advantage of boundless imagination and a table with a few friends, on a screen the choices are limited to what is programmed inside the game, there are some video games that make their universe incredibly large nevertheless the walls are still visible somehow, Citizen Sleeper has a way to make those walls seem to disappear with the power of its incredible writing and deeply human struggles of living in a world where extreme capitalism is the rule and isn't even being contested, the universe seems to expand lightyears just like the rule of the corporations, a whole entire universe and we are allow to see just a glimpse of it from our little corner of The Eye where we struggle to make it better for everyone as much as we are capable of, well that is until Citizen Sleeper 2 comes out on 2025. See you then Sleeper.