Citizen Sleeper

Citizen Sleeper is a somewhat unique game that's a bit difficult to describe. It's mainly a text-based RPG, accompanied by hand-drawn portraits of the people you interact with and a 3D view of the space station you're living on.

Your interactions in the game take mainly two forms:

1. Your choices during conversations, where you can pick from among 2 or 3 options.
2. Choosing which dice to place where.

Each day, you have a certain number of six-sided dice (maximum 5 dice) and the game pre-rolls them for you. High rolls are usually better. You then look for places to use those dice. Your limited number of dice means you have to make tough choices about where to spend them. Do you spend on your survival, making money, getting food, or repairing your body? Or do you spend to help others? Do you spend to explore and potentially open up new opportunities? The major hitch is that as your body deteriorates you get fewer dice to roll, leading to a nerve-racking downward spiral if you under-invest in your survival.

I played for 14 hours before I felt like I'd won the game. I stopped playing at that point.

THE GOOD:

• The game design is quite good! It's exciting, almost stressful, to manage to survive and still explore or help others.
• The quality of the writing is excellent.
• The graphics and character portraits are pretty and compelling.
• The plot twists and turns in very interesting ways. Enemies can become friends and vice versa, and when you invest dice in exploring one plotline things can turn in really unexpected and fascinating directions.
• You get forced to make some tough choices as you proceed, just because you can't survive and help everybody.
• For example, I ended up never helping the NPCs Lem and Mina, but it felt so good later on down the line when I was able to give them my ticket, which allowed them to achieve their dream anyway. I really loved that! I had tears in my eyes. I feel like I could have stopped playing there and the game would have been perfect.
• There are multiple possible endings that you can unlock as you go along.

THE BAD:

• At the start of the game, I wanted to find food and was really confused as to why I couldn't find any. It turns out that I needed to spend some dice on fully exploring a zone to discover all the locations in it. This mechanic became intuitive over time, but at first it was not obvious.
• I ended up not wanting any of the potential endings that were offered. Part of the reason why was that some of the endings didn't make sense to me. Your character's body is constantly deteriorating without access to a special stabilizer drug. I didn't understand how some of the endings were supposed to be survivable.
• The ending I wanted, to remain on the Eye in physical form, was never an official possibility.
• The DLC story is significantly less interesting than the main plot. I don't mean to be too harsh here, given that the author made the DLC available for free, but the characters and story were just less compelling for me. The characters kind of fell flat, being mostly unpleasant and with little redeeming character, and the cool twists and turns that marked the main story were absent.

THE UGLY:

• The tutorial at the beginning of the game is a big info-dump that is hard to grasp. There is no way to review the tutorial material afterward. It's like a flash card you see for a moment and then it's gone. Fortunately, the game mechanics are simple enough to grasp even without a useful tutorial.
• I understand why the game uses white text on black background (because it's outer space, duh), but gosh is it hard on the eyes.