If they put your consciousness in a robotic body, would that someone still be you? This and many other philosophical questions you will find in Citizen Sleeper.
THE GAME
Citizen Sleeper is a cyberpunk narrative RPG developed by Jump Over The Age and distributed by Fellow Traveller. In a world where capitalism has ruined everything, you live the life of a Sleeper on the run, a consciousness implanted in an artificial body belonging to a corporation that will do anything to get it back. Surviving on The Eye space station, you'll need to make do to live one more day. Get a job, make friends and help them. Great adventures await you, with many moral dilemmas and choices you must make that will impact your journey.
MY IMPRESSIONS
If you like a good narrative RPG, with a well-built universe and characters, Citizen Sleeper is for you. The detail in the texts, in the construction of the world and in the personality of each character was done with care. Nothing is there without purpose and everything and everyone is well crafted. Unfortunately, the game does not have Brazilian-Portuguese subtitles. As it is a game that relies heavily on texts, non-English speakers will not have the full experience that is essential to play. And the game has a lot of text, which can be tiresome for some.
The art in the game is beautiful. All the characters have a well-crafted design and match what is described with the narration. They are so well built that your emotions are genuine and make you like or hate each one of them. Some will captivate you, others will deceive you, and others will put you off helping them, all because of the way they are well written.
The story goes on as long as your Sleeper remains alive. You have three Sleeper options at the start of the game, each specializing in a certain characteristic. These, in turn, will be used to check the success of a task. I felt that the more quests you do and earn upgrades, the less that initial choice matters.
As if it were a tabletop RPG, you must use dice to roll success or failure in a mission. In this case, the dice are fixed values and distributed at the beginning of each round (or cycle, as it is called in the game), the result will be based on the mission requirement and the dice used. A result can be positive, neutral, or negative. Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of this type of mechanics. I'm not sure why, but I feel like it's kind of frustrating to have a negative result when the chance of a neutral or positive is so much higher. This obviously happens in tabletop roleplaying games, but it seems that rolling dice digitally is less convincing than it is in real life.
I felt that some dialogue choices make little difference and are more there for you to interpret what your Sleeper would say, which is not a problem, but I wish they had more impact. And the ones that have an impact, happen without prior notice, which is great for the player to pay attention to the story and their actions.
Citizen Sleeper is a game made with care and creativity, with many deep questions that, even though it takes place in a fantasy universe, has a lot of basis in our real world.
ACHIEVEMENTS
Most achievements are connected with the end of each character quest. Fulfilling all of them, you will be able to complete most of the achievements. However, some endings have variations depending on certain actions you take. That is, you will need to repeat some missions or even start a new game to meet the requirements to complete them. In general, they are not difficult, they will just take some time.
CONCLUSION
For lovers of a good narrative RPG, Citizen Sleeper is a full plate. You can even imagine a tabletop RPG session set in this universe. I confess that the game can become a little tiring due to the amount of text, so I recommend playing in small doses. Thus, you will enjoy the whole story without getting bored. It's sad that there are no subtitles in Portuguese-Brazil, because it would make it much easier and less tiring.
There is clearly a way to end up dying in the game, but I didn't feel in any danger at all. Whether that's a good thing or not I can't say, but it makes the game more focused on its narrative than gameplay. As I mentioned earlier, I'm not the biggest fan of the dice mechanic, but it's not something that harms the game.
I wish there were more endings. Some tense moments, for example, could end in your character's death if you made the wrong choices. I played in three saves to be able to complete the achievements and tried other dialogue alternatives to see if anything changed, but to my sadness, little changes.
Citizen Sleeper has a wonderful universe at hand and can create even more incredible things. With a sequel already announced, I can't wait to see how much better this series will get.
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