Imagine if the laser-cutting protagonist of Hardspace: Shipbreaker did a runner to another solar system while still in tremendous debt, and ended up making friends with a bunch of visual novel characters.Ĭitizen Sleeper isn't really a visual novel, but it borrows from that template as much as it does the RPG. As an asylum seeker you are here to make a new life of sorts, far from the corporate masters you've escaped from.

Huge chunks of its ring habitat are missing.

You arrive as a robotic refugee on Erlin's Eye, a rotating space station that has seen years of damage and disrepair. You can be a motor-kicking Machinist, a hardened mining Extractor, or an Operator who likes to hack the planet. Even when the game's own systems of dice and clocks clash with its stories of human interest, it is the people who come out on top. Throwing off the shackles of a faceless process governing your life is a recurring theme in this blend of sci-fi RPG and interactive fiction, and it makes for a strong rags-to-ramen story of one robot on the run. Systems should not govern people's behaviour, he says, the people are what matters. In one scene he explains his deep anti-capitalist reasoning to you. He is not my favourite character in Citizen Sleeper but he is the one who best represents it. Feng is a zealous computers guy with less of an axe to grind and more of a guillotine to set up.

From: Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, Humble.

A swish sci-fi RPG full of decent folk and just the right amount of scum.

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