Citizen Sleeper Critic Reviews

Citizen Sleeper is an amazing piece of sci-fi media and an even better TTRPG game that will have you glued to your seat to the early hours of the morning, reading and trying to figure out how this world and its colorful characters work. If you love adventure and story in games you mustn’t pass on this one.

The Eye isn’t perfect and, in the end, it wasn’t my home. But it is the place where I discovered a different one. Citizen Sleeper elicits feelings like that incredibly well, while providing a practically catered experience that will stick with me, long after my departure from Erlin’s Eye.

Citizen Sleeper is a breath of fresh air for a genre like science fiction, more and more inclined to self-cite itself and to enhance its aesthetics, leaving the content partially in the shade. Its settings, although not directly observable, are alive, pulsating, and inside it is possible to intertwine with the stories of the inhabitants of Erlin's Eye. A sort of second chances simulator in which to create a new identity to start from scratch. Minimalist gameplay, stratospheric illustrations and an ethereal and dreamy soundtrack make it an essential experience in our opinion.

Citizen Sleeper is a title that we feel we can promote without too many hesitations because it represents what any author's game should be: a personal work that carries out its main theme within its systems, that is, that makes its ultimate meaning in the mechanics alive.

An absorbing mix of tabletop inspirations and sci-fi storytelling, that makes for one of the most unique and well-written games of the year.

With its emotional story and complex management mechanics, Citizen Sleeper is a game you don’t want to sleep on. You’ll be swept away by its beautiful and harrowing world-building and fall for the characters that breathe life into this already intricate world. You will die and the learning curve is steep, however it is all worth it for the philosophical story Citizen Sleeper intends to tell.

Citizen Sleeper is fantastic. It's a deep and well-crafted narrative experience with a fascinating setting, and is filled with plenty of challenging questions for players to ponder over. This is a game that gets cyberpunk right.

The story of Citizen Sleeper is one of the most thoughtful and emotionally satisfying I’ve ever played. Your story will be different, and I wholeheartedly recommend that you find out what it is.

An evocative life-sim RPG you won't want to wake up from.

Citizen Sleeper creates a strong universe and gives the main character an engaging story with plenty of choices. Erlin’s Eye feels like a small part of a well-designed narrative space that can support more exploration. The visual design fits in with the wider themes of the game and the characters never become preachy. The problem is that the developer also cares about gameplay and the concept of investing for a result. The dice system is adequate enough, but everything takes so long and requires too many clicks. Citizen Sleeper would have probably worked better as a more classic visual novel, with the resources assigned to mechanics re-routed to deliver more story.

Citizen Sleeper doesn't shy away from weighty topics, and excels in managing to explore these while feeling intensely personal.

Despite its simple gameplay, Citizen Sleeper still captivates players thanks to its intriguing cyberpunk story and its rich and detailed setting, full of history, personality and charm.

This is a great game built upon a solid narrative that carries the weight of the adventure.

Citizen Sleeper – an enjoyable journey into a mind trapped in a stolen artificial body – is a game where the story is more important than gameplay mechanics and the questions that arise along the way are more important than answers. This narrative game that creatively combines the randomness of dice with some survival and management mechanics does not fully deserve to be called a „Disco Elysium in space”, but the association is basically correct.

A cyberpunk life sim, as rough as it is emotional. Citizen Sleeper is all about the story (which is great), not so much the gameplay elements (which are very simple).

Citizen Sleeper is a cyberpunk gem that tells an extraordinary, profound story and makes you think.

I get excited and optimistic every time I experience games like Citizen Sleeper, Disco Elysium, and Pentiment. These RPGs draw as much on the design ideas of tabletop RPGs as they do from their digital counterparts. They focus on imparting their players with a desire to roleplay—to inhabit a particular world and character while feeling your way through interactions and choices—while having the self-confidence to do without combat or other easily gratifying genre conventions. Systems and mechanics are there to support the roleplaying experience rather than simply add to it. These games won’t necessarily be for every RPG fan, but they are helping expand our idea of what a digital RPG can be, and I’m here for it.

The game is an homage to board games, but also to classical literature. The lack of graphical glitz is compensated by quality texts, well-written characters and stories that do not lack surprising twists and themes typical for the cyberpunk genre.

Overall, Citizen Sleeper is the kind of game one has to be in the right mood for. The setting is cold and alienating, while the overall mood for much of the game is a desperate struggle for survival against stacked odds. Once the stress of this abates, however, there are some genuinely lovely moments of characterization and storytelling that are absolutely worth it to experience. The challenging dice-based tabletop gaming experience is stressful at first, but loses some of its challenge as situations are dealt with, giving way to lovely and thought-provoking story interludes. With the developer supporting the game further with several pieces of free DLC, there’s a good amount of worthwhile sci-fi to experience here.

Citizen Sleeper stands out as one of the best games of the year, with great writing that avoids easy outs.