Video Game / Citizen Sleeper

Wake up Sleeper. You have no idea what's coming.

Citizen Sleeper is a narrative-driven Cyberpunk Adventure RPG developed by Jump Over The Age^note a solo developer by the name of Gareth Damien Martin, with artwork by Guillaume Singelin and music by Amos Roddy, distributed by Fellow Traveller, and released in May 2022, available for Nintendo Switch, as well as Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh via Steam, GOG.com, and Humble Bundle.

You are a sleeper, an emulated copy of another's mind in a synthetic body owned by the Essen-Arp Corporation. Originally contracted to do soul-crushing menial labor on a mining planet, you came to the realization that the corporation had no intention of ever letting you go, but had rigged your contract against you to keep you in a state of indentured servitude in all but name for an indeterminate period of time, which might as well have been forever. Desperate, you took the only avenue to any kind of freedom left to you; a high risk escape by smuggling yourself away on a transport ship. Despite the odds being stacked against you, you survived the perilous journey and made it to Erlin's Eye — a rundown space station at the edge of corporate controlled space. Freed from the yoke of your corporate rulers, you are now looking for a new life. But all is not smooth sailing in your journey to find a new home...

A trilogy of "DLC Episodes", which introduce a new endgame storyline about the arrival of a refugee flotilla to Erlin's Eye, was announced with a focus on expanding on the wider politics and going-ons of the Helion System, the star system in which Erlin's Eye orbits. The first of these episodes, titled FLUX, was released in July 2022. The second episode, REFUGE, released in October 2022, and the final episode, PURGE, released in March 2023.

For the game's first anniversary, a solo Tabletop RPG set on the Erlin's Eye named Cycles of the Eye was announced. Like Citizen Sleeper, the game casts you as a Sleeper who finds themselves on the station, and uses a mix of dice and tarot card mechanics to let you tell your character's story.

A full sequel to the game, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, has also been announced for an unspecified release date. You play as a new sleeper in a new location (the Starward Belt), following your journey as you navigate a ship and its crew within a system-wide crisis. Leading up to the release of this game are the Helion Dispatches, a monthly serialised story about a pirate radio station tracking corporate activity in the Helion system, and is posted on the official Jump Over The Age Substack.

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Tropes found in "Citizen Sleeper" include:

• Artificial Intelligence: The cyberspace constructions help run the station. Another you find in a derelict, hidden vending machine.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Subverted, the station has multiple AI constructs, and while some of them have gone mad after decades of neglect, they are only reinforcing the BanOnAI law, as they were created to do. You are hunted only after using your Digitized Hacker abilities and all of the other AI range from harmless to very benelovent. It is implied that if the AI were able to freely coexist with humans, they would both thrive.
• Androids Are People, Too: A central theme. Sleepers, straddling the line between humanity and the robotic, explicitly don't have any "human" rights in the eyes of the people in power. The corporation which made them see them as little more than a product to be bartered and sold, and several people they come across treat them as expendable Ridiculously Human Robots. The Player Character can insist multiple times that they are still are a person.
• Anarchy Is Chaos: Averted; though the Eye has a reputation for being lawless, things are kept pretty stable between Havenage and Yagatan. When Ethan shows up, what makes him dangerous is that he seems to be the only person on the station with a gun, and he is certainly willing to use it.
• Apocalypse How: The refugee flotilla is fleeing the "Flux", a mysterious phenomenon that caused the sudden destruction of computer systems on a planetary scale. It turns out that the Flux was manufactured by a corporation, SenetStat, to wipe the system clean in preparation for their arrival and takeover.
  • The Eye suffered a very slow Class 0 after Solheim collapses.
• Art-Style Clash: The AIs are drawn in a very different art style to all the other characters. The regular human(-ish) characters all are in color with black outlines, whereas the AIs are all black and white, have a white outline, and are drawn in sharper, more abstract manner.
• Asteroid Miners: The Eye was created to be a base for Solheim's palladium mining operations. The palladium reserves drying up was the beginning of the end for its many inhabitants.
• Back-Alley Doctor: Sabine the "Slum Doctor" helps you find stabilizer to prevent your death, as well as being involved in the wider plotline.
• Ban on A.I.: Anything which comes close to sentient AI is strictly banned; Sleepers were created to find a loophole around this, as on paper the conscious that pilots them is human rather than artificial.
• The Bartender: Tala, the owner of the Overlook, is a friendly and warm woman who knows her regulars, but she also has a core of steel, and knows when put her foot down hard on unruly customers. She can potentially become one of your first friends, if you visit the Overlook's bar frequently.
• Benevolent A.I.: The Gardener, the enigmatic and extremely powerful caretaker of the Greenway district. No-one even knew they exist until you make contact, upon which it turns out they've been secretly helping not just you but everyone in the Greenway survive ever since the Eye became independent decades ago. One of the Multiple Endings allows you to abandon your physical body to join the Gardener in cyberspace forever, potentially becoming an example of this trope yourself.
• Bittersweet Ending: Like in so many other Cyberpunk stories, getting one of these is the best you can hope for. You will generally achieve something worthwhile, either for yourself, the friends you made along the way, or even both if you're lucky, but it'll always come at a hefty cost.
• Blessed with Suck: Apparently the player characters synthetic body can survive hard vacuum, but still requires food intake as well as a regular injection of the "stabilizer" that prevents total system shutdown.
• Brain Uploading: How Sleepers are made. In order to get around the rules over creating truly sentient AI, human brains are digitally cloned and the new conscious is uploaded into a robotic Sleeper body.
• Capitalism Is Bad: A central theme. From the cradle, planet born humans are bombarded with adverts that try to entice them to sell their souls to the corporate machine for the chance at a better life than abject poverty. The player character was one of them, selling away their entire body for a what turned out to be indentured servitude on an asteroid. The corporations running stations like the Eye aim to squeeze every last credit out of the poor unfortunates who sign up with them, and leave them to the mercy of outer space when they run out of value. Even in the DLC, Eshe and Peake were doomed to waste their entire lives away toiling on a dead end space outpost purely so that the company who owned it could maintain their rights to that tiny pocket of galaxy. The DLC episodes also reveal that some corporations won't bat an eye at decimating entire planets in order to clear the way for their own system takeover.
• The Casino: One exists on the station that the player can win a lot of money at with the right dice rolls.
• Centrifugal Gravity: The Erlin's Eye is designed to generate gravity through rotation, and also features sections closer to the radial centre for zero gravity working. Word of God is that Artificial Gravity does not exist in the Citizen Sleeper universe, and human civilization as a whole relies on centrifugal gravity or just making do with low or zero gravity environments.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Progressing through the Greenway questline eventually unlocks the ability to plant and harvest rare mushrooms, with the species you harvest being determined by an RNG roll. One of these mushrooms can be turned into stabilizer, effectively giving you an infinite supply of the stuff. However, if you have stabilizer in your inventory, these mushrooms simply won't spawn, preventing you from building a stock of stabilizer in advance.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Some of the advanced character perks are much less useful than they sound.
  • Self Repair only restores a single condition bar (equivalent to a single cycle) per piece of scrap, a resource that isn't exactly easy to come by and has numerous other applications in quests. However, later in the game, you lose the ability to buy stabilizer. While there's a repeatable quest that'll let you make it yourself, it makes a certain amount of sense to use excess scrap to keep your condition topped up.
  • Photosynthetic Skin is an unreliable way of restoring energy if you use low dice rolls on it, and a waste of high rolls unless you're completely broke. You're generally better off using your leftover dice to make some cash in the Greenway or similar safe-rated activities, then use the cash to buy food.
  • Its follow-up, Hard To Kill, is something you're unlikely to ever use unless you're really bad at playing the game. It's not that difficult to keep stocked up on stabilizer vials, so if you somehow managed to get your condition to Breaking status and can't afford stabilizer, you should probably start over anyway.
  • ICE Breaker can be useful, but only for a few early-game quests that require hacking agents. This mechanic plays no role from mid-game onwards except as a source of income, making the perk a waste of points. However, the Interface skill as a whole remains useful throughout the entire game, so at least the bonus to your dice rolls continues to provide tangible benefits.
• Company Town: The Eye when under Solheim control. Feng recounts that his parents worked on Solheim mines, ate and Solheim canteens and slept in berths rented out from Solheim.
• Covered with Scars: The first thing the Player Character notes about Emphis is that he's covered in very unusual, symmterical scarring. They're what remains of the access ports he was fitted with as part of the Bone Suit programme.
• Corporate Conspiracy: Episode: PURGE reveals that the Flux virus which decimated Ember Hearth, Steppe and Side was deliberately created and let loose by the SenetStat Coporation, in order to wipe that part of the galaxy completely clear of all other corporate remnants so SenetStat can take over unimpeded.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: The process of becoming a Sleeper destroys the majority of their human memoires, with the remnants that survive the process only visiting in the occasional vague dream. The Player Character doesn't know if this is just an unfortunate side effect of the complicated process of Brain Uploading which is involved, or if the company deliberately does this in order to keep their newly created propert docile and pliant.
• Cyberpunk: Transhumanism? Check. Evil Corporations exploiting ordinary citizens to an inch of their life? Check. Big, squalid slums in a high tech, but decrepit space station? Check.
• Cyberspace: The non-physical layer of the game is this, with nodes of control and points of access you can break into.
• Cyborg: Mechnical limbs are commonplace, as are implants that can do anything from enhancing vision to blocking pain receptors. Sabine's main duty is the installation and upkeep of implants Yagatan enforcers.
• Do Androids Dream?: Comes up as a question from multiple AI constructs, questioning if they are sentient or just complicated machines that pretend to be.
• Dystopia: Of a technolibertarianism variant, with corporations who control the lives of workers, discarding them on a whim, signing them up to lifetimes of indentured servitude, caring only for the profit they can extract.
• Early Game Hell: You start out with a half-dead Player Character who doesn't have anything to their name - no money, no food, no items to sell, and you don't even know where to go to get fed. The first cycles are a mad scramble just to survive (fittingly, that's also your first major Drive), and you'll need to think very carefully about what to do when and in which order. It takes quite a while for your situation to stabilize enough to feel like you're not about to drown in heavy sea at any moment.
• The Engineer: One of the skills, allowing the player to perform better when interacting with machines.
• Existential Horror: Downplayed. Your own status as a sleeper plays with elements of this. You are aware that you're a copy of the original person who chose to undergo the sleeper treatment, and while you have their memories, at least the scattered fragments you can still vaguely recall, you are also quite aware that they are not your own memories per se. In the end, thinking about that original consciousness and their memories only tends to leave you with feelings of discomfort, unease, loss, and dissonance.
• Fictional Currency: The common currency on Erlin's Eye is called "chits". In theory, its a cryptocurrency, but in effect said currency is stored on a walled-off chip, making it function quite a bit more like conventional money.
• Good Morning, Crono: The game begins with a short prologue of the Sleeper having a nightmare about their dramatic escape from the Essen-Arp Corporation. The game proper then begins as they are then awoken in their temporary container home by Drago.
• Grand Theft Me: Two main versions. The first are the "sleepers" of the title and player character who are synthetic copies of another person. The other is when a person is hijacked for communications purposes.
• Hate Sink: Bounty Hunter Ethan is an incredibly Smug Snake and all-around asshole with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The only good thing to say about him is that no matter how (or if) you resolve his questline, he gets the short end of the stick, either ending up a broke nobody on the streets if you don't, or dead if you do.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Neovend / Navigator and Gardener. Arguably Hunter as well. But not Killer, who's "growth" has been so self destructive they rendered themselves deaf and blind to everything else but Hunter's signal and the occasional nearby AI.
  • Arguably, the protagonist Sleeper. Others such as Ethan see him as only a machine, while several times in the game others and themselves question their true nature and potential for growth.
• Hunter of His Own Kind: From what little you get to see of the corporate Bounty Hunter, Maywick, at the end of Ethan's quest line, he is clearly robotic in his appearance and bleeds black blood, heavily implying that he has a bio-mechanical body that resembles your own (perhaps with the distinction that it is made for combat rather than menial work), and therefore might also be a sleeper of sorts.
• Impossibly Cool Clothes: All the characters have extremely cool looking cyberpunk outfits ranging from space suits to work clothes or guard uniforms.
• I Am Not My Mother: Eshe of the FLUX storyline, has a rather complicated relationship with her mother, because she decided to join the ranks of the oppressive corporate administration of her home planet, a job which included many Cold Equations. As a result, Eshe has a fundamental distrust of authority figures and the corporations, and while she has ended up in a leadership position of the refugees, she vehemently refuses to be the kind of leader her mother was, one who is willing to countenance the life of her people against some nebulous greater good.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: One of the sources of food energy is to steal from the Commune's grown beds.
• Loss of Identity: A core element of the player characters narrative. They are not 'real'. They are a synthetic clone that shouldn't be alive, and is hunted down by the evil corporation.
• Money for Nothing: Despite the game's Early Game Hell, there comes a point where food is the only meaningful thing you can spend money on, and even that can be gotten for free if you're willing to pay for energy with dice instead. At the same time, repeatable, mostly risk-free activities can rake in large amounts of cash quickly. It's not unusual to finish the game with over a 1,000 cryo in your pocket.
• Multiple Endings: Ten endings in total, eight of which are obtained at the end of major questlines. Each quest generally ends with you choosing to stay on the Erlin's Eye or leave; the latter ends the game, while the former will give you an epilogue for the quest but allows you to continue playing.
  • Four as the completion of the Lem & Mina questline involving the Sidereal Horizon, involving leaving on the ship alone, leaving on the ship with Lem & Mina, rejecting the ship but allowing Lem & Mina to leave and destroying the ID's so that neither you or Lem & Mina can leave.
  • Two that follow the Neovend cyberspace plotline, with one where you kill your body and stay in Cyberspace with the Gardener AI, and the other where you return back to the land of the living.
  • Two that follow Bliss' questline, one where you leave with her and one where you stay.
  • The DLC Episodes offer two final definitive endings, in which you either decide to stay on the station with Peake and live through the coming Flux, or leave with the flotilla.
• Mr. Fixit: The player character can start out as a machinist character who starts with an engineering skill for working with machines and physical tools. Also in general since you don't actually have to specialize in these skills, they simply give bonuses to your dice rolls. Much of the game revolves around you fixing machines or helping people with their ships or buildings. Other characters also work in this area, most specifically Bliss the Ship Mechanic.
• Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters: Yatagan are a crime family who serve as the government in Lowend, collecting "taxes" from the various enterprises there but also keeping the peace. As Lowend is the poorest part of an already-anarchic station, they're actually pretty handy to have around and make for decent allies.
• Nightmarish Factory: The station as a whole is decrepit, dangerous and incomplete.
• Non-Human Non-Binary: The Sleepers are genderless.
• Phlebotinum Dependence: All Essen-Arp Sleepers have a "failsafe" in case they are stolen or go rogue. Their bodies will decay over time unless they receive "Stabilizer", the equivalent of an immunosuppressant drug that keeps their cybernetics from rejecting each other.
• Pro Bono Barter: The Commune don't use money. When hiring an outside repair bay, they pay in mushrooms instead. They just don't mention how they mean to pay before they do. The engineer is thoroughly nonplussed.
• Punch-Clock Villain: The security workers aren't particularly evil and don't prove that much of a threat to you.
• Race Against the Clock: On multiple levels.
  • The game in general is one. Your body is dying and you need to scrounge up enough money for the very expensive treatment necessary to give you another couple of cycles to live, only for the whole process to start over immediately.
  • Following your arrival on the Eye, it doesn't take long for the people hunting you to pick up your trail. This gives you an ominous red counter to tell you how many cycles you have left before they catch up with you. The first hunter is unavoidable and will make your life a whole lot harder, but the second one can be evaded reasonably easily if you have your priorities in order and make the right decisions.
• Random Number God: What you can or can't do in each cycle is almost entirely dependent on dice rolls. Leveling up your character gives bonuses to specific rolls, but even then there's always a good chance of a bad day where you won't be able to get anything meaningful done.
• Riddle for the Ages: What was it that caused the person the player character was originally based on to agree to undergoing the Sleeper treatment? The game never proposes a straight answer to this question.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Justified, Sleepers are emulations of humans who have had their brains scans. They are used because of a generalized setting ban on AI.
• Resources Management Gameplay: Your health is determined by your condition, which means you have to acquire stablizers. You also have to maintain your energy levels or your condition will drop. To perform actions, each day you gain a number of dice rolls, which represent taking an action as well as how useful the action is. There are a number of inventory items such as the stabilizers, credits, scrap and non-physical data to manage.
• The Reveal: Various elements of the storyline are built up over multiple turns (cycles) and events.
• Rewarded as a Traitor Deserves: At the end of Ethan's quest line, Ethan sells out your location to Maywick for a 50/50 split of your bounty. Unfortunately for Ethan, Maywick actually isn't in much of a mood to share the spoils, and he immediately guns down Ethan in cold blood as soon as he has found the both of you.
• Sadistic Choice: All the time. There is little to no margin for error on the Eye, and very little room for compassion or altruism. Often you'll have no choice but pure pragmatism in the face of adversity, regardless of whether or not your moral compass is aligned with the decision.
• Scavenger World: The Eye is an unfinished and rather decrepit station. The economy is built around trading in scrap, food is grown in a largely-feral hydroponics section, and leftover AIs from the station's construction infest an equally-feral cyberspace. There's still some functional areas like the Hub, but the station's original purpose is gone, and the people there are just surviving in the ruins.
• Shout-Out:
  • When trying to deal with the Killer program, you are offered two options: delete Killer or render it harmless by trapping it in the system. The former objective is called "Killer is Dead".
  • A couple through the game's achievements:
    • Building a shipmind from scratch nets you the achievement "Mindcraft".
    • Completing Ethan's quest line, which involves two Bounty Hunters hunting the same quarry, gives you the achievement called "For a Few Chits More".
    • The quest which involves tracking down a rogue AI anti-virus is called Hunter/Hunter.
• Sole Survivor: Part of your backstory. You were originally just one out of 10 sleepers who were conspiring together about an escape plan from the Essen-Arp facility you were kept in. You were the only one who made it out, however.
• Terse Talker: The Sleeper shows a tendency to talk like that. Most of the dialogue choices offered to the player consists either of a some short three-five words statements, or just straight up Parrot Exposition.
• Timed Mission:
  • You sometimes have to wait cycles before you can continue, and in others there is something you need to complete before the timer runs out.
  • A main point of the FLUX storyline. Once you have kicked off the main quest, Eshe will take the Climbing Briar and make her run for the Refugee Flotilla quarantine bay in 12 cycles. And that's all the time you will get to help her and Peake finish their preparations. The final episode, PURGE, is another 12 cycle race to prepare the evacuation flotilla and spread the Gardner's influence before the Flux arrives.
• Title Drop: Done by Helene in the FLUX storyline:
  Helene: We still don't know why the Flotilla came here, why they abandoned settlements and outpost throughout the systems to flee to this ruined station. What little we heard from them concerned computer and life support systems collapsing in waves, machinery in flux.
• Transhuman: The recruitment propaganda surrounding surrounding the bone suit programme was full of this: Emphis bitterly remarks that he and his entire cohort were sold on the dream of becoming larger than life supermen. Once the whole program was declared unviable and decommissioned, all those who underwent the painful and invasive procedures which allowed them to interface with the suits were left out in the cold, with most wasting away from arthritis, osteoporosis or crippling addictions to painkillers.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Ethan turns out to be this in his questline. After having his contract on you cancelled, he offers to protect you from the new bounty hunter Maywick in return for helping him work off his debt to the Kompressor Club. And you even help him steal his confiscated gun back from the club. Instead, upon reclaiming his gun he turns on you, revealing that he sent Maywick your location in return for a 50/50 cut of the bounty. Luckily, Maywick instead shoots him dead before he can finish you off, and you manage to shoot Maywick dead with Ethan's gun before he can kill you too.
  • Dragos, despite being your first real friend on the station (and you potentially getting him out of a crippling debt) is quick to kick you to the curb the instant you stop being convenient to him, without even so much as a goodbye or thank you.
• Unstable Equilibrium: Everything in the game is determined by dice rolls, with the number of dice you have available per cycle depending on your condition (five dice at maximum condition, decreasing by one every four cycles). To keep your condition up, you need good dice rolls, but the less of those you get, the harder it gets to keep your condition up, which means even less dice to roll in the first place. It's a vicious cycle that'll keep you on your toes until you get ahead of the curve.
• Unusual User Interface: Those who signed up to the bone suit programme had access the ports which allowed them to pilot the suits literally embedded into their skeleton. The scars which cover the majority of Emphis' body are all old access ports.
• Used Future: The station is far from new, in fact it's unfinished and in a massive state of disrepair to the point there are plans afoot to abandon it entirely.
• Weird Trade Union: The Havenage Union is one for the data analyzers, engineers, and other technical workers inhabiting Erlin's Eye. It was founded by Erlin himself back in the day, and is the closest thing the space station have to any kind of civil government.
• Wetware CPU: The Sleepers, who were created specifically to find a way around the blanket bans on creating sentient AI.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Ultimately the reason why Riko decides to remain on the Eye at the end of Episode: PURGE; she knows that her time will soon be running out, and she'd prefer to spend her final days surrounded by her beloved Greenway.

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