Graphic novels are not typically My Jam, but Citizen Sleeper has enough mechanics to make it feel like just barely enough of a game to feel like a game and not a graphic novel.

So obviously the point of this game is :words:, and those words are largely good (but depressing) words. The mechanics are all about balancing resources and choosing what to work on next. Currency-wise you’ve got Food/Hunger, Robot Insulin/Exhaustion, Dice, Time, Money, and various materials. Every day drains your Hunger/Exhaustion. Dropping 20% exhaustion cuts your count of dice. Dice limit how much stuff you can do each day.

So what you do each day has to be balanced amongst things that will net you cash (to buy food and Robot Insulin), but not risky things you’re not proficient in, or things that will potentially have consequences that eat into your reserves.

The balance is actually pretty interesting! The choices are good! Many locations you can interact with across the map also have multiple options of what you can do there, like you may have two activities split across two skills. So you might be proficient in one, but it might be less efficient yield than the other. Or you might have one high-yield option you can only do three times (raid a farm) before locking out access to a repeatable low-yield (work at the farm).

Time is also interesting, the game has a lot of lockout timers. Mid-game you start hitting points where you have to think of time as a currency too, because you may have to grow some mushrooms which takes three cycles, or wait for a freighter to come to port in 6 days, so you have to make sure you have adequate cash to buy stuff from the freighter when it gets here, or be prepared have enough exhaustion cleared to be able to dump high quality dice into harvesting mushrooms. Similarly, there are some “impending consequence” timers, where you only have 3 cycles to complete a task or fail it, or know in 10 cycles someone will come to beat the crap out of you. Surface level it seems chore-y and game-y, but in practice it wasn’t terrible.

Thematically, the game is cyberpunk-y corpo dystopia hell, the PC is a semi-rogue android indentured servant, dropped off in a derilict space station full of equally depressed augmented and unaugmented humans. It isn’t a happy game, but very few things in this genre are. But the individual stories are pretty good. Some are a little hackish and tropey (the guy who double-crossed me double-crossed me again! then he quadruple crossed me and was actually a good guy!), but overall it was good for a largely solo project.

Oh! And the music was pretty great too! It was someone apeing Boards of Canada / Tycho, but . . idk it worked. And I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.

Main Downside: Two achievements are easily missed and preclude you from getting a slew of other achievements, meaning you either have to run the game three times to 100% it, or you have to save-scum. Hate that. I mean, it’s not a long game, but still, it absolutely infuriates me.

Overall, strongly recommend on Game Pass. Less strongly recommend for retail price.