Citizen Sleeper is a superb narrative adventure indie game about surviving the urban sprawl of a struggling space station. Think The Expanse meets Cart Life. The game has proven to be the toast of narrative adventure gamers for weeks now, praised as a cerebral cyberpunk revelation and a tour de force of hope from the dark margins of galactic society, positioning it as a solid contender for awards season.
A deceptively simple story inspired by TTRPG mechanics and narratives, the game tells the tale of a “sleeper,” an emulated human intelligence in a synthetic body that has recently escaped the Essen-Arp corporation, its legal owner. Recovered half-frozen to the hull of a derelict by a salvager, you learn how to scrape out an existence on Erlin’s Eye, the space station of a bankrupt intergalactic conglomerate that has been reclaimed by its old union, an authority now known as Havenage, while being pursued by their bounty hunters.
With a set of refreshing themes unmistakably parallel to our modern lives, the story is rich with cathartic elements. I caught up with Gareth Damian Martin, the game’s creator, to dial into what’s behind its genius.
“Stories like this have always fascinated me from long before my time as a developer,” Damian Martin explains, “and even as a DM. When I first began my journey as a developer, I had two ideas in my head: In Other Waters, my debut game, and another looser one, about being a thief in a sprawling fantasy city trying to survive a life of poverty while becoming implicated in the many disparate political structures of the city.
“Through the fires of conceptualization, Citizen Sleeper is what emerged of that idea. Despite the jump to a science-fiction setting, the bottom-up perspective of a vast network of urban lives at the mercy of diverse machinations was what survived.”
At the Periphery of Science FictionIt’s often these sorts of multifaceted stories, thick with fictional intrigue, that capture the hearts of fantasy and sci-fi RPG fans. Indeed, Damian Martin reminisced about the quaint introductions to new areas in Mass Effect, and how they couldn’t help but be enamored with the stories of bystanders and workers designed to give Commander Shepherd a snapshot of life on that particular planet.
“Every time protagonists find themselves at a mundane bar or discussing docking fees, I feel the urge to know more about the side characters who occupy those spaces,” Damian Martin adds. “These people in the margins of a bigger story who main characters glide past when they sweep through busy thoroughfares or crowded hangers. As science fiction stories drag the narrative toward explosive quests, I want to stay with these people living ordinary lives in extraordinary settings.
“This is something that I always adored about Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor. That game felt like such an honest portrayal of working a crappy job, which was wonderfully accented by the backdrop of a colorful spaceport. I love seeing how science fiction can be a powerful ambient space for slice-of-life narratives. A space to extrapolate stories about ourselves,” they explain.
