Citizen Sleeper

I just finished this game during a time of war in my country, daily the sounds of bombs and fear of death to myself, my family and loved ones. Many of which left the country for refuge elsewhere, while I chose to stay, no different from the sleeper in my adventure. This game is a wonderful take on how life passes us by, people come and they go, events happen around us by forces often we don't understand that wish for nothing but to fuel its self interest at any cost. I hope for a better world for those like me in the Eye and those who rode to newer pastures. for freedom and peace to all.

A very dishonest "TTRPG-dice based" game where you basically play a Visual Novel with extra steps. The cycle and dice mechanic is only there to give an illusion of choice for the players and to hide how shallow the game is. Story wise it's nothing great but i like the side story about a hidden AI [spoiler] that basically fused to the station and lives within the plants and mushrooms[/spoiler] which was cool. Every choice has no effect so you can play as whatever/whoever you want and got ZERO repercussions. A disappointing experience, false advertisements and promises, but still an okay visual novel if you're into that stuff. I want a refund.

Citizen sleeper would be a bad Visual Novel, if you judged it as a VN. Citizen sleeper would be a bad RPG, if you judged it as an RPG. Citizen Sleeper, despite the above, somehow takes the worst of both worlds and is stronger for it. Before I gush, though, I do want to note that the UI is pretty buggy for a game this.. simple. So far in just 3 hours I've noted: - Having to enter and leave menus to get rid of 'sticky' tooltips - Some random nodes on the cyber layer just never have a mouseover tooltip, which means you have to click to enter the node every time you want to be reminded what's inside - Clicking on dice tentatively assigned to a slot is supposed to return them back to your dice pool, but when you have skill point for that slot which boosts the rank of a die, you can't simply click the die to return it to the pool anymore (But dragging the dice off still works) All minor complaints, but the distractions are unwelcome. Imagine trying to read a novel that smears its ink randomly every 30 minutes or so, and then you have to shake your book for a second to get it back into focus. With that said, let's examine one facet of the game I really want to appreciate: how your daily dice allotment complements the game's primary genres. If a whole RPG was built around it, it'd be.. shallow, unsatisfying. Your potential to accomplish your goals on any given day subject to chance and not to your effort as a player. If a whole visual novel was built around it, it'd be frustrating. The whole point of a VN is to let you make choices that influence the story, and maybe even replay it to see the different paths different choices might have led to. Having dice pick a path through the story for the player instead of... having the player directly pick their path very much defeats the point of "playing" a visual novel. Even just having the dice rolls exist at all would be an annoyance without purpose. Why interrupt a good story with mandatory yahtzee breaks? And yet, in Citizen Sleeper, having a mechanic to remind you of how arbitrary and uncontrollable fate is for everyone on the station, to throw up roadblocks and stall your progress, to make you have to weigh the pros and cons of starving and completing the last ring of a timed event right before the deadline, versus gambling your last die to have a chance to gamble money to be able to afford a meal.. Well, such a mechanic winds up being a perfect choice. The mechanic is simple: Every day, the game rolls 1 - 5 dice based on how healthy you are. And then you're basically stuck with whatever you happen to get for the day. That's the first layer of luck. The second layer of luck depends on how you choose to spend those dice. Every choice you make has one of three outcomes, Positive (major progress, probably a bonus), Neutral (minor progress, slight chance of a small bonus), and Failure (take a penalty, maybe lose progress). A strong die roll, like 6, is a guaranteed Positive result. Anything weaker isn't necessarily positive, but 4's and below start running the risk of Negtive results. And yet even the weakest die, a 1, is still 50-50 Neutral vs Failure roll - a merciful glimmer of hope. Per the visual novel side, you aren't a hero, you're a refugee. You're unarmed and only a shell of a person, rapidly dying from a corpo-installed apoptosis. And the story of about how your survival past the opening prologue has been utterly subject to the whims of lady luck and the strangers alike is reinforced by the ludonarrative beats that come with having only a dwindling daily allotment of dice to spend -- and uncertain results even when you commit to spend one. Having a gutwrenching daily roll of scattered one's and two's is just as much a part of your story as the day you rolled perfect sixes. Even failures and bad results progress the story, even if closer to an outcome you fear. Much like another dice-management game called Tharsis, your real skill as a player is going to be figuring out how to keep moving forward even when the dice are stacked against you. Then, shortly into the game, there's a small burst of power expressed in the plot -- your dreams of the network become waking dreams become waking connection and your special connection with the cyber layer comes awake. This isn't just a plot beat that hands out an upgrade point or two, though. What the game gives you is a new layer of the station to spend your dice on, and it's a layer where higher numbers aren't necessarily better, since having a specific number is what counts. All of a sudden, even a bad day of 1's and 2's that had been wrecking your life on the physical layer now has new potential. And, just as quickly as that power is granted, there quickly comes a new threat directly related to that power. But I digress. The visual novel supports the RPG which supports the visual novel which supports the RPG which supports the visual nov

EDIT: En las guias de la comunidad dentro del apartado punto de encuentro de Citizen Sleeper en Steam, se encuentra un mod gratuito para traducir el juego al español hecho por Susa Ken. Es extremadamente sencillo de instalar. En 1 minuto ya lo tienes en español. Si eres hispanohablante cuidado! El juego esta en ingles, es todo texto, y escrito en un lenguaje literario de alto nivel con vocabulario elevado. Si no controlas muy muy bien el idioma, ni pienses en jugarlo.

I have mixed feelings about the storytelling of this game. Yes, the gameplay is not the focus, it's the story. But the story itself keeps you on a happy path all the time. Your decisions, at the very core, will finish ambiguously. Either way, you will win. What degree of "winning" you achieve, it depends on you entirely. And maybe that's the point. But for a game that starts with the notion of regaining agency over yourself, it appears that the most you can do for you is to decide how to end it. I think that is a beautiful message, if leaving a little empty at the end.

This one is not really a game. It's an interactive book with great audio ambience and very little visuals. The entire thing is literally a single scene in Unity (I'm just guessing here, but it seems like it, might be wrong). As a player, you can orbit around or back and forth on a space station called "The Eye", pick some spot of interest on it and interact with it by completing some tasks which rely on a random dice throw; and as a player you can also choose which dialogue option to choose when conversing with various characters. That's basically it gameplay-wise. Your choices in one quest-line do not impact any other quest-lines. But even more, your choices in dialogues do not matter at all. The only few times they do matter is when you choose between alternative endings, there are eight or nine situations like this in the entire game. But still this feels like a great book. I'd recommend this for sci-fi lovers.

5/10 不推荐 游戏底子和概念非常不错，机制看上去也相当有潜力，随机骰子点数的玩法还是比较创新的。被立绘和世界观吸引着一直坚持玩了下去，但还是弃了，恨铁不成钢之感…… 可惜的有以下几点： 1.游戏流程和事件设计太重复无聊了，玩法里充斥着枯燥的打工，很多时候我都觉得自己是一个执行标准SOP的工具人。 2.支线之间不会互相影响，关联性非常弱，角色之间太独立了，故事线基本上没有任何交织，而且游戏都做了任务列表了，任务列表和地点竟然写得如此不清不楚，记忆力稍微差点可能就会把某个支线忘记。 3.在游戏流程里，资源消耗和获取的方式都非常简单毫无趣味可言，随机骰子基本只有挫败感，没有惊喜感，要么就是某些事件强制你等待三个循环以上，要么就是某些事件强制你投入大量的资源去拉长你的游戏流程。 4.完全没有角色扮演和分支选择的体验，无成就感，主角通常都是不知道自己为什么要帮忙，也不知道自己为什么不帮忙。 5.唯一吸引我的居然是文本里的一些描述和设定，剧情和角色都太孱弱了 就比如说收集数据这个玩法，就是找对应的节点然后投入对应的骰子就可以，而且这些步骤通常没有任何差异，一模一样的操作要做三四遍，这种情况非常常见。在绿道安蠕虫和骇入主机的流程竟然一模一样，两个这么重要的剧情在玩法上居然没有一点差异！！ 重复流程的单调到了菌丝公社理子这里达到了巅峰，菌子居然真的要一朵一朵摘，而且理子要的菌子多达十二朵，虽然我知道我的种植园马上就要建成了，可还是感到有些厌烦。 实在无法忍受这样强行拖时间的设计。为这个游戏感到惋惜，明明可以做到更好，机制都有，但是设计表达得却这么差，说不定真的做成AVG还会好一些。

毎日ランダムに配られる１～６のダイスを使ってミッションをこなし話を進めていく ビジュアルノベルライクなゲーム。上記の事から完全運ゲーに思えるが、スキルを 解放して行くと結構良い目を出しやすくなる。凄く練られたゲームバランスだ。 そしてやはり特筆すべきはこのシナリオだ。丁寧に訳された日本語版はさながら 上質な海外小説。ラノベやセリフばかりのアドベンチャーゲームに慣れた人には ちょっと読み進めるのが億劫かもしれない。が、文章を読むのが苦でない人には 断然おすすめできる一作。なんにしろセンテンスがおしゃれ。いちいち言葉が かっこいい。壮大なスペースオペラ、サイバーパンクな要素の中に、 ひりつく緊張感も、心揺さぶる感動もきちんとある。 時折同じ文章が２ページ続いたり、達成してないのにイベントが進んだり、 エンディングらしからぬ場所でスタッフロールが流れたり…といった、 ほんの少し「？」と思う所はある。あと欲を言えば、SF用語やこの作品ならではの 専門用語がとにかく多いので、「用語集」や「人物紹介」などのデータベースを ゲーム画面から確認出来るような機能があればもっと作品に没入出来たかも。 それでも本当にこの上質な文章の虜になりました。ノベルゲーでまる一日 時間溶かしたのは初めてでした。