Retrospective: Citizen Sleeper - ★★★★☆
With Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector dropping recently (and, for what it’s worth, IndieLoupe’s review of it coming soon™) we thought we’d take a look at the previous two games from Jump Over the Age (JOTA) - namely In Other Waters and, surprisingly enough, Citizen Sleeper. JOTA is the one-person game studio of developer Gareth Damian Martin, so it’s their brain we have to thank for these worlds and everything in them. Spoilers for both games to follow — the In Other Waters Retrospective can be found here.
Image: Jump Over the Age / IndieLoupe
Have you ever walked in on two people having a conversation on a subject you know nothing about? I mean something like astrophysics, rather than Charli XCX’s new album. That's how I sometimes feel when I'm playing Jump Over the Age’s games, particularly Citizen Sleeper. To continue with that ‘conversation’ metaphor, I feel like when that situation arises, there’s two situations: either the conversation is genuine, or its participants are hamming it up so you know just how clever they are. There’s definitely games that come to mind as being guilty of the latter, but I really don’t think that’s the case for Citizen Sleeper.
In Citizen Sleeper, you play as an eponymous Sleeper. I can’t do the concept justice without making it sound a little ostentatious, but you’re an emulation of a human mind housed in an artificial body, who has escaped the indentured servitude of the Essen-Arp corporation. They’re not happy about it, and fully intend to track you down and see that you don’t enjoy your freedom. I use the term ‘freedom’ very loosely, as your body is in rapid decline without the aptly-named Stabilizer that it requires to keep itself from falling apart. It turns out that in the future, planned obsolescence also extends to beings, albeit those who are, to oversimplify, android slaves.
There’s two sides to your Sleeper, the physical and the… digital? I’m not quite sure the best way to describe the latter, which might betray the fact that I didn’t ever fully grasp it. It doesn't have to be a huge part of the game if you don’t want it to be, and doesn’t overstay its welcome, but it felt like a step beyond what my mind could wrap itself around. Call it a lack of imagination on my part: I could just about put myself in the shoes (do androids wear shoes?) of the Sleeper with regards to the rest of their existence, but trying to relate to a bodiless electronic signal became a little tedious as the game went on. Again, ‘bodiless electronic signal’ is probably not the most apt of descriptions, but it was my interpretation of the ghostly, black-and-white world hidden within your Sleeper.
Image: Jump Over the Age
Whether or not it’s Damian Martin’s intention, my lack of understanding of that half of the Sleeper’s existence did contribute to the sense of unease that is prevalent in Citizen Sleeper; the feeling that something is wrong with your character. There’s constant reminders of it throughout: the way your character is treated by those around you, the way your body is deteriorating with each passing day, the constant intrusions - both mental and physical - from forces that you’d really wish would just leave you alone… there’s an inherent struggle which you feel you might never escape. That struggle presents the key narrative hook of Citizen Sleeper: the hope that you might, somehow, free your Sleeper from it.
One such way you might do that is to escape Erlin’s Eye, the station you find yourself stuck on. There are a handful of endings to Citizen Sleeper, some of which where you leave for paths anew, but by the time I reached those junctures, I wanted to stay. It felt like what was right for my Sleeper - I was more invested in the life they’d built for themselves on the Eye than the relationships they’d established with those who they might’ve left with. The problem with my ‘ending’, if you can call it that, was that I was deprived of the sort of closure received by players who chose to leave. I can imagine my Sleeper living their life, spending time in the places they’d learnt to call home with the friends that kept them there… but I have to imagine it, because the game doesn’t paint that picture for you. When you’ve passed up on each opportunity to leave, you’re just left on an empty-feeling Eye with nothing left to do. You know the characters that made you stay are there, but there’s no interacting with them, no little paragraph or two tying it all together. When you’ve grown emotionally invested in your Sleeper and their world, it leaves you feeling a little underwhelmed. The journey remains worth it – Damian Martin’s writing more than sees to that – but you end up feeling punished for not leaving: the unloved child of the four (albeit with some minor variations) endings.
Image: Jump Over the Age
There are a couple of other issues with Citizen Sleeper: at points you find yourself monotonously scrolling up and down the Eye, spending your days doing menial tasks as you wait for the story beats to catch up with your Sleeper. There are other occasions where the gravitas of your tasks feels mismatched: there was one point where I was in the midst of doing something that felt it would have a monumental impact on the lives of all those on Erlin’s Eye, and my Sleeper put it on hold – albeit briefly – because they needed to pop over to a food stall to give their friend a mushroom delivery.
It bears repeating, though, that Damian Martin’s writing and worldbuilding is superb, and that makes it easy to ultimately forgive the handful of quirks that come with Citizen Sleeper. Much like In Other Waters, I found it staying with me long after I finished my playthrough, and eagerly awaiting the next instalment. Citizen Sleeper is awarded ★★★★☆ by IndieLoupe.com.
The reviewed product was purchased by IndieLoupe.com.
