Citizen Sleeper PS5 review. If there’s one thing that has become evidently clear as of late, you can never really have enough games taking place in a cyberpunk setting, or at least I can’t anyway. Citizen Sleeper then is a narrative based adventure which tidily falls into that genre, but manages to subvert expectations brilliantly with its top-tier writing, superlative world building and characters that you actually care about.
Citizen Sleeper PS5 Review
A Stirring Cyberpunk Narrative Tabletop Adventure That Pulls At The Heartstrings
Citizen Sleeper puts players behind the eyes of a the titular ‘Sleeper’, an emulated human consciousness that exists within a manufactured body, you find yourself thrust to the edges of space on Erlin’s Eye, a crumbling space station that is far from the ultra-capitalist centre of the galaxy where mammoth conglomerates rule for money and power, a universe where empathy and apathy prove to be utterly foreign concepts.
When you begin your playthrough of Citizen Sleeper three very different classes are available to you – Extractor, Machinist and Operator and each boasts their own skills, perks and demographic background. After choosing your class, Citizen Sleeper begins in earnest and wastes no time in introducing players to its narrative driven, tabletop beats.
Taking an elevated view of Erlin’s Eye, a circular space station structure that isn’t entirely dissimilar to something you might see in the Mass Effect games, points of interest appear on the station and you simply choose where you want to go and your character instantly goes there. To be clear, Citizen Sleeper is not a real-time first-person or third-person video game like Cyberpunk 2077 or Disco Elysium, but rather a much slower paced affair that bears a much closer resemblance to titles such as the Vampire: The Masquerade – Coteries of New York and Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Heart Of The Forest.
As a Sleeper that has awoken on Erlin’s Eye with no memory of who you were but occasional, dream-like intrusions that hint at a former life both shattered and fragmented, you’re presented with a simple initial goal; your artificial body is degrading over time – a measure of planned obsolescence implemented by the corporation that provided you with your body – and you must remedy that situation however you can. The idea of ‘planned obsolescence’ is one that strikes a familiar chord with Ridley’s Scott seminal Blade Runner, the notion that a hard cap has been placed on a seemingly artificial life form by a bastion of capitalism to keep it in check, that somehow you cannot be trusted with remaining on your mortal coil in line with your own whims.
Though rife with the same brand of wistful intoxicating melancholy that was so synonymous with Blade Runner, Citizen Sleeper also muses on its themes of transhumanism in a similar fashion to Masamune Shirow’s endlessly influential cyberpunk manga Ghost in the Shell, with frequent and incisive meditations on what it means to have something approximating a ‘soul’ surrounded by a non-human exterior. Certainly, the writing is sophisticated, emotive and highly descriptive, providing a stunning prism through which players get to view Citizen Sleeper’s cyberpunk dystopia. In the absence of a fully realised 3D world such as the one seen in Cyberpunk 2077, Citizen Sleeper’s superlative writing does more than its fair share of the heavy lifting when it comes to effective and memorable world building.
Life on Erlin’s Eye is played out within cycles. Within each cycle, which essentially represents a ‘turn’, you can perform actions, speak to characters and explore the station itself, but must retreat back to your place of refuge in order to rest and restore yourself for the next cycle. As such, in Citizen Sleeper there are two primary aspects of your character that you should focus on; condition and energy. Condition essentially doubles up as both your health and the number of actions available to you. The less condition you have, the less health you have (obviously) and the fewer actions you can carry out in each cycle. Energy meanwhile, is essentially a measure of stamina that depletes with each action you undertake and once reduced to zero, then begins to take a toll on your condition.
Further Reading – Upcoming PS5 Games – The Most Anticipated PS5 Games Coming Soon In 2023
And it’s these two aspects that represent the heart of the player agency that Citizen Sleeper presents. Though you have an unavoidable need to sustain yourself and maintain your ever declining condition, so too is there a need to make money in order to buy what you need, in addition to helping or styming new faces that you meet as you proceed through Citizen Sleeper’s twisting non-linear narrative. It is entirely up to you to decide what you do during each cycle in Citizen Sleeper and it’s all completely non-prescribed.
Certainly, despite seemingly having the primary goal of leaving Erlin’s Eye, the people that you meet there, the lives that you affect and the living that you can eke out for yourself on the station, all press you towards staying. Do you help Tala, the determined bar owner to build and expand her bar and start her own distillery with you as your partner, or, do you want to spend your cycles plying your trade in the shipyard, earning a crust as you do and making friends with the shy Lem and his daughter Mina in the hope that you can maybe all escape together? Make no mistake, player choice is abundant in Citizen Sleeper.
Rather than allowing you to do everything you want whenever you want to do it, certain situations are cycle-locked and can only be made available by waiting for them to become available, or by performing certain actions the success of which depends on the roll of the dice and the stats that you have. Attempting to get to know the folks working at the shipyard for example can only be done if you put in some hard labour, thus gaining you some measure of respect amongst the calloused handed individuals who ply their trade there. Once you’ve gained their respect, additional areas become available for you to explore, along with new characters to meet and nodes to investigate.
Further Reading – The Best Cyberpunk Games On PS5
Possessing an emulated mind also means that our trusty sleeper can dive into cyberspace, whereupon a wireframe overlay is placed on top of Erlin’s Eye and shows communications traffic that can be snooped on, resources that can be hacked and much more besides. In each case, matching your dice to the one required is how you’ll be successful – but having additional points in the interfacing skill also helps this endeavour immensely. As you might expect, this all dovetails with the main game itself where company saboteurs can ask you to hack information and renegade doctors can look to escape from the system entirely.
The cycle system also means that events and folks on Erlin’s Eye move on without you too, marching towards their inextricable conclusion whether you’re there or not. This means that when you’re juggling multiple questlines at once, it is inevitable that a good chunk of them will fall through the cracks and will affect your ultimate ending as a result. There’s so much going on in Erlin’s Eye that it’s absolutely impossible to do everything and see everything in a single playthrough, so Citizen Sleeper boasts far more replayability than you might initially assume.
Really though, it’s the quality of the writing and world building that makes Citizen Sleeper such an immersive and memorable time. The fact that you’re essentially the brown stain on the bed of an ultra-capitalist system that wants to conduct shady dealings on the edge of the universe where it believes prying eyes won’t find them, lends credence to the fact that Citizen Sleeper is unmistakably a dystopian tale, albeit one filled with surprising amounts of hope. From the folks on Erlin’s Eye that seem relentless in their pursuit of a better future, to the fact that you play a machine that desperately wants to be human in the face of hunters both digital and physical, Citizen Sleeper’s superb narrative comes across as a sort of spacebound, reverse Blade Runner where every single character, part of the environment and situation is deftly described to within an inch of its life.
With static images and no voice acting, the visual novel-esque presentation that Citizen Sleeper embraces won’t be to the taste of everyone, even though the absolutely stellar writing is so descriptive and immersive that it renders the absence of typical visuals a practically (and unexpectedly) moot point. Equally, Citizen Sleeper’s ponderous tabletop mechanics likely won’t appeal to folks looking for something with more mechanics dare I say, more traditionally ‘gamey’.
Absolutely overflowing with evocative characters, situations and stunning world building, Citizen Sleeper effortlessly punches its ticket as one of the best narrative adventures on PS5. Sure enough, the lo-fi presentation and plodding tabletop mechanics won’t be for everyone, but for everyone else Citizen Sleeper is a beautifully written, often emotional cyberpunk adventure that will linger long in the mind long after completion.
Citizen Sleeper is out now on PS4 and PS5.
Review code kindly provided by PR.