I finished my first playthrough last night, and this seems accurate. Of the dozen or so narrative threads in the game, there only appeared to be a few that I wasn’t able to wrap up by the end. I won’t know until another attempt, but I got the sense that dialog options and character class don’t actually matter and exist for flavor. My ending did depend on finishing an optional quest chain, so I think there are multiple endings.
I really enjoyed my time with it, and there were enough interesting corners left unexplored that I’d give it another try down the road. Especially if it only takes 5-ish hours to complete again.
Shoot a monkey. That’s my main concern. I was hoping Citizen Sleeper had a bit more rogue-like in it, to encourage variety and replayability. It seems a bit slight otherwise.
Oh, I’m not saying it’s a roguelike. Did you infer that from what I wrote? That wasn’t my intention at all.
I just meant that I was hoping it would encourage replays with different characters to explore the game, which is part of what I enjoy in a good roguelike. That’s a genre that seems to revel is giving players a sense of creative expression by offering different approaches, by encouraging replay through variety. But it doesn’t sound like that’s what’s going on with Citizen Sleeper, which is what I had initially hoped when I saw different characters with skill trees and worldbuilding based on those skills. That it would be a game built to play through multiple time, built to be explored. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case based on @thatdudeguy’s comments.
No, I think I took your meaning, that you were hoping for more randomness in the game. But while I do think (like I said, from my fairly limited time in the game so far) that there is room for replayability, with different characters, skills and decisions - different branches, I guess. But it doesn’t look very random at all. Even with the dice rolls.
I risked losing my save again and played it through. I enjoyed my time with the game but I don’t think there’s much reason to replay it.
Every character class will wind up similar after an hour or two, the skill tree incentivizes you to be a jack of all trades.
There’s about seven major narratives – only one has a plot changing decision before the end. Three other stories finish with a choice to either accept an ending or reject it permanently and keep playing. Besides that there’s no branching.
I do want to see the flavor text for the endings I didn’t get, but since there isn’t multiple saves, I’d rather just watch it on YouTube than replay the game again.
I played through this yesterday, and enjoyed it for the most part. I really liked the ‘clock’ mechanic at the beginning- it seems lifted directly from the ‘Blades in the Dark’ series of TTRPG games- but by the end it was kind of just a slog. I saw the credits roll three separate times, but when I finished the last storyline, that didn’t happen, so I kind of timed things poorly- I essentially kept choosing not to end with leaving everything behind (in some manner), but that meant I just ran out of stories, and am now just going to eek out a life forever on the station. I wish there was an ending to reflect that.
I liked the writing, and the characters, and the worldbuilding. I liked how there really wasn’t any ‘save the world’ plot- though it came close a bit once, I guess, but was just treated as another side-story.
As I said, though, by the end it was just kind of a slog- it reminded me of Fallen London, back when I played it a decade ago. Just watching timers and whatnot to get the next little drop of story. But thankfully that was just the last little bit. All in all, a cool little experience.
I realized what this reminds me most of is the Hero of the Kingdom series. Except yank out the hidden-object DNA, add a real story in a unique setting, and sprinkle it with UI glitz. Which sounds like an overhaul, but the same core is still in both: Do activities (often repeatable) that unlock new activities or give you inventory items that let you do complete other activities… I find this weird genre really appealing, actually. Something about how a very basic skeleton system can be wrapped in many different fictional scenarios to flesh out an interactive world.
The ideas the developer discusses in that article are interesting. I might quibble a bit about his interpretation off Gibson’s writing–I think Gibson was less interested in power fantasies than in showing the cost of power, for instance–but the thrust is on point I think. The founders of cyberpunk were indeed writing about the there and now of that era, in the way the best science fiction writers do. The future is never the future, it’s always the present–as is the past. That does mean that you can’t just replicate the surface tropes over and over again and call it genre. Cyberpunk in 2022 has to reflect 2022, not 1982.
I try to get my game students to draw on a wide variety of inspiration, not just other games or gamified tropes. That is apparently hard even for AAA teams it seems.
I am instantly turned off by anything cyberpunk. Partly because it’s overdone and partly because it’s usually so unappealingly cynical. Oh, and mercenaries. Mercenaries are so boring. Citizen Sleeper is different. I think there is a mercenary character, but their story is about a betrayal motivated by something personal and intimate, not by money. I’ve been struck by how much the game is about friendship–another quality often ignored or disparaged in cyberpunk–and the benefits of friendship among those who are marginalized. Citizen Sleeper is clearly a cyberpunk setting, but it doesn’t feel like cyberpunk.
I am a fan of cyberpunk themes and stories and games, and while I’m no scholar I do think some of the themes it’s pretty consistently hit are transhumanism and the growing corporate influence in our lives. And I think those themes are equally, if not more, relevant today than back when Gibson and others wrote their novels. I haven’t yet tried Citizen Skeeper but it’s on my list! I think RPS described it as Fallen London crossed with Murderbot, which sounds amazing to me.
Well, that does sound amazing. But also, yikes. Being familiar with all three properties, I would recommend tempering your expectations of finding anything that lives up to Murderbot or Fallen London in Citizen Sleeper. :)
Absolutely. My favorite piece of media in recent years that one might label cyberpunk (though it leans more toward dystopian government rule than mega corporations) is the anime entitled Psycho-Pass.
Man, I am not feeling this game and I really wish I was because it seems like there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. I get that they’re trying to instill a feeling of constantly being on the edge of everything just totally falling apart, or maybe I’m just really bad at this. But I think I need to come back to this when I’m more in the mood for a “choose your own adventure” experience.
I guess I should revise my opinion, since pushing onward a bit has definitely expanded my horizons with the game. I was definitely overwhelmed in the early game by the wealth of options and the scarcity of tools to accomplish my goals and the sense of impending doom weighing on me. But it doesn’t really take all that long to work out things, in fact in some cases they seem to just work themselves out. And then the game becomes pretty darn easy. I guess things could change, I haven’t beaten the game yet and something could shake stuff up but yeah, I kind of feel like I’m king of this station at this point. Loads of money, easy access to resources, and highly leveled skills - maybe I’m not meant to try to solve every problem in front of me in a single game but hey, I am nothing if not a completionist!
