Disco Elysium is a dreamy narrative RPG artwork about being a hungover fuckup solving a murder. You wake up in a rundown communist town in the middle of a labor dispute. You explore a beautiful isometric world and meet a host of characters ranging from artists and tweakers to fascists. It’s a perfect game, except for one small flaw: it isn’t set in space. Here’s where Citizen Sleeper comes in.
In Citizen Sleeper you’re also a mess waking up in a strange place. You’ve just escaped from a corporation that has transplanted your consciousness into a synthetic body and sent it into space to perform brutal manual labor. Now you’re on a ring-shaped space station; like everyone else, you’re just trying to survive.
Every morning, you wake up with 1-5 dice (depending on how well you’ve taken care of your body). You can spend the pips on tasks like working or exploring. You can eat space food and drink in space bars. As you play, new areas of the space station open up. You build experience. You befriend a vending machine and fight a program designed to erase unauthorized intelligence. During these early days, I often felt like I was just barely surviving.
Citizen Sleeper scratches the space opera itch of new horizons, new people, and what-ifs, although the space station here is a cold and frightening place. There’s a sense that the whole operation is barely holding out against the cold void. In addition to the base game, there’s at least one more piece of content coming out this year—the final segment of a three-part story.
Disco Elysium is a longer and more complex game than Citizen Sleeper, but they both have fully articulated worlds and complex characters doing their best to choose between bad and worse options. They both have unions, and are both interested in leftist politics without being preachy. You meet strange and surprising creatures. I was moved emotionally by moments in both games. Whether you’re on a post-war archipelago or a space station, in the end, it’s about the people.
Citizen Sleeper might be for you if:
- You love beautifully written games
- You like games that are political but not preachy
- You want to get to know complex characters
Citizen Sleeper might not be for you if:
- You don’t like reading text
- You’re more about gameplay than story
- You think space is a lightless void that no one should spend time in
You can get Citizen Sleeper on Steam here, and it’s also available on Nintendo Switch & Game Pass.
