Citizen Sleeper Goes Free On PS Plus Just Ahead Of Its Anticipated Sequel
It doesn’t have to be lonely out in space.
You can’t save the galaxy, but you can at least help your neighbors. Where other RPGs tend to cast players as saviors and fated heroes, one of the best games of 2022 explores a very different kind of quest. Starting as a hunted castaway, you’ll need to scramble and trade favors just to survive before paying it forward to change the fate of an entire space station. And as of today, it’s available free for PlayStation Plus Extra and Premium subscribers.
Citizen Sleeper is far from your typical RPG. Much closer to tabletop RPGs than video games in many ways, Citizen Sleeper tells a tale that makes failure a necessary part of your adventure, and reminds you at every turn that the world doesn’t revolve around you. Instead, you’re cast as a Sleeper, a cloned human consciousness stuffed into a robot shell, who flees from their corporate captors and washes up on a station teeming with drama to dive into.
Citizen Sleeper’s fascinating character form the backbone of its story.
The clearest way Citizen Sleeper draws from tabletop RPGs is with its dice system. Every day in Citizen Sleeper, you roll up to five six-sided dice, and you’ll find plenty of ways to spend them as you go about your business. Higher numbers are more likely to produce good results, and there’s no changing the dice once they’re rolled. A big part of the game’s strategy is determining which actions to use your highest dice on, and which you can risk spending a low roll on. Do you try to minimize risk and not use low rolls at all, or power through and accept the consequences of failure? Do you focus all your energy on one task at a task, or spread your limited actions across everything you want to accomplish?
But dice are about more than just success or failure. Their inherent randomness, the unfairness of having some days when you just can’t get anything done, is also a storytelling device.
“The dice system was very much about the idea of precarity and the way we’re exposed to chance,” developer Gareth Damian Martin told Inverse after Citizen Sleeper’s release. “Working temp jobs and gig work as I did, you’re living a life where one thing going slightly wrong can become a whole horrible cascade.”
Citizen Sleeper uses dice to represent the instability of life on the margins.
While Citizen Sleeper tells stories about intelligent robots and interstellar civilizations, it’s really about things much closer to Earth. Even in the far-flung future, the forces its characters struggle against are the same ones that today push gig workers to the brink, keep immigrants living in fear of persecution, and threaten the bodily autonomy of trans people. Its light but challenging gameplay systems don’t just decide how well you perform, they reinforce the danger and cruelty of the game’s world, tying it uncomfortably closely to the struggle for survival in the real world.
Citizen Sleeper isn’t all doom and gloom, though. While its world is harsh and punishing, it’s full of joy, too. Street chefs, found families, and all sorts of people living on the outskirts pull together to help the Sleeper, and in turn, you can be the help they’ve waited for. The community that forms in the shadow of oppression makes life worth living in Citizen Sleeper, and the stories that emerge make it one of the best RPGs in years.
Citizen Sleeper’s arrival on PS Plus is perfectly timed. At the end of January, Citizen Sleeper 2 hits PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC. While its story doesn’t pick up directly from the events of the original, it does build on the themes that came before — and more importantly, the original Citizen Sleeper is a must-play game in its own right. Whether you’re a tabletop RPG aficionado or you’ve never made a character sheet in your life, Citizen Sleeper represents a bold fusion of digital and analog game design that’s not to be missed.
