Fleeting scenes of violence and brutality also offer vulnerability, and I come away from them filled with conflicting flashes of sadness and resentment. Capitalism is an endless bitch, but I quickly learn that even in the face of truly bleak choices, the game always allows the Sleeper to retain a soft, haunting sense of humanity through dialogue and actions.

My frame is in need of repair, and after meeting junk salvager Dragos, it becomes clear that I need to earn some “cryo,” a cryptocurrency that’s been isolated from the market. I awaken, filled with anxiety, on Erlin’s Eye (or simply “the Eye”), a decaying space station. I choose one as far as possible from my real-life traits: the careful, structured Machinist who excels at engineering-type work. Pulling from its tabletop inspirations, Citizen Sleeper has a range of three character classes. It is possible, though, to partially repair the Sleeper’s body, which is more than can be said for many electronics today.

For Essen-Arp, these frames are a failsafe to prevent escapees like me from getting too far before they can send someone to bring me back. The player controls a Sleeper - an emulated “person” fleeing from the Essen-Arp megacorp in a proprietary body frame designed for “planned obsolescence.” It’s not far off from consumer tech now - hardware purposefully designed to wither in the face of endless updates and opaque new operating systems (or in the case of bionic eye company Second Sight, hardware that bricks itself in the face of bankruptcy). Ĭitizen Sleeper is the new narrative-driven, text-heavy role-playing game from Jump Over the Age (aka Gareth Damian Martin, the creator of 2020’s In Other Waters) that uses a dice system inspired by tabletop games. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule.

Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences.

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