Citizen Sleeper Offers Hope In the Midst of a Capitalist Space Hellscape

Citizen Sleeper is mostly the work of one person: Gareth Damian Martin, who began the project immediately on the heels of his previous game, In Other Waters. He tells me that on In Other Waters’ release day in 2020, he realized suddenly that he only had funding for it up to that day, and he would need to immediately begin work on something else. Fortunately, he’d been tossing around an idea for a slice-of-life science fiction project already. Inspired by the success of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, he got the backing of Fellow Traveler and went to work.

The tabletop influence came naturally, as Martin had gotten interested in running tabletop games while he was working on In Other Waters, especially Blades in the Dark. He liked the way Blades in the Dark focused on consequences after each dice roll, and found himself wanting to avoid the trap of other tabletop-like video games that force players to reroll the same action until they can pass a certain obstacle. This ultimately influenced the direction of Citizen Sleeper.

“Immediately I had this idea of giving people dice up front so that they wouldn’t have that horrible moment of ‘I rolled a terrible dice. I hate this game because it’s just random.’ That very quickly became so thematically important to me, because I got this feeling of, well, we roll dice every morning when we wake up…Some days you roll five ones, some days you roll sixes.

“I wanted to try and make a video game RPG where you choose what you do, where you turn up to, where you go each day, and that affects how the story progresses. That’s how I like to run RPGs. I like to see what the player is interested in, and build around them as they go.”

Like any good tabletop game, Citizen Sleeper’s excellence hinges on its storytelling. At first, the tale it tells is often anxiety-inducing, as the Sleeper struggles to shake their corporate pursuers, find the medicine they need to hold off planned obsolescence, and eke out a living. In some ways, its early hours are more management sim than roleplay, but that quickly changes as the Sleeper begins to make connections and explore the space station’s hidden corners.

Of course, in a tabletop campaign, there’s constant player discussion and negotiation with a DM, and the story is constantly changing on the fly based on their actions. A video game like Citizen Sleeper is always inevitably going to have set outcomes. But Martin says the tabletop storytelling element still pervaded his thinking in how he developed the story, even if ultimately the player sees fixed outcomes.

“I tried to think about, instead of the story I wanted to necessarily tell, I thought instead about the themes I wanted to explore and then all the kinds of characters that might exist in relation to those themes in that world,” he says. “I just started by putting them all in their places and then I’d write a bit of story for one of them and then I’d move on and write a little bit of story for another one and then follow the implications of those stories. Which, to me, feels more like GMing. You don’t have time to write Lord of the Rings and then guide people through [it]. You just have time to make the ring and Frodo and Mordor or whatever, and then you just pick it up as you go. I tried to capture that as I worked on the game, even though I knew that, that’s not how the player would experience it.”

Though it takes place in a dystopian space future on an abandoned space station and stars the equivalent of a runaway sentient AI, Citizen Sleeper isn’t some epic space adventure. That comes from Martin’s own relationship with science fiction, and struggling to relate to big space hero protagonists like Commander Shepard in Mass Effect. He relates more to stories like Cowboy Bebop, which he describes as “a bunch of freelancers who are flatmates in space.”

“I think that my generation experiences precarity a lot …The Sleeper is just a sci-fi version of precarity. You have this debt and you have to work it off. And so you go to sleep and you get copied and this other version of you goes off and does the work for you, but what’s it like for them? What’s it like to be someone who doesn’t even qualify as a person? Society does that for us too. We see that some people are citizens and some people aren’t citizens.

“That’s the sci-fi that I would like to play … When I watch Star Wars, I’m always looking over the shoulders of the characters, trying to see the market stall people or what’s happening in- I was recently watching The Book of Boba Fett and there’s a bit where they just introduce this incredibly cool ring station type setting. And there’s these factions and they spend like five minutes there and then they’re just like, ‘Anyway, back to Tatooine.’ And I was just like, ‘No, leave me here, please. Leave me behind to find out what these people’s lives are like.’”

Citizen Sleeper, then, is a smaller tale of individuals struggling under the thumb of big money and big power, banding together to support one another and fight back, and ultimately finding meaning in their lives even when all around them is cold and uncaring. I won’t spoil the multiple endings, but there’s a lot of hope contained under the grim exterior of Citizen Sleeper. I was surprised to walk away from a story about struggling in an impoverished gig economy surveillance capitalist hell state feeling rejuvenated and alive.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.