The cyberpunk wave continues and it never ceases to amaze us. Citizen Sleepera new sci-fi point-and-click role-playing game, is full of touching, even fascinating stories that take us to the heart with their cyborg hands.
We play the role of a “Sleeper”, an artificial creation by emulation of human thought, cheap labor doomed to a life of servitude for a soulless corporation. Our character escapes from this tyranny aboard an interstellar container to finally arrive on a giant space station that once belonged to our owner. Today, it has been conquered by a workers’ union. It remains to survive in this space city.
Because to survive, it will be necessary. The corporation that gave birth to us has continuity in ideas. If she can’t possess us anymore, no one else can: Sleepers like us need drugs distributed only by the corporation to keep them alive. In this dystopian world marked by savage capitalism, running away rhymes with dying slowly as our artificial organs deteriorate, deprived of a corporate panacea.
Seen from above, we point and click to browse the city in search of work, friendships and meaning. We meet incongruous characters: a scrap dealer in debt, a communist botanist, a mercenary betrayed by her crew, an artificial intelligence locked up in a vending machine… All have their intrigues, and their goals do not always align with our interests. .
A heartfelt story
Life unfolds in cycles in space. Depending on our condition (do we have enough energy, have we taken our medicine?), we can do up to five actions using randomly distributed dice at the start of each cycle. The value associated with each die allows us to deduce the outcome of our actions, a bit like a Disco Elysium. Since our choices are limited, heartbreaking dilemmas are often played out: come to the aid of one or the other? To eat or to work?
This second game from the Jump Over The Age studio, which also signed the very intriguing In Other Waters, is all in all refreshing, despite its limited means. A lot of effort has been put into the dialogues that we spent hours reading alongside the very successful portraits of each character. This is a lesson for some developers: with a story that has heart, it is largely possible to stand out. It’s not just technical prowess in life.
After five hours of play, we had obviously not thoroughly explored the world of Citizen sleeping. But we were satisfied with the state in which we left our character. He had freed himself from exploitation, no one wanting to rob him of this body that was never really his, and he had found a place for himself within this heterogeneous society at the edge of space, Havenage. , the ultimate refuge from capital. There was something beautiful in there.