Loving Broken Things
My time playing Citizen Sleeper
I’m hot off finishing another book disguised as a game and have felt a bit lighter as of my last article.
I’ve written in the past of my time playing/reading Disco Elysium (which contains over 1 million words) and watching my wife go through it with fresh eyes. I had heard Citizen Sleeper recommended for those who loved Disco Elysium, and so I decided to give it a try.
It’s similar in many ways, with a big difference being the amount of people who worked on it. Disco Elysium had a whole studio dedicated to writing and creating the world of Revachol, whereas Citizen Sleeper was, by and large, written by one person, and worked on by a small team. So, while I did miss the fully voiced dialogue and traversable world in Disco Elysium, I was amazed at how quickly I was enthralled by Erlin’s Eye.
Erlin’s Eye is a circular space station in the middle of nowhere, having been part of a corporate takeover, then a corporate liquidation, and now full of independent people who don’t have any other place to go.
You take the reigns of a Sleeper, someone who had such massive amounts of debt to a corporation, that you had to digitize your psyche and be put into a robot while your human body sits in a cryochamber on ice. You’d think that the main goal of the game would then be to reunite with your true body, right?
Wrong. Sleepers still have sentience, and all of their previous memories are wiped away, some only resurfacing like static on an AM radio station, discordant and vague. And you just got a new lease on life.
Your freighter crashed onto the Eye and you are now free to do as you please with nothing to your name, and no name to even go by. What’s worse, your body of metal relies on a stabilizer fluid to keep you running, something that, without, will leave you as scrap to be picked apart. A feature from your corporate overlords, not a bug.
Additionally, you still have a corporate tracker stuck in your head, and if you’re not quick about getting it removed, a bounty hunter will come to claim you and kill you for good. You are corporate property, after all.
It starts out as a true test of survival, you are scraping together as much money as you can to feed yourself, as well as to by some more stabilizer, while you sleep inside an abandoned shipping container, wondering when the bounty hunter will come knocking.
Citizen Sleeper relies on dice, like a tabletop RPG would, except, in a stroke of genius, you start each new day with already rolled dice. Whereas in Dungeons and Dragons you roll dice when a random encounter appears, Citizen Sleeper has set encounters and a set amount of dice, with a set amount of numbers.
You usually want 6’s, because they ensure your day-to-day activities go 100% positively, whereas anything lower gives higher percentages of something going wrong. To make matters worse, if your condition worsens because of your lack of stabilizer, you start losing more dice that you can use each day.
But those early game days were rough. I was waking up with three 1’s and a 3, my final dice locked out because my condition had worsened to “flickering.” I imagined my little Sleeper going to the dockyard, cutting away ship parts while lights flickered behind their eyes. Dock work is dangerous work, too, so any bad rolls ended up having worse consequences, like a piece of metal chipping away at my frame, or I didn’t get to make as much money as I was hoping, the list goes on.
Eventually, though, I had multiple gigs in the Eye. I could work at the dock, I could work at the bar, where the owner would let me eat years-old rations at a discount, since the bar was close to going under. But hey, if that’s the best she could do, I’d work with it.
Before long, I had a bit of a system going. I’d go to the docks for steady money, and then hit the bar to bus some tables, and then go back to the junkyard I lived in to hack apart the ship that I think I crashed in on. It was gruelling, but it gave me enough to eat, and eventually, buy a vial of stabilizer.
My condition improved so much, that I woke up the next day with a pocket full of 4’s, 5’s, and 6’s to spend as I pleased. It was eventful! I got to know more about the Lowend part of town and started trading at the market there, found a little abandoned shack I could retrofit into a home if I put the time into it, and if tomorrow went similarly, I’d be able to buy a backup stabilizer, just in case.
But, I got shooed away from my junkyard job, my constant presence proving too much for the regulars, but graciously afforded my little metal can to sleep in. I thought I could still make it work, but that next day, I woke up with 1’s and 3’s.
I ended up losing money at the market exchange, I couldn’t get any stabilizer, and I had lost all of the rations I ate at the bar because the barkeep was putting in their own still.
My last choice was a ramen joint run by a man named Emphis. His price was a bit higher than the bar rations, but I figured, if it was real food, it would have to cost a bit more.
Turns out Emphis is a stand-up fella. He gives me my first bowl free, in exchange for…a story. My memory is unfortunately pretty shoddy of any human stories, so I tell him a story of something that only a Sleeper would get. He appreciates it and lets me eat in silence.
The text surrounding Emphis communicates how he’s just a solid guy with a knack for noodles and the only organic food that grows on the eye: mushrooms. But, I’m given a new task I can pursue: Get to know Emphis.
As I’m riding a rollercoaster trying to get the tracker out of my head (which took so long that a bounty hunter found me anyway), I kept hanging out in the Lowend of town just to hang out with Emphis and Tala, the barkeep.
Eventually, I built a little apartment in the Lowend, and when my dice looked terrible and I had no money, I could work at the noodle factory for $5, but they’d feed me. Now with a considerable amount of people met, and more issues to solve, I found myself in the latter half of the game.
I found this place called the Greenway, a commune that essentially only harvests mushrooms, but overall, take care of their own. The bounty hunter is out of the picture, I’m not going to go into detail there, but it’s not on the agenda anymore. I have the chip out of my head, no one can find me anymore, and there are still a couple other quests to complete!
I take time babysitting Mina, so her dad, Lem can go to work and hopefully earn a living, as well as a ticket off the Eye and onto a real world, where it rains and thunders, as opposed to an artificially lit spoke and wheel careening through the universe.
I promise him that I’ll make sure he and Mina can get off the Eye and head towards a brighter pasture, even as she bids me farewell with a hug and, “Bye, Robot!”
I make a ton of progress at the Greenway, though, with one of the lead scientists and I working together to figure out how to grow different kinds of mushrooms, and before long, we make a breakthrough: a certain type of mushroom can make more stabilizer for me. A never ending supply. Something I’m not sure I could find anywhere else.
My throat tightens. That means that I can’t go with Lem and Mina (I guess I could, but that means I’ll probably die young). Eventually, my mushroom quest leads me into the cyberspace of the Eye, and I find an AI called “The Gardner.”
The Gardner notices me (I’ve taken a trip through cyberspace multiple times at this point, so I’m bound to leave a digital footprint) and offers me a choice.
Leave behind my body and join him in AI world, or stay as a robot. It’s going to be the only time I get the offer.
I could leave behind my body of crumbling scrap altogether! No more finding stabilizer, no more working away to afford food in the Lowend, no more hunting for scrap metal to solder onto my frame, and no more worrying about my condition anymore. I remember in the early game thinking, “Ugh, repairing myself is so annoying! I hate losing dice!” I wouldn’t have to worry about dice anymore. No more repairs.
But I’d be lying if I said that was my first thought. My first thought was the people I’d leave behind. The droves of people trying to get by, and ones, I think, would be worse off without me around.
The text reads as such when you choose to stay as a broken down Sleeper robot, choosing to leave cyberspace and back to the real world.
It doesn't understand you, and you don't understand it.
So you don't focus on it, you don't think about it, on what feels like such a long journey back through the dark. You set your mind on eyes instead. On hands. Things you can focus on, hold onto.
And then, after an age of crossing, you are there, settling back into the chair, into a body in a chair, and the overwhelming sensations that come with being a living thing with a rich and detailed sensorium.
For a moment you feel like you have made a terrible mistake. Who would choose this weight? This anxiety? This deep well at the center of existence.
But then you feel it. Riko's hand, gripped hard around yours, trembling a little, sweating a little. Riko's hand with its brittle bones and crumpled skin. Riko's hand.
And in that moment you understand why you made this choice. And then you squeeze Riko's hand, and you wake up.
The game was an incredibly insightful journey for me. A very stripped down, simple gameplay loop allowed for me to get into the headspace of someone incredibly down on their luck, and someone that is on the bottom rung of every system and every institution. A game that could easily choose to punch up at the people who created the dire circumstances, but instead, focuses on community.
I worked hard the rest of the game to make sure everyone else got their happy endings. Through a lot more elbow grease than I thought, Lem and Mina took to the stars, as well as swaths of other characters I had grown to love, even ones I thought would never leave, ones who were tentpoles to their communities. Each time, they would ask if I wanted to come with them, whether on a spacecraft, a flotilla, or some other mode of transportation. Surely, a robot who crash landed on the Eye wouldn’t want to stay there.
But I felt too ingrained with the city. It never felt right for me to leave, even though I had my mind set from the start to get off the station by any means necessary. It was full of sketchy characters, dangerous labor, and a cruel system to keep people down. Yet, through the journey, I came to realize the Eye could be worse off. There could still be worse places than a space station in constant need of repair.
And so I chose to stay, yet again, with the people of Erlin’s Eye, because they stayed with me when I was at my lowest. If they could provide for me in my broken state, I could provide for others when they were busted and breaking down as well, robot or not.
After the last ship sailed away, and some of my dearest friends had left, I still felt a sense of hope. I could keep the wheel spinning. I could keep tending the bar, repairing ships in the docking bay, and growing my special mushrooms while building more friendships with those around me. I could keep feeding my cat in my newly furnished squatter home.
If I could find the joy and beauty in frail, soon-to-become broken bodies, I could find the joy in broken systems, and in turn, come to terms with the fact that nothing will truly ever become fixed and perfected. It is a part of life, whether we like it or not.
And I am fine with that.
*Citizen Sleeper is available on all gaming platforms, as well as the newly released sequel.