Year of Games #11: Citizen Sleeper DLC

Citizen Sleeper by Jump Over The Age was one of a host of innovative narrative-driven adventure games to come out last year, and its radical tale of corporate skirmishes, crummy jobs and decaying bodies was hands down one of the best things I played in 2022. With three free DLCs, Episode Flux, Episode Refuge and the latest, Episode Purge, director Gareth Damian Martin has brought this story of the Sleeper and the Eye to a definitive and impactful close.

As we enter this final chapter, the Sleeper has already said their goodbyes to friends and enemies alike and committed to a life on Erlin’s Eye, the crumbling space station at the edge of the Helion system. If you’re like me, you likely took the time between the end of the base game and the release of Episode Flux just building up resources and Cryo, the station’s stable and airgapped cryptocurrency. Jobs got done, people were helped, and a pattern was formed: the rough outline of a real life.

But we chose to live on the Eye, and that life is inherently unstable. A new pair of corporate fugitives, Peake and Eshe, arrive on a ship called the Briar, and immediately begin causing a ruckus. We investigate and discover that they traveled to the Eye with a flotilla of refugees from a nearby planet, Ember Hearth, that suddenly catastrophically became hostile to life. Havenage, the union currently administering the Eye, has set up a quarantine at the edge of the Greenway, keeping the refugees from flooding the station. Peake and Eshe are looking for a way around that quarantine.

From there goes the game. Functionally nothing has changed about the way you actually play Citizen Sleeper. Your actions are still constrained by up to five randomly-rolled D6 dice; your core gameplay loop is still a perpetual balancing act between doing things to advance the story and doing things to maintain your body’s long-term condition and its short-term hunger.

It’s still true that, even though you’re effectively free from Essen-Arp, the company that created the Sleepers, you still rely on its proprietary blend of pharmaceuticals to keep your body from decaying fully. Luckily, a botanist you met, Riko, will synthesize more for you out of some Greenway mushrooms you can grow, but that process takes a lot of time and resources just to create one vial of stabilizer. Barring that, you can always salvage for a couple pieces of scrap per day, if you have the right perks. Likewise, you don’t have to pay for food if you unlocked the kitchen in the Bantayan, but you do have to cultivate and bring your own mushrooms.

This all would be enough to manage by itself. But the flotilla – and Peake and Eshe specifically – complicates things. As does the bad news they brought with them: a station-destroying “flux” is on its way, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

As a result, the Sleeper finds themself in the same boat (lmao) many of us find ourselves in during “unprecedented times” like these: managing the best they can to keep their head above water while also doing their best to meet others’ expectations and hold off their slice of a pending apocalypse.

Ultimately the game boils down to a single decision: do you finally flee Erlin’s Eye, or do you (literally) put down roots? There is a future in either path, but you have to choose. Staying on the station means dealing with the repercussions of the flux, which is still on its way even after you take steps to mitigate its effects. Leaving means contending with the multifarious politics of the flotilla, now laden with several hundred more bodies all fleeing the Eye together. Staying means facing the ever-looming threat of hostile corporations, all angling to take over the Eye and forcibly evict the whole city – a city of inadvertent squatters, as it turns out. Leaving means facing the harsh realities of space travel once again.

There is no ease to making your choice. There’s also no time to make it. Yes or no, stay or go. One prompt, the weight of the future riding on your decision.

But to be clear, we know this was coming from the get-go. You face the prospect of leaving or staying as soon as you start the DLC. There are no other paths to take outside of it, no more friends from the base game to join on their own journeys to parts unknown. You are thrust out of your quiet cycle of mere subsistence back into consequentiality. Within the fiction, you’ve been thinking about this choice the whole time.

“You say the words, and the moment you do, the weight of it all seems to descend on you. You stumble a little, and then stand straight, refusing to be crushed.”

Citizen Sleeper is a game that acknowledges that living a life in which you are an active participant can be difficult, but asks you to do it anyway. There is always something you can do, even when you get a bad set of rolls on your action dice, even when you can only muster the energy for a couple of tasks, even when you’re so hungry or tired that you can feel yourself start to fall apart. Your work may not be the thing that inspires everyone else into revolution, or whatever, but it is still important, even if only to you.

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