Citizen Sleeper: The Kindness Within Us Persevering in a Cyberpunk Dystopia.
Set in a cruel, uncaring world, Citizen Sleeper's characters are anything but.
The genre-savvy among us might take issue with the title. Citizen Sleeper doesn’t look like a Cyberpunk story. It foregoes the Punk in favour of something more akin to Lo-Fi. It exchanges the mohawks, boomboxes, and flashy weaponised implants for cosy practical clothing, headphones, and an array of futuristic supportive technology, ranging from wheelchairs to prosthetic arms. On the other hand, it is still true to the setting: an anarcho-capitalist future where corporations own the universe. And we are all the worse for it.
There’s a broad range of characters in the game. But they all have one thing in common: they are outcasts, people without a place in the broader social model.
The world (worlds?) of Citizen Sleeper is post-apocalyptic. Set in space, the system the characters inhabit was once owned by the world’s largest corporation, Helion. Upon the company’s collapse, the entirety of the system went down with it, and its inhabitants were left to deal with the aftermath. The first game is set inside Erlin’s Eye, a ruined space station in the Helion system that social outcasts from all over the galaxy have repurposed into a city. It is home to all kinds of people: labourers, merchants, refugees, criminals… anyone who doesn’t fit into conventional society. It’s a place to reset, to get away from everything. The second game takes place in multiple similar places. On your spaceship, accompanied by your crew of misfits, you go to different planets, each with their own stories. This is as Cyberpunk as a setting can get.
In-game and concept art of Erlin’s eye. The days are called “cycles”, marked by each complete rotation around its axis.
What sets Citizen Sleeper apart is the focal lens through which we explore this setting. Instead of focusing on the rebels who lash out in violent protest, it focuses mostly on regular, working-class people. Through the game’s multiple-choice dialogue coupled with dice rolling mechanics (it is a Tabletop RPG-inspired project), you find out the stories of people who’ve been, in one way or another, been victimized by something much larger than them.
Take Emphis. He is introduced as a quiet but intense street food vendor. He only begins to open up as you continue having meals with him and cement yourself as a local. As you get to know him, you find out his story: he was born on a mining planet owned by the mining company Conway Extractions. He was educated from a young age to be an employee, and eventually got contracted as a specialised worker to mine with an “Anchored Interface Rig”. This mechanical control device is drilled directly into his bones, all the way down the arm, and is used for piloting a heavy-duty extraction suit. The problem is that the suits turned out to be inefficient and defective. And after proving to be underperforming, they were discontinued. Thousands of workers with surgical alterations for suits that didn't work were left to fend for themselves and find new work, receiving only the severe chronic pain from the operation as compensation. That’s how Emphis ends up as a street food vendor.
Notice the layered outfit, saddled with ingredients and utensils for day-to-day use. The character designs tell stories in and of themselves; they make the world feel lived in.
However, what sets Citizen Sleeper apart is the “what then?”. What life is there to have after this story? Emphis, through his work as a street food vendor, cements himself as a renowned member of the community. His stand becomes a haven for the hungry, one of the few places in the Erlin’s Eye where the predominantly working-class citizens can taste real food made with love and skill, instead of manufactured nutrient packets.
Emphis forcefully carves out a meaningful life into a world that otherwise could not host one. He trudges on, his dedication to his craft and the joy of seeing happy clients helping him to push through his pain. His relationship with you represents a final frontier: learning to trust people again after being betrayed by his employer. By the end of your story together, Emphis has fully embraced his new life as a citizen of the Erlin’s Eye.
Now, this might seem like a somewhat depressing story. The grander socio-political landscape hasn’t changed- Conway Extractions has gone completely unpunished, and there are thousands just like Emphis who either died or weren’t able to adapt back in society. However, for a Cyberpunk story, this is a massive symbolic victory. The corporations loom in the background like Greek Gods, with us humans dying and suffering en masse at the mercy of their petty squabbles. And yet, we persevere. We find joy in a world built to sap it away, connection in a world built to prevent it. To do that is to wrestle power away from the Gods.
Maybe there is nothing you can do to change the world around you but to be kind.
Those are the characters that colour the world of Citizen Sleeper: labourers at the mercy of uncaring corporations. Some have fallen into a routine, some are striving towards an unlikely better life, but all of them are trying to survive a world that is unkind to them. But it’s in that struggle that you find the game’s most poignant moments of beauty. Lem, for example, dutifully toils away in a shipyard in hopes of securing a good future for his adoptive daughter, Mina. As you both sacrifice body and mind to this shipyard cycle after cycle, eventually you have the choice to embark on a ship to a newly colonised planet. A chance to escape this life.
Lem asks you to take care of Mina a few times throughout your time together. A shipyard is no place for a child, but he can’t afford a babysitter. Even in space, it takes a village to raise a child.
If you choose to do so, you get an ending describing the three of you going into cryogenic sleep to reach this distant planet. Your body deteriorates over that time, and as you arrive, it’s clear that the planet is nothing more than a resource cache which you will be working on for the rest of your existence. To imagine Lem and his daughter being faced with this fate is heartbreaking.
The good ending for that plotline, in my opinion, is realizing that there is no future out there. To get shipped off to an uninhabited planet to work in indentured slavery is no life, much less for a child. The future is here; Erlin’s Eye is as good a place as we make it. Lem abandons and grieves his dream, acknowledging the beauty of what he has here and now: a daughter whom he loves, and a friend in you. And that is enough. The beauty of Citizen Sleeper is the small things, in a world where any victory is a big one.
However, these small, personal victories aren’t the only type of story this game can tell. Some characters are leaders- people who cultivate oases of peace and community against all odds. One such example is Sol, whose story spans two games.
In the first game’s DLC, Sol is a refugee from Ember's Hearth, a farming planet. It was faced, alongside other planets with the Flux, a system-wide disaster caused, of course, by reckless expansion from the megacorporations. It caused thousands of refugees to flood into the Eye in different ships. Sol is himself a farmer- in the Pilgrim’s Seed (the ship on which his people escaped) are massive indoor farms that emulate the arid environment of Ember’s Hearth. There, his people work desperately to feed the thousands of refugees aboard the seed. Sol especially works himself to the bone- at the cost of his own body.
Sol’s rusty armor and makeshift cane betray two aspects of himself. The first is that he works incredibly hard for the Pilgrim Seed’s survival. The second is that his body is slowly falling apart.
In the second game, which takes place years after the first, the Pilgrim’s Seed did not survive. Most of its people died between the events of the two games, as the ship crashed onto an abandoned planet named Olivera. It is a desolate place, with all of its citizens living in severe poverty. One of the only other people there is Karman, an old mercenary who was waiting out his last days in this hellhole, away from the rest of the universe. However, with the Pilgrim Seed crash landing, him and the last people of the Ember’s Hearth, alongside the people in the people of Olivera, form a colony there.
As part of the Olivera plotline, you help revitalize and restore this colony until it becomes somewhere you can truly call a home. Had Sol (and the protagonist of the first game, mind you!) not worked to preserve the remanants of his home planet, the people of Olivera might have never had a home. So special is the colony that Serafin, your second in command and best friend, falls in love with a woman there named Candance. As of the ending of the game, it is possible that they end up together, settled in the colony. This is what Sol sacrifies his life’s mission, as well as his own body, to create. A place where something truly rare can blossom: love. And while the people of Ember’s Hearth may be gone, they live on through Sol, and now, through the people of Olivera. In the words of Karman: “The Pilgrim’s Seed brought the universe back to Olivera”.
Sol in Citizen Sleeper 2. He is living out his last days, looking proudly at the fruit of his labour.
Kindness is a central theme in Citizen Sleeper. Not the empty platitudes, but the praxis. Throughout your journey, you aid refugee camps, you help workers unionize, and you hack away the hold of corporations over your system. All of those actions, at their core, come from a place of solidarity. If you can dedicate your suffering to make life better for others, then maybe that suffering is a burden worth carrying.
Nowhere is this more obvious than with the lead character you play as, the titular Sleeper. A Sleeper is a human mind implanted into a robotic body by a corporation. They are slaves, built to work in extreme environments that human workers cannot. In order to assure their obedience, they are built with planned obsolescence: without constant doses of Stabilizer drugs, their bodies decay and they eventually die. The formula for the drug is, of course, only produced by the corporation that created them.
Your character choice in the game amounts to what you were originally built to do. Were you made to Engineer, hack or do manual labour? You are not treated as a human being, despite having the mind of one.
In both games, you play as an escaped Sleeper. You are the lowest class of citizen, if you can even be called a citizen. You owe the world absolutely nothing, and need to work hard and get continuously more creative to get access to Stabilizer (in the first game) and escape your owner who is now hunting you across the galaxy (in the second). The people around you look at you like an inferior being, or at the very least, don’t understand you. And yet, the Sleeper chooses to use their limited energy and time that could be dedicated to securing their safety to fostering relationships. They help, they are kind, and they put themselves even further in the face of danger for their friends. Even though their body is decaying, even though they feel forever trapped in a body that is not theirs, that they cannot ever truly touch and feel… the Sleeper fosters the humanity within themselves.
To me, the Sleeper is human. Not in a philosophical sense, but in that they are a metaphor for the human condition. The Sleeper is faced with something new to them after escaping: they are dying. Throughout their journey, you see them grapple with the idea of nonexistence. And so they’re faced with a choice: what do we do when we know our time is short? The Sleeper chooses to live a full life. They defy their circumstances by learning to live with their new body despite it being a twisted creation of corporate inhumanity. By helping others despite being seen as a machine. By loving even if it is irrational for them to do so. And, like Sol, when the time comes and their body falls apart… there isn’t anything they’d do differently. And they are thus more immortal through the countless lives they have changed, people who will grieve them deeply, than through their fleshless body.
This is the way of Citizen Sleeper. Reality is cold, but the warmth of your connections melts through its seemingly inescapable oppression. It’s a story of love budding in the most desolate of environments through sheer perseverance. Citizen Sleeper holds this as the most self-evident of truths: in a universe so cruel, there is no greater act of rebellion than to love one another.
You can play Citizen Sleeper and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector on PC, Switch, Xbox and Playstation. As of writing this, the first game is free for PlayStation Plus members.