Gareth Damian Martin found a new way to tell a story in In Other Waters, presenting us with a luminous dashboard of buttons and scanners and radars to toy around with, then feeding a story through it. It was elegant, it was unusual and it worked – it made a big impression on me. Their new game Citizen Sleeper leaves a similar impression but it works rather differently.
Citizen Sleeper
- Developer: Jump Over the Age
- Publisher: Fellow Traveller
- Platform: Played on PC
- Availability: Coming to PC in spring 2022
Citizen Sleeper is a mixture of board game and role-playing game. The role-playing part is familiar: you experience a space station playing area through text, and there’s a character sheet with skills you can improve as you level up. There are some eye-catching character illustrations to decorate it, and a simply rendered space station floating in the background, but it’s mostly text and imagination that fuel the adventure.
The board game part is more complex. It’s based around dice rolls and rounds. Every round, a new set of dice is rolled. You then individually use those dice to accomplish tasks, like earning money at a scrap metal yard or exploring an area.
To do this, you use your cursor to pull a rolled-die down from the top of your screen into an activity box, then wait for the outcome. The higher the number on the die, the greater your chance of success (and character’s skills modify this), but there are neutral and negative outcomes too – and depending on how risky the task is, these can potentially sting. When you’ve used all your dice, you go to your home space on the station and sleep, starting a new round and a roll of the dice.