Citizen Sleeper (2022)

Final free DLC came out for this recently, and it's pretty solid!

It's brief, and late game Sleepers are far too overpowered for any of the resource/dice mechanics to carry much weight any longer. But it's a nice chance to say goodbye to all your friends and enemies still hanging around the station, and offers at least one ending that felt like a better fit for my character than any of the ones in the base game.

Just started playing this. I like the game's structure and dice resource systems so far. It's impressive the way things can quickly settle into a daily rhythm, while still maintaining a sense of fragility and inevitability of time. It's a balance between repeatable actions, timers, and resources that must have been difficult to come up with. The vibes remind me of The Yawhg, but this game is working at a much larger scale.

It's just a personal preference thing, but don't think I like the prose very much. It reads a bit heavy handed sometimes.

A very narrative focused, short game where your stats are used solely for objective progression rather than also feeding into role playing as in Disco Elysium, the game this most often gets directly compared to. The stats system in this game impacts how you approach storyline progression and gives enough of a gameplay loop when paired with resource management to break up the bulk of the game which is reading as events occur. Otherwise everything is handled in menus around a map of your space station setting. The interface is serviceable but can be a bit clunky at times.

The sci-fi elements are fun, and what I enjoyed the most. I did end up wishing some of the gameplay elements were deeper, or that more storylines and characters crossed and intersected more if you completed enough objectives with each, but there's enough here that I was able to enjoy everything even if it did leave me wanting more. I'll hopefully come back to this again in the future to try a new playthrough to do some storylines I failed before and try the new free DLC content that is currently planned.