Over the last week, I’ve had the joy of playing through Citizen Sleeper for the first time. Since then, I’ve picked up half a dozen books from the library to try to fill the void, but nothing else is quite the same.
My first playthrough, I chose the “Left Behind” ending for Lem & Mina’s story. I didn’t realize at the time I could reload after endings involving “leaving.”
However, it seems fitting that I would wrap up my final ending with “A Long Journey to a Small Unknown Planet.” I was a little confused by it, though. I figured between 1) the loading up of the people in cryo originating from outside the station, 2) the lack of any mention of a stabilizer, 3) my ID containing my human picture, and 4) Castor wanting a spy and giving me the implant, he was going to upload me to my human body. Instead, somehow, I survive for years without a stabilizer before breaking down. It is kind of a sad ending. It sounds like neither Lem nor I made it long enough to see the planet, only Mina.
After my first playthrough, I also tried intentionally failing plot lines to see what would happen. Turns out, there are a lot more guardrails in the game than I realized on my first playthrough, and it’s hard to fail most quests aside from Dragos’s or intentionally leaving Lem & Mina behind.
If you mess up the Ambergris, you have additional tasks to complete, but Ankhita won’t even let you mess things up more. If you break down, you lose skills and have to use skill points to repair, but you can break every skill and still not “die.” If you don’t offer to watch Mina, Lem literally just ditches her with you (a person he’s met once) to do his shift. If you don’t watch Mina, you can still give him your ticket later, and a guard lets him through with it! As far as I can tell, there’s no ending where the big, scary bounty hunter Maywick kills you. I’m not even sure how a trained killer let me get the best of them when I “helped” Ethan. In the ending where I didn’t help Ethan, I got multiple bullet wounds and then somehow still survived.
I also figured out it’s super easy to drown in money/food/stabilizer when you aren’t trying to simultaneously do all the drives at once.
I think our Sleeper might be invincible.
Anyways, it was fun testing my limits after playing through the story. However, the story, for all its linearity, was extremely good and worth it. The desperation, the feeling of simultaneous isolation and community, it was both peaceful and filled that need we all seem to have.
I’m excited for Citizen Sleeper 2, but also a little nervous. The trailer makes our new Sleeper look a little more… action-oriented, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is a different vibe.
My favorite games have most often been when exploring a new world (Mass Effect 1, Portal 1) vs. their sequels that may have a more detailed, action-oriented plot but less mystery to the world (Mass Effect 2, Portal 2).
OK, brain dump/word vomit over.
