Some spoilers for Citizen Sleeper and Cyberpunk 2077 below.
Citizen Sleeper is a game I thought I loved. Liked? I still know that, but for a while since I played it in 2023, it stood as an example of great harmony between gameplay and thematic intent. It’s funny, how stuff lives up in your head, huh? I replayed it this week on my Switch while visiting my parents for a few days, just hanging out with the family dogs on the couch while I explored the structure of the Eye. If I had to sum up the game, I’d call it a “space disability simulator”- you’re an artificial clone of another’s consciousness, imprinted into a metal body and sent off to work until you collapse for the purposes of a corporation.
You escape, but the corporation builds a failsafe into all of their ‘sleepers’ - The need for a proprietary stabilizer, a substance that prevents the artificial bodies from decaying. Effectively, you are a disabled person reliant on corporate healthcare in order to keep your body functioning. The game docks the ability to perform tasks from you if you neglect your stabilizer doses, furthering the feeling of pressure- you have to source stabilizer, usually at an exorbitant price, and ration it (until later on in the game). Combined with a dice system that means you have limited chances a day to perform activities, with those chances being random based on the dice you receive, the feeling is of an ever spiralling death loop. You have to do jobs with dwindling resources in order to keep yourself alive in order to perform more jobs.
This is what I remember of Citizen Sleeper, the stress of the unknown, feeling like the world is against you- but, in fact, thriving. To me the fantasy of Citizen Sleeper, outside of its sci-fi world and cyberpunk trappings, is that disability can be fully overcome, and accepted in a community. You build bonds in Citizen Sleeper, forming connections and helping people, and in turn, they help you- making yourself a life in this world, a sort of virtual home.
I wish I could remember more of the words though.
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Cyberpunk 2077 is a game I thought I hated. Still feel uneven about it in places? Sure, but after finally giving it a full shot in May of this year, I fell in love with it and its world. Night City is one of the most effectively realized locations in a game I’ve played, the feeling of driving out around its streets, seeing the monolithic downtown give way to sprawl and slums, and then into full outlying wastes and badlands, it’s immersive and man I hate to use that word so you know I feel strongly about it.
Its characters are great too, a cast of defined personalities, some being tropes and others being more fleshed out, but all memorable. Keanu Reeves gives a great performance as Johnny Silverhand, a guy I really hate (in a good way, mind you- he was written to be a vain asshole), Vik, Misty, fucking Jackie- god Jackie. He’s one of the best written side characters in a game that I’ve played and he’s only there for less than a third of the game.The side-quest where you find something in his garage to put on his ofrenda, talking with his girlfriend Misty about the things you and your character never got to know about him as a partner in crime- it’s great.
I can talk about so many of the main and secondary characters in Cyberpunk, from Panam and the Nomad clan that I got to help me raid Arasaka Tower in the final missions of the game, to Judy, my character’s eventual girlfriend, who I tried to help unionize a club of sex workers and who showed me a part of the world’s history that neither of us (V and I) knew - the cost of “progress” and the lost homes that Night City had consumed.
The thing is, in an inverse of Citizen Sleeper, I can’t remember the gameplay much outside of the moments of self-directed immersion. Cyberpunk 2077, at least the version of the game (Update 2.2) I played, is a standard shoot/loop/quest loop. I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling while I played these parts, doing random “gigs” or poking my nose around in abandoned alleyways, none of it stands out. What does is the character writing, the quiet moments, the parts of the games where it stops trying to perform as an action shooter and instead tries to invite me into the world of the characters that I genuinely adore.
In Citizen Sleeper, the Eye (the space station where the game takes place), is hostile at first. You pay to unlock new areas, gated off by security or by guards looking to extort you for easy cash. As you play the game though, the world becomes more known, each section of the space filling out with repeatable activities that give you cash, resources, both, or function as a median in-between in order to facilitate the acquisition of said resources. The game tames itself, the pressure of the early game giving way to a sort of comfort in the routine. Even if I don’t remember the stories of the characters, I remember the loop that took me across their paths- but it’s hard not to view it as mechanical design more than anything else. In Cyberpunk 2077, on the other hand, Night City is mechanically unlocked from the get-go, positioning itself as a playground where you can explore and shoot and loop such activities. The only real locked off space is Dogtown, which is a DLC area locked off to the game’s only expansion, Phantom Liberty. Where the hostility comes in is in the narrative– everyone in Night City hates it, the city itself is a brutal machine destroying and consuming everyone who dares enter it and doesn’t try and escape.
Within the world of Citizen Sleeper, you have the option to escape the Eye, whether it’s from leaving on a work crew, a private ship, or by fading into the hive-mind of AI and code that now embodies a section of the ship. The game though gives you the option to stay, to allow yourself to stay within the loop and routine that the game creates for you. There’s also bonus story content, added for no cost, if you want to play that. The game positions almost each option as valid, the only ones that, to me, don’t seem valid are the ones in which you hurt a father and daughter by denying them a spot on a colony ship (and potentially taking it for yourself).
On the other hand, Cyberpunk’s endings feel purpose built to deny you a sense of closure if you don’t escape. Out of the base game’s endings in which you stay within your body, decaying as it is, you end up as a corporate lab-rat or as someone stuck in the way of the street-samurai, a hired gun. One ending has Johnny Silverhand, now in control of the body that was once yours, leave Night City, but after everything I’d be damned if I gave him anything.
The ending I gave myself and V was one of escape- leaving with the Aldecaldos nomad clan, taking Judy with me (an option for Fem V if you romance her). Night City was a hellscape, the game’s text said so, and the idea of being a “Night CIty legend” didn’t seem at all realistic after seeing what happened to Johnny, to Jackie, to so many others who died along on the path to glory.
Citizen Sleeper is a game about escaping the cycles of capitalism through self-determination, escaping through community and bonds, giving you an option to persist and survive.
2077? It says that the only way to escape is to move on. Which is funny, for a game enamored with the cyberpunk media of the 80’s and 90’s. That rings truer though. We find ourselves in systems of control and coercion that crush and dismantle all around us.
The path forward is in the middle, I think. Escaping the nostalgia of the past, and forging ourselves into a stronger chain of human connection towards the future. All we can do is keep on.
You can follow me on Bluesky or put a little in my tip-jar at Ko-Fi. Thanks for reading!
Its characters are great too, a cast of defined personalities, some being tropes and others being more fleshed out, but all memorable. Keanu Reeves gives a great performance as Johnny Silverhand, a guy I really hate (in a good way, mind you- he was written to be a vain asshole), Vik, Misty, fucking Jackie- god Jackie. He’s one of the best written side characters in a game that I’ve played and he’s only there for less than a third of the game.The side-quest where you find something in his garage to put on his ofrenda, talking with his girlfriend Misty about the things you and your character never got to know about him as a partner in crime- it’s great.
I can talk about so many of the main and secondary characters in Cyberpunk, from Panam and the Nomad clan that I got to help me raid Arasaka Tower in the final missions of the game, to Judy, my character’s eventual girlfriend, who I tried to help unionize a club of sex workers and who showed me a part of the world’s history that neither of us (V and I) knew - the cost of “progress” and the lost homes that Night City had consumed.
The thing is, in an inverse of Citizen Sleeper, I can’t remember the gameplay much outside of the moments of self-directed immersion. Cyberpunk 2077, at least the version of the game (Update 2.2) I played, is a standard shoot/loop/quest loop. I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling while I played these parts, doing random “gigs” or poking my nose around in abandoned alleyways, none of it stands out. What does is the character writing, the quiet moments, the parts of the games where it stops trying to perform as an action shooter and instead tries to invite me into the world of the characters that I genuinely adore.
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In a way, Citizen Sleeper and Cyberpunk 2077 are both about sprawl. “Cyberpunk” as a genre is intrinsically focused on cities and urban areas, the sensation of a city as a living breathing thing codified in the pages of books like William Gibson's Neuromancer.In Citizen Sleeper, the Eye (the space station where the game takes place), is hostile at first. You pay to unlock new areas, gated off by security or by guards looking to extort you for easy cash. As you play the game though, the world becomes more known, each section of the space filling out with repeatable activities that give you cash, resources, both, or function as a median in-between in order to facilitate the acquisition of said resources. The game tames itself, the pressure of the early game giving way to a sort of comfort in the routine. Even if I don’t remember the stories of the characters, I remember the loop that took me across their paths- but it’s hard not to view it as mechanical design more than anything else. In Cyberpunk 2077, on the other hand, Night City is mechanically unlocked from the get-go, positioning itself as a playground where you can explore and shoot and loop such activities. The only real locked off space is Dogtown, which is a DLC area locked off to the game’s only expansion, Phantom Liberty. Where the hostility comes in is in the narrative– everyone in Night City hates it, the city itself is a brutal machine destroying and consuming everyone who dares enter it and doesn’t try and escape.
---
Both games talk about escape—escape from the dystopias that they tell their stories in.Within the world of Citizen Sleeper, you have the option to escape the Eye, whether it’s from leaving on a work crew, a private ship, or by fading into the hive-mind of AI and code that now embodies a section of the ship. The game though gives you the option to stay, to allow yourself to stay within the loop and routine that the game creates for you. There’s also bonus story content, added for no cost, if you want to play that. The game positions almost each option as valid, the only ones that, to me, don’t seem valid are the ones in which you hurt a father and daughter by denying them a spot on a colony ship (and potentially taking it for yourself).
On the other hand, Cyberpunk’s endings feel purpose built to deny you a sense of closure if you don’t escape. Out of the base game’s endings in which you stay within your body, decaying as it is, you end up as a corporate lab-rat or as someone stuck in the way of the street-samurai, a hired gun. One ending has Johnny Silverhand, now in control of the body that was once yours, leave Night City, but after everything I’d be damned if I gave him anything.
The ending I gave myself and V was one of escape- leaving with the Aldecaldos nomad clan, taking Judy with me (an option for Fem V if you romance her). Night City was a hellscape, the game’s text said so, and the idea of being a “Night CIty legend” didn’t seem at all realistic after seeing what happened to Johnny, to Jackie, to so many others who died along on the path to glory.
Citizen Sleeper is a game about escaping the cycles of capitalism through self-determination, escaping through community and bonds, giving you an option to persist and survive.
2077? It says that the only way to escape is to move on. Which is funny, for a game enamored with the cyberpunk media of the 80’s and 90’s. That rings truer though. We find ourselves in systems of control and coercion that crush and dismantle all around us.
The path forward is in the middle, I think. Escaping the nostalgia of the past, and forging ourselves into a stronger chain of human connection towards the future. All we can do is keep on.
You can follow me on Bluesky or put a little in my tip-jar at Ko-Fi. Thanks for reading!
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