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I'm not exaggerating: your UA-cam channel is a direct inspiration for my return to this one. We left the channel for a while. You can see vids that go back six years, then a year of output, then a a stretch of nothing. I discovered your channel a couple years ago. Your videos-alongside a few others like ones from Jacob Geller and Noah Caldwell-Gervais-made me consider there's a place online for my particular sense of dorky affection. Your vids are a left-right hemisphere scientific-poetic coil that winds around philosophy without suffocating its human core. You trick viewers into learning amidst their feelings. I love it! Thank you for stopping by and giving our small channel a chance. The fact that you appreciate this vid and even chose to let us know-Thank you for being so kind!
@@ToGamesItMayConcern Ohhhhhhhhhh, that's ever so lovely of you to say, thank you. Right back at you - massively enjoyed your stuff, especially the Trek to Yomi video, was such an interesting take on power. Will be looking forward to whatever you make next and thanks again :)
@@colored_printers664 I hadn't. I'll look it up. I'll keep my comment up, because it is a fact that his work influenced my own, and I'll keep your comment up, so people can make informed decisions about what they choose to watch.
The story with the hunter was different in my case. I managed to completely avoid that interaction all together. If you get Feng to remove your tracker, the one thing keeping the hunter tied to you, He just leaves, and you never encounter him nor the other hunter ever again.
I absolutely understood why it was a game. It is a story told through writing, but through just writing or comics or any medijm you cannot immerse yourself in daily life so easily as a game. Nor can you feel the pressure of a deadline in the same way, or the feeling that *you* helped someone. I absolutely love the game from the gameplay to the god damn incredible soundtrack, and in my eyes its the most immersive and interedting experience of putting yourself in a new life, beyond any other roleplay game. The video was a wonderful look at how the sleeper is a blank slate and thats something i really like about it, but i also see a lot in the game about how the eye is a blank slate for you, the player. To me its about making your mark in a community youve arrived in, establishing your own character. Anyway lovely game and lovely video👍👍
Thank you for this comment. You make an excellent point: the player experiences what is described; it is not merely the description of a far-off character's experiences. That is significant. It's been a while since we made this video. I find myself growing more and more fond of the game over time.
@@ToGamesItMayConcern any time lol, also yeah it just keeps bringing up interesting ideas to me, plus its why the new free dlc updates are working nicely, its just another story in the world and it doesnt take away from the day to day feel of it.
Absolutely, even if I’m just presented with a text box and two choices the fact that *I* was the one who progressed to that point and did that thing makes it feel like my story, much more than any simple book can do. Video games have a level of interactive storytelling that books and movies can never achieve. And Citizen Sleeper is an S-class example of the possibilities of the medium for storytelling.
I love this game and the writing is absolutely amazing also I find the video quite interesting and one of the more unique and cool reviews of this game though only one thing I think it would be amazing to include music in the game in your video.
Appreciate the angle you took for this review. I think I will pick up this title, as I found myself unexpectedly compelled by Disco Elysium and its heavy exploration of various characters and narrative focus. Seems like a slow burn, but one that may be worth investing in if the character writing is anything like Disco Elysium and sufficient to offset the potentially mundane and repetitive aspects of the actual gameplay.
The sense of place and of characters whose lives are their own main story is richly available in this game much like in Disco Elysium. It doesn't quite hit the same stylistic consistency of Disco, but I hope you get much out of it nonetheless. I also recommend Pentiment for that same literary bent.
*Before I comment on the gameplay, some thoughts on the story:* I’m a bit overly cynical when it comes to this game. I feel that it’s vastly overrated, and that the people who heap praise onto it are too easily impressed by flowery prose with a pseudo-philosophical aesthetic. That being said, you're right, the Ethan quest-line is one of the best. You start out with a despicable guy, but you have to respect him because he's intimidating. He casually decides to extort you, and it's hard to tell if he's this confident because he's skilled and has the situation under control, or if he's just a reckless fool who's f**king around on the job. Either way, it's more pressure, as you get another deadline and a drain on your money. Seeing him in the bar, though, you realise he’s just a fool - the dynamic shifts. He still has power, but he's such a mess that it's hard to imagine him using it effectively. You start to pity him or feel superior, even though just a few cycles ago, he was the one who had you terrified for your life. It was one of the few times when I didn't truly know how to feel about a character (the others being Ankhita and Dragos’ quest-lines). The issue is that the few examples I mentioned above are the only ones. Everyone else is a "downtrodden but kind hearted" person who either befriends you immediately, or puts up a cold front for a while before befriending you immediately. They’re kind and helpful, trust you, they’re giving you important jobs left and right even though you just met... Despite the bleak atmosphere, everyone and everything feels soft, too accommodating for it to feel like a real world. There's barely any point in the story where I felt tangibly discriminated against - a few lines of dialogue about your creepy body doesn't change the fact that you have job prospects everywhere and that everybody treats you with respect, which really undermines this sense of you being an outcast. Of course, writing wise, this is somewhat necessary. Giving you a thorough look into the lives of these people requires you to be closely involved. But it creates this uncanny feeling - a player character who’s a hyper-competent generalist with no loyalties or beliefs, working for everyone, everywhere. You're a manual labourer assembling a ship with Lem, but you're also hacking Havenage with Feng while casually working for a gang and also helping the Hypha commune on the side. Despite your questionable loyalties, everyone trusts you. You can work for the Yatagan *while* selling data you stole from them to Havenage, and nobody bats an eye. I acknowledge the point you made about the Sleeper's lack of identity allowing them to fit in anywhere, but this is an incredibly temporary situation! No matter how much of a pariah you are, your actions will eventually align you with certain groups while alienating and pushing away others. You can't have it both ways, support everyone and be supported by everyone with no ideological or practical conflicts. The only people who can do that are sociopaths and master manipulators. And when everyone is likeable, you have no conflicted emotions about how you should interact with them - you always try to help as best you can. Characters like Ethan are what I wanted more of - people so different from me that it's impossible to have smooth, frictionless interactions. Choosing to help Ethan or leave him to his debt, to forgive Ankhita or hate her - those felt like the times I was truly asked to emotionally engage with the story. Everyone else is a simple matter of finding them immediately likeable and helping them with various fetch-quests. It's boring and pointless and doesn't demand any reflection. Not to mention the missed opportunity to explore ideas of transcendentalism. We’re sometimes reminded that our character’s body has some kind of interface which sends warnings for intense sensations. We know they can interact with cyberspace in an efficient, abstract way normal hackers cannot. Yet outside of the Gardener quest-line, we're never asked to question what a bodily existence like that would entail. Can we consciously boost or suppress emotions? Does it let us be more lucid? Is it possible to make modifications directly to our brain? Clone our mind? There are many interesting ways a digitised human consciousness could be explored, yet it's all ignored for what amounts to a person with a weird-feeling robot body. This isn't a real problem. It's a completely different rabbit-hole and I understand why the writer wouldn't want to dive into it (minus the Gardener ending). But it further shows that the main character isn't really an outsider, acting and thinking the same way a normal person would. *Regarding gameplay:* It's bad. Not so much in itself, but because the way it's handled, it completely undermines the story. Put simply, it’s incredibly easy. In the first few hours, there is a superficial challenge because of a few clever tricks, but as time goes on and you earn skill upgrades, you become overpowered and nothing can hurt you. The "Self Repair" perk is ridiculous and a fundamentally terrible idea. Scrap is relatively easy to acquire, so the skill lets you out-heal the decay of your body, completely negating the need for Stabilizer. No Stabilizer means you don't spend as much money, so it piles up and makes other things more affordable. This ruins a lot of the dialogue. Characters sympathised with me over my decaying body and need for Stabilizer, while for the past 20 cycles, all I did was intermittently graft bits of scrap onto myself and was in perfect Condition, 5 action dice always at hand. This isn't the only method to totally break the game's progression. Why is selling mushrooms so insanely profitable? Why does cyberspace always have tasks where you can dump your unlucky 1s and 2s for a decent payout? Why can you permanently disable Hunter, the only downside to hacking? Why does the game eventually stop throwing negative countdown timers at you, letting you approach everything at your leisure? I hate this omnipotence. It might be a controversial term these days, but it’s a classical example of "ludonarrative dissonance". The story claims that I'm a poor, blue-collar worker struggling with my health. The gameplay shows me as skilled in every discipline, wealthy, handling everyone's business and not even needing the one substance supposedly essential to my survival. Can you see how this undermines the melancholic, working-class aesthetic? My favourite early game mechanic were these two ships which periodically dock and sell their wares before departing again. It showed that the world around me doesn't care - it has its own business and it will move on without me if I don't take my chances. But this is the ONLY place with such cycles. Almost everything else waits for you to trigger it. By the end, you retroactively realise that the difficulty and tension in the first few hours were all smoke and mirrors. The bounty hunter was never a real threat (only dealing 1 or 2 points of damage), that quests were actually waiting patiently for you to earn disposable income and heal before you tackle them... *General remarks on writing style:* Finishing the game, I looked back and realised I didn't find any of it particularly memorable. Across the long-winded descriptions and dialogue exchanges, no line or detail stood out as significant or meaningful. I've long been a fan of the sci-fi novels of the Strugatsky brothers - Roadside Picnic, Monday Begins on Saturday, Space Mowgli... My best point of comparison to Sleeper is "The Final Circle of Paradise", which also depicts a futuristic society whose worst parts have been emboldened by technological progress. The difference between the Strugatskys and Gareth Damian Martin is that the former have a blunt writing style. Their characters are direct, call things by their names and make arguments in favour or against. No purple prose, flowery sentiments and vagueness - they efficiently present the dilemmas of a sci-fi future while wasting little time. Besides clarifying the story's themes, this also gives a stronger grasp on the characters. When you know their beliefs, you can contextualise their actions, tell when they're being dishonest, hypocritical, or changing their mind. The story doesn't frame anyone as obviously correct, so you're free to disagree with them. And there is something concrete to disagree with! By contrast, Sleeper's characters are operating in a nebulous context, letting you easily agree with pretty much anyone. The Yatagan presents itself as a kind of police force, keeping the peace. But they're a gang, how do you know they're not abusing their power or doing anything morally questionable? You don't. The game never mentions it, never dives into details. Things are left vague enough that you're never confronted with something that might alienate and prevent you from sympathising. Note that the only major faction you're not given a quest-line with is Havenage, because maybe players would be too uncomfortable working under the same roof as Hardin. Speaking of which, the corporate bad guy. Here, Gareth swings way too hard the opposite direction - making the writing so blunt and void of subtlety that it’s downright condescending. Hardin is a blatantly corrupt prick, with game's narration *explicitly explaining* why his beliefs are wrong, even when his dialogue was already making him as unlikable as possible (you're not even given a chance to pity him, like Ethan). All this for a cliched "rebel against the corrupt establishment" story. I'm not against having obviously evil and irredeemable characters, but bloody ‘ell, if you're going to do it, don't use narration to beat the audience over the head with it! We get it! *TL;DR:* The whole package is just kinda mediocre, unfortunately. I love Singelin's art (that's why I bought the game) but I wish he had teamed up with a better writer.
*Update:* A new balance patch has upped the cost of level 2 upgrades to 3 skill points, nerfed Self Repair and made scrap harder to acquire, rendering a lot of my gripes with the gameplay obsolete. I still stand by my criticisms of the writing, however.
@@nmlss-r9 Yeah, I actually replayed the game a few months ago and it's still super easy (I didn't edit my comment because I was so tired of talking about it that I couldn't be bothered). It turns out that it's not level 2 upgrades that cost 3 skill points, it's level 3 upgrades (the +2 modifiers). So you can still get all the overpowered perks for relatively cheap. Self-repair isn't as game-breaking, but with more playtime, I noticed that Instant Karma is also completely overpowered. It could have been a neat risk-reward mechanic where you can re-roll your entire hand at the start of each cycle - still useful, but requires some thinking. Instead, you can use your good dice and then re-roll the rest, so it's just a straight upgrade in every way. But the biggest revelation for me was that suffering a complete Breakdown is not a game-over! It just sends you back to half-health and cripples one of your stats. Then, you can just spend a skill point to "fix" the broken stat and bring it back to its former level. I got a full Breakdown twice during this second playthrough (so 2 skill points permanently spent), and still finished the game with +1 in every skill and all the busted perks unlocked. Clearly, the game just has layers upon layers of safety nets so that even a computer-illiterate grandma can finish it and see all the endings. With this design philosophy, the game is kinda inadvertently implying that struggling with poverty, chronic illness and "having no rights" (yes, that's a direct quote from the game) is actually perfectly manageable! You just need to work hard and sell mushrooms, like a good capitalist entrepreneur! What a self-contradictory mess. Oh, and since you said you "can't imagine how it was before", I thought I'd throw this in: the game launched with tons of typos, missing punctuation and grammatical errors (if you look at some early let's-plays recorded on launch, you can still see these)! Yes, this "story focused" game which largely centers on dialogue didn't have a (or had a very incompetent) tester / proofreader look at it and check for mistakes. These have been patched after release, obviously, but it's hilarious that the game launched with such a blatant lack of polish.
@@Halucygeno I mean don't take me wrong, is still one of my favorite games of the year but it could have been a masterpiece if the ludonarrative dissonance was fixed and the characters had depth. It sounds like a lot but I honestly don't think it was that far away from this game. Going back to the criticism tho, the self repair thing is wild, no wonder in one of the endings you can survive decades without medicine without problem.
@@Halucygeno The late game is easy but that's clearly an intentional choice. The mechanics succeed in giving you some of the flavor of struggling, at least initially. The game makes you think it's harder than it is by being stingy with resources and subjecting you to anxiety producing timers. But it doesn't actually punish you much for failing. Most games are trying to trick you. The thing is that it's A GAME. The enemies might feel terrible but they're there to be beaten. The monsters are meant to be slain. Few games are nearly as hard as they present themselves being. I don't know how fun a game reproducing the brutal and dehumanizing grind of capitalism would actually be. Your criticism for it not being that game strikes me as a tad harsh and unfair. Imho the mechanics create the atmosphere of insecurity and vulnerability, which is all they are meant to do. As the game goes on the resource scarcity eases but I just take that as part of the progression as your character becomes more established. I don't think this means that poverty and deprivation are easy. To me the central theme of this game is solidarity among the oppressed and marginalized. It could very well be the brutal, hobbesian struggle the mechanics suggest if it weren't for the kindness and compassion the Eye's residents show to the player character. The Eye isn't just a postcorporate wasteland, it's also a community. People are always trying to lend you a helping hand. You are all the waste, the castoffs sitting on the scrap heap. You, in turn, are given the opportunity to help others. Generosity and mutual aid. Mutual recognition of our common, slightly soiled humanity. It's an optimistic game, surprisingly soft and tender. Do I agree that some more hard edged, noir tones would help those tender moments stand out more? Yes. But it's not "a mess".
@@StephenYuan I mean, if all the punctuation errors and typos on launch were intentional, then I guess it's not a mess. And if the game was always meant to be incredibly easy, fair enough. But then why patch it to make it harder? To me, all the nerfs suggest that the dev WANTED the game to be harder - and if that's the case, they failed. The game was so incredibly easy, that the patch barely did anything. You bring up that it's A GAME, but the following are also games: "Papers, Please", "Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor" and "Pathologic". Those three instantly come to mind as ones that in some way focus on being working class, empoverished or living through a crisis, and they use difficulty and/or confusion and/or time pressure to grear effect. And Pathologic manages to do this while also having a large cast of characters with opposing goals and agendas that you have to meditate between, unlike Citizen Sleeper's barely-descript factions. So no, the argument that "it's a game, so it has to create the illusion of challange while remaining fun" doesn't hold up when there are plenty of games that eschew conventional design when it doesn't suit the story they're trying to tell. It just takes guts and artistic integrity to alienate some of your players with mechanics they might find unintuitive or "unfair". And just like surviving with a terminal illness and no human rights should really be more of a challenge, achieving class solidarity also should be. People have differences of opinion, sometimes fundamental disagreements about moral values. Resources aren't always abundant (especially in a cyberpunk dystopia), and cannot always be shared. You need to negotiate and compromise, sometimes you have to pick sides. But no - just like its approach to poverty through typical game progression is very reductive and inaccurate, its approach to politics through "let's all be nice to each other and hold hands to achieve class solidarity" writing is also reductive and inaccurate. And hey, if you just want to make something fun where the power of friendship saves the day, that's great! You can write a fantasy action story like Steven Universe or something. But when your game starts tossing around ideas of poverty, organized crime, megacorporations, workers' rights and communism, then you're no longer just making a fun action flick, you're writing political commentary. And at that point, it's up to you if you care enough to make that commentary accurate and nuanced, or if you'd rather make simplistic propaganda. I'm not inherently against optimism. I just believe that optimism has to account for and overcome life's many problems, rather than pretend they don't exist or are magically easy to solve. That's not optimism, that's delusion.
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The game is a masterpiece and this was too
I'm not exaggerating: your UA-cam channel is a direct inspiration for my return to this one.
We left the channel for a while. You can see vids that go back six years, then a year of output, then a a stretch of nothing. I discovered your channel a couple years ago. Your videos-alongside a few others like ones from Jacob Geller and Noah Caldwell-Gervais-made me consider there's a place online for my particular sense of dorky affection.
Your vids are a left-right hemisphere scientific-poetic coil that winds around philosophy without suffocating its human core. You trick viewers into learning amidst their feelings. I love it!
Thank you for stopping by and giving our small channel a chance. The fact that you appreciate this vid and even chose to let us know-Thank you for being so kind!
@@ToGamesItMayConcern Ohhhhhhhhhh, that's ever so lovely of you to say, thank you. Right back at you - massively enjoyed your stuff, especially the Trek to Yomi video, was such an interesting take on power. Will be looking forward to whatever you make next and thanks again :)
@@ToGamesItMayConcern Don't you know of this guy's allegations? Sounds like it's about time, then
@@colored_printers664 I hadn't. I'll look it up.
I'll keep my comment up, because it is a fact that his work influenced my own, and I'll keep your comment up, so people can make informed decisions about what they choose to watch.
@@ToGamesItMayConcern Sounds reasonable. Have a good one then
The story with the hunter was different in my case.
I managed to completely avoid that interaction all together.
If you get Feng to remove your tracker, the one thing keeping the hunter tied to you, He just leaves, and you never encounter him nor the other hunter ever again.
So great how much players' experiences deviate from each other. A personalized story.
I absolutely understood why it was a game. It is a story told through writing, but through just writing or comics or any medijm you cannot immerse yourself in daily life so easily as a game. Nor can you feel the pressure of a deadline in the same way, or the feeling that *you* helped someone. I absolutely love the game from the gameplay to the god damn incredible soundtrack, and in my eyes its the most immersive and interedting experience of putting yourself in a new life, beyond any other roleplay game. The video was a wonderful look at how the sleeper is a blank slate and thats something i really like about it, but i also see a lot in the game about how the eye is a blank slate for you, the player. To me its about making your mark in a community youve arrived in, establishing your own character. Anyway lovely game and lovely video👍👍
Thank you for this comment. You make an excellent point: the player experiences what is described; it is not merely the description of a far-off character's experiences. That is significant. It's been a while since we made this video. I find myself growing more and more fond of the game over time.
@@ToGamesItMayConcern any time lol, also yeah it just keeps bringing up interesting ideas to me, plus its why the new free dlc updates are working nicely, its just another story in the world and it doesnt take away from the day to day feel of it.
Absolutely, even if I’m just presented with a text box and two choices the fact that *I* was the one who progressed to that point and did that thing makes it feel like my story, much more than any simple book can do. Video games have a level of interactive storytelling that books and movies can never achieve. And Citizen Sleeper is an S-class example of the possibilities of the medium for storytelling.
Fantastic video, love the podcast yet curated feel of a dude talking over a radio. Excellent content!
Thank you very much!
Citizen Sleeper 2 pls 😭
Trailer for Citizen Sleeper 2 just dropped :)
I love this game, good video on it :")
I love this game and the writing is absolutely amazing also I find the video quite interesting and one of the more unique and cool reviews of this game though only one thing I think it would be amazing to include music in the game in your video.
We actually have music from the game's soundtrack playing in the background throughout the video, though the volume might be too low.
@@ToGamesItMayConcern Oh then thats my bad.
Very intriguing game for sure. Great video btw.
Appreciate the angle you took for this review. I think I will pick up this title, as I found myself unexpectedly compelled by Disco Elysium and its heavy exploration of various characters and narrative focus. Seems like a slow burn, but one that may be worth investing in if the character writing is anything like Disco Elysium and sufficient to offset the potentially mundane and repetitive aspects of the actual gameplay.
The sense of place and of characters whose lives are their own main story is richly available in this game much like in Disco Elysium. It doesn't quite hit the same stylistic consistency of Disco, but I hope you get much out of it nonetheless. I also recommend Pentiment for that same literary bent.
Hey I would love to see u talk about gamedec it's another text base game with a pretty cool interrogation mechanic. I think you would enjoy it.
Thank you for the recommendation! My brother and I have a long list of games to get through for this channel, but now Gamedec is one of them.
*Before I comment on the gameplay, some thoughts on the story:*
I’m a bit overly cynical when it comes to this game. I feel that it’s vastly overrated, and that the people who heap praise onto it are too easily impressed by flowery prose with a pseudo-philosophical aesthetic.
That being said, you're right, the Ethan quest-line is one of the best. You start out with a despicable guy, but you have to respect him because he's intimidating. He casually decides to extort you, and it's hard to tell if he's this confident because he's skilled and has the situation under control, or if he's just a reckless fool who's f**king around on the job. Either way, it's more pressure, as you get another deadline and a drain on your money. Seeing him in the bar, though, you realise he’s just a fool - the dynamic shifts. He still has power, but he's such a mess that it's hard to imagine him using it effectively. You start to pity him or feel superior, even though just a few cycles ago, he was the one who had you terrified for your life. It was one of the few times when I didn't truly know how to feel about a character (the others being Ankhita and Dragos’ quest-lines).
The issue is that the few examples I mentioned above are the only ones. Everyone else is a "downtrodden but kind hearted" person who either befriends you immediately, or puts up a cold front for a while before befriending you immediately. They’re kind and helpful, trust you, they’re giving you important jobs left and right even though you just met... Despite the bleak atmosphere, everyone and everything feels soft, too accommodating for it to feel like a real world. There's barely any point in the story where I felt tangibly discriminated against - a few lines of dialogue about your creepy body doesn't change the fact that you have job prospects everywhere and that everybody treats you with respect, which really undermines this sense of you being an outcast.
Of course, writing wise, this is somewhat necessary. Giving you a thorough look into the lives of these people requires you to be closely involved. But it creates this uncanny feeling - a player character who’s a hyper-competent generalist with no loyalties or beliefs, working for everyone, everywhere. You're a manual labourer assembling a ship with Lem, but you're also hacking Havenage with Feng while casually working for a gang and also helping the Hypha commune on the side. Despite your questionable loyalties, everyone trusts you. You can work for the Yatagan *while* selling data you stole from them to Havenage, and nobody bats an eye.
I acknowledge the point you made about the Sleeper's lack of identity allowing them to fit in anywhere, but this is an incredibly temporary situation! No matter how much of a pariah you are, your actions will eventually align you with certain groups while alienating and pushing away others. You can't have it both ways, support everyone and be supported by everyone with no ideological or practical conflicts. The only people who can do that are sociopaths and master manipulators.
And when everyone is likeable, you have no conflicted emotions about how you should interact with them - you always try to help as best you can. Characters like Ethan are what I wanted more of - people so different from me that it's impossible to have smooth, frictionless interactions. Choosing to help Ethan or leave him to his debt, to forgive Ankhita or hate her - those felt like the times I was truly asked to emotionally engage with the story. Everyone else is a simple matter of finding them immediately likeable and helping them with various fetch-quests. It's boring and pointless and doesn't demand any reflection.
Not to mention the missed opportunity to explore ideas of transcendentalism. We’re sometimes reminded that our character’s body has some kind of interface which sends warnings for intense sensations. We know they can interact with cyberspace in an efficient, abstract way normal hackers cannot. Yet outside of the Gardener quest-line, we're never asked to question what a bodily existence like that would entail. Can we consciously boost or suppress emotions? Does it let us be more lucid? Is it possible to make modifications directly to our brain? Clone our mind? There are many interesting ways a digitised human consciousness could be explored, yet it's all ignored for what amounts to a person with a weird-feeling robot body.
This isn't a real problem. It's a completely different rabbit-hole and I understand why the writer wouldn't want to dive into it (minus the Gardener ending). But it further shows that the main character isn't really an outsider, acting and thinking the same way a normal person would.
*Regarding gameplay:*
It's bad. Not so much in itself, but because the way it's handled, it completely undermines the story. Put simply, it’s incredibly easy. In the first few hours, there is a superficial challenge because of a few clever tricks, but as time goes on and you earn skill upgrades, you become overpowered and nothing can hurt you.
The "Self Repair" perk is ridiculous and a fundamentally terrible idea. Scrap is relatively easy to acquire, so the skill lets you out-heal the decay of your body, completely negating the need for Stabilizer. No Stabilizer means you don't spend as much money, so it piles up and makes other things more affordable. This ruins a lot of the dialogue. Characters sympathised with me over my decaying body and need for Stabilizer, while for the past 20 cycles, all I did was intermittently graft bits of scrap onto myself and was in perfect Condition, 5 action dice always at hand.
This isn't the only method to totally break the game's progression. Why is selling mushrooms so insanely profitable? Why does cyberspace always have tasks where you can dump your unlucky 1s and 2s for a decent payout? Why can you permanently disable Hunter, the only downside to hacking? Why does the game eventually stop throwing negative countdown timers at you, letting you approach everything at your leisure?
I hate this omnipotence. It might be a controversial term these days, but it’s a classical example of "ludonarrative dissonance". The story claims that I'm a poor, blue-collar worker struggling with my health. The gameplay shows me as skilled in every discipline, wealthy, handling everyone's business and not even needing the one substance supposedly essential to my survival. Can you see how this undermines the melancholic, working-class aesthetic?
My favourite early game mechanic were these two ships which periodically dock and sell their wares before departing again. It showed that the world around me doesn't care - it has its own business and it will move on without me if I don't take my chances. But this is the ONLY place with such cycles. Almost everything else waits for you to trigger it. By the end, you retroactively realise that the difficulty and tension in the first few hours were all smoke and mirrors. The bounty hunter was never a real threat (only dealing 1 or 2 points of damage), that quests were actually waiting patiently for you to earn disposable income and heal before you tackle them...
*General remarks on writing style:*
Finishing the game, I looked back and realised I didn't find any of it particularly memorable. Across the long-winded descriptions and dialogue exchanges, no line or detail stood out as significant or meaningful. I've long been a fan of the sci-fi novels of the Strugatsky brothers - Roadside Picnic, Monday Begins on Saturday, Space Mowgli... My best point of comparison to Sleeper is "The Final Circle of Paradise", which also depicts a futuristic society whose worst parts have been emboldened by technological progress.
The difference between the Strugatskys and Gareth Damian Martin is that the former have a blunt writing style. Their characters are direct, call things by their names and make arguments in favour or against. No purple prose, flowery sentiments and vagueness - they efficiently present the dilemmas of a sci-fi future while wasting little time. Besides clarifying the story's themes, this also gives a stronger grasp on the characters. When you know their beliefs, you can contextualise their actions, tell when they're being dishonest, hypocritical, or changing their mind. The story doesn't frame anyone as obviously correct, so you're free to disagree with them. And there is something concrete to disagree with!
By contrast, Sleeper's characters are operating in a nebulous context, letting you easily agree with pretty much anyone. The Yatagan presents itself as a kind of police force, keeping the peace. But they're a gang, how do you know they're not abusing their power or doing anything morally questionable? You don't. The game never mentions it, never dives into details. Things are left vague enough that you're never confronted with something that might alienate and prevent you from sympathising. Note that the only major faction you're not given a quest-line with is Havenage, because maybe players would be too uncomfortable working under the same roof as Hardin.
Speaking of which, the corporate bad guy. Here, Gareth swings way too hard the opposite direction - making the writing so blunt and void of subtlety that it’s downright condescending. Hardin is a blatantly corrupt prick, with game's narration *explicitly explaining* why his beliefs are wrong, even when his dialogue was already making him as unlikable as possible (you're not even given a chance to pity him, like Ethan). All this for a cliched "rebel against the corrupt establishment" story. I'm not against having obviously evil and irredeemable characters, but bloody ‘ell, if you're going to do it, don't use narration to beat the audience over the head with it! We get it!
*TL;DR:*
The whole package is just kinda mediocre, unfortunately. I love Singelin's art (that's why I bought the game) but I wish he had teamed up with a better writer.
This is probably the longest youtube comment I ever enjoyed.
I hope you publish more game critiques.
@@val26874 Thank you! You have no idea how much this means to me.
*Update:* A new balance patch has upped the cost of level 2 upgrades to 3 skill points, nerfed Self Repair and made scrap harder to acquire, rendering a lot of my gripes with the gameplay obsolete. I still stand by my criticisms of the writing, however.
I just finished it and I gotta say the mid to end game it's still too easy. I can't imagine how it was before.
@@nmlss-r9 Yeah, I actually replayed the game a few months ago and it's still super easy (I didn't edit my comment because I was so tired of talking about it that I couldn't be bothered).
It turns out that it's not level 2 upgrades that cost 3 skill points, it's level 3 upgrades (the +2 modifiers). So you can still get all the overpowered perks for relatively cheap. Self-repair isn't as game-breaking, but with more playtime, I noticed that Instant Karma is also completely overpowered. It could have been a neat risk-reward mechanic where you can re-roll your entire hand at the start of each cycle - still useful, but requires some thinking. Instead, you can use your good dice and then re-roll the rest, so it's just a straight upgrade in every way.
But the biggest revelation for me was that suffering a complete Breakdown is not a game-over! It just sends you back to half-health and cripples one of your stats. Then, you can just spend a skill point to "fix" the broken stat and bring it back to its former level. I got a full Breakdown twice during this second playthrough (so 2 skill points permanently spent), and still finished the game with +1 in every skill and all the busted perks unlocked. Clearly, the game just has layers upon layers of safety nets so that even a computer-illiterate grandma can finish it and see all the endings.
With this design philosophy, the game is kinda inadvertently implying that struggling with poverty, chronic illness and "having no rights" (yes, that's a direct quote from the game) is actually perfectly manageable! You just need to work hard and sell mushrooms, like a good capitalist entrepreneur! What a self-contradictory mess.
Oh, and since you said you "can't imagine how it was before", I thought I'd throw this in: the game launched with tons of typos, missing punctuation and grammatical errors (if you look at some early let's-plays recorded on launch, you can still see these)! Yes, this "story focused" game which largely centers on dialogue didn't have a (or had a very incompetent) tester / proofreader look at it and check for mistakes. These have been patched after release, obviously, but it's hilarious that the game launched with such a blatant lack of polish.
@@Halucygeno I mean don't take me wrong, is still one of my favorite games of the year but it could have been a masterpiece if the ludonarrative dissonance was fixed and the characters had depth. It sounds like a lot but I honestly don't think it was that far away from this game.
Going back to the criticism tho, the self repair thing is wild, no wonder in one of the endings you can survive decades without medicine without problem.
@@Halucygeno The late game is easy but that's clearly an intentional choice. The mechanics succeed in giving you some of the flavor of struggling, at least initially. The game makes you think it's harder than it is by being stingy with resources and subjecting you to anxiety producing timers.
But it doesn't actually punish you much for failing. Most games are trying to trick you. The thing is that it's A GAME. The enemies might feel terrible but they're there to be beaten. The monsters are meant to be slain.
Few games are nearly as hard as they present themselves being.
I don't know how fun a game reproducing the brutal and dehumanizing grind of capitalism would actually be. Your criticism for it not being that game strikes me as a tad harsh and unfair.
Imho the mechanics create the atmosphere of insecurity and vulnerability, which is all they are meant to do. As the game goes on the resource scarcity eases but I just take that as part of the progression as your character becomes more established. I don't think this means that poverty and deprivation are easy.
To me the central theme of this game is solidarity among the oppressed and marginalized. It could very well be the brutal, hobbesian struggle the mechanics suggest if it weren't for the kindness and compassion the Eye's residents show to the player character. The Eye isn't just a postcorporate wasteland, it's also a community.
People are always trying to lend you a helping hand. You are all the waste, the castoffs sitting on the scrap heap. You, in turn, are given the opportunity to help others. Generosity and mutual aid. Mutual recognition of our common, slightly soiled humanity.
It's an optimistic game, surprisingly soft and tender. Do I agree that some more hard edged, noir tones would help those tender moments stand out more? Yes.
But it's not "a mess".
@@StephenYuan I mean, if all the punctuation errors and typos on launch were intentional, then I guess it's not a mess. And if the game was always meant to be incredibly easy, fair enough. But then why patch it to make it harder? To me, all the nerfs suggest that the dev WANTED the game to be harder - and if that's the case, they failed. The game was so incredibly easy, that the patch barely did anything.
You bring up that it's A GAME, but the following are also games: "Papers, Please", "Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor" and "Pathologic". Those three instantly come to mind as ones that in some way focus on being working class, empoverished or living through a crisis, and they use difficulty and/or confusion and/or time pressure to grear effect. And Pathologic manages to do this while also having a large cast of characters with opposing goals and agendas that you have to meditate between, unlike Citizen Sleeper's barely-descript factions.
So no, the argument that "it's a game, so it has to create the illusion of challange while remaining fun" doesn't hold up when there are plenty of games that eschew conventional design when it doesn't suit the story they're trying to tell. It just takes guts and artistic integrity to alienate some of your players with mechanics they might find unintuitive or "unfair".
And just like surviving with a terminal illness and no human rights should really be more of a challenge, achieving class solidarity also should be. People have differences of opinion, sometimes fundamental disagreements about moral values. Resources aren't always abundant (especially in a cyberpunk dystopia), and cannot always be shared. You need to negotiate and compromise, sometimes you have to pick sides.
But no - just like its approach to poverty through typical game progression is very reductive and inaccurate, its approach to politics through "let's all be nice to each other and hold hands to achieve class solidarity" writing is also reductive and inaccurate.
And hey, if you just want to make something fun where the power of friendship saves the day, that's great! You can write a fantasy action story like Steven Universe or something. But when your game starts tossing around ideas of poverty, organized crime, megacorporations, workers' rights and communism, then you're no longer just making a fun action flick, you're writing political commentary. And at that point, it's up to you if you care enough to make that commentary accurate and nuanced, or if you'd rather make simplistic propaganda.
I'm not inherently against optimism. I just believe that optimism has to account for and overcome life's many problems, rather than pretend they don't exist or are magically easy to solve. That's not optimism, that's delusion.
Liked the vid
I appreciate it!