Citizen Sleeper is a sleek, cyberpunk-style video game, where you play an android with the mind of a human, who has sold their flesh-and-blood body to the corporation Essen-Arp. When you start the game, you've just escaped Essen-Arp in a stolen robot frame, transported to a spaceship colony, where you don't know anyone and have only a vague memory of who you once were. The game takes place in "cycles" in which the player rolls virtual dice to perform tasks, with each roll of the dice determining the outcome of actions like working, asking for directions, stealing, fighting, or making friends. The higher you roll, the better the odds you have at completing those tasks successfully. As you work, you earn money, which can buy you food and resources, as well as a "stabilizer" that you need to repair your robot frame, and thereby survive. The rules of the game can be seen as a critique of the cruelties of the modern economy.

Citizen Sleeper is a superb narrative adventure indie game about surviving the urban sprawl of a struggling space station. Think The Expanse meets Cart Life. The game has proven to be the toast of narrative adventure gamers for weeks now, praised as a cerebral cyberpunk revelation and a tour de force of hope from the dark margins of galactic society, positioning it as a solid contender for awards season. A deceptively simple story inspired by TTRPG mechanics and narratives, the game tells the tale of a "sleeper," an emulated human intelligence in a synthetic body that has recently escaped the Essen-Arp corporation, its legal owner. Recovered half-frozen to the hull of a derelict by a salvager, you learn how to scrape out an existence on Erlin's Eye, the space station of a bankrupt intergalactic conglomerate that has been reclaimed by its old union, an authority now known as Havenage, while being pursued by their bounty hunters.

If your brain were copied and placed in a robot body, would it have human rights? That's the thorny issue at the heart of Citizen Sleeper, a game set on a run-down space station called Erlin's Eye in the far-flung future. In this reality, AI is strictly controlled and artificial beings that achieve sentience are hunted down and destroyed, Blade Runner-style. But "emulated" humans known as sleepers offer a loophole, being neither fully artificial nor fully human. Nefarious megacorporations will pay desperate volunteers handsomely for the right to emulate their brain.