It’s always a pain to finish a game during the Backlog Burner event and to know that your backlog has not in fact shrunk one bit, because earlier this year Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector released, and immediately after finishing the first one I went to Steam and bought it. I’m about to be a bit harsh on Citizen Sleeper in this review, and what I want to be clear about right up front is that I think this game, a management sim-meets-Disco Elyisum style RPG, where you explore a space station and try to build a life there, is very good. The worst that can be said about it is that it’s derivative and poorly paced and painfully light – and I will be saying all that. But I don’t want the strengths of this game to get lost in the shuffle, so let’s start with those.

Citizen Sleeper is, mechanically, very more-ish. Fundamentally, the game plays like this: at the start of the day, you roll a pool of one to five six sided dice, depending on your current health. You then spend those dice around the halo-shaped space station megastructure The Eye, doing odd jobs or progressing questlines or hacking – choosing which tasks should get the high rolls, and which ones should get the low rolls. By completing jobs, you unlock conversation scenes that will progress one of several sidestories and provide roleplaying opportunities. Often, key jobs and quests will come with a time limit, giving you only a set number of days to complete them, or forcing you to wait a set number of days to progress them. Each day is short, lasting only a few minutes – I completed the game in ninety in-game days and nine real-world hours – and you’ll often have multiple irons on the fire, multiple timers running. My thoguht process often went something like, "well, in three days, the ship dealing scrap will arrive, so I can craft a shipmind for X quest, but in four days, I have to pay this guy’s bar tab, so I should do some jobs in the meantime, and in this job, I have to decide whether to spend my dice on actually doing work, or on searching for clues about the underlying mystery before I get fired."

And at the end of the day, you think, well, it’s just a couple more days until Y happens, so I should keep playing until then, and it’s always just a couple more days to get something big done, with multiple overlapping timers, so the game is very difficult to put down. I played Citizen Sleeper in almost a single sitting, only breaking to eat and to clean the bathroom, and I didn’t even intend to – you know, nine hour game – but the mechanics were so propulsive that I just couldn’t stop. It helps that the story is pretty well-written, too. On The Eye you meet a diverse, colorful cast of characters belonging to a homogeneously grimy group of factions: corporations, gangs, corrupt unions. And the writing isn’t unusually beautiful, the dialogue isn’t unusually believable, but it isn’t trying to be. This is a competently written game that knows exactly what it is; that is at its best when telling stories about a cast that’s like, thirty percent male, thirty percent female, and thirty percent NB, where politics serve as an ever present subtext, where there are no easy choices or everybody wins scenarios. Which is most of the time. It’s a pity, then, that I’ve read this story before.

Citizen Sleeper has an achievement called A LONG JOURNEY TO A SMALL UNKNOWN PLANET. This is a reference to Becky Chambers’s novel The Long Way to A Small, Angry Planet, and, alongside Disco Elysium, that book is clearly Citizen Sleeper’s biggest reference point. If you’ve read Chambers’s novels, you’ll immediately recognize in Citizen Sleeper both direct references and an extremely strong tonal and structural resemblance. Circumstantially, both stories seem rather bleak, but by focusing on relatively hopeful and empathetic stories of community and solidarity, both spacefaring something-punk worlds ultimately feel quite cozy and, in low moments, even a little weightless. Both stories largely lack a main plot, instead taking on an episodic narrative structure comprised of largely disconnected character-driven stories. In Citizen Sleeper, you play as a robot consciousness with no legal rights; the way that story is handled will strongly remind you of The Long Way’s sequels. In some respects, Citizen Sleeper actually surpasses Chambers’s book. Because its episodes progress on these overlapping timers, they feel muddled together, creating a greater sense of a more textured, cohesive world, where all the characters are living their lives in parallel, so that even if their paths don't really cross, at least they're not arbitrarily disappearing from the narrative whenever an episode doesn't need them. But in most ways, Citizen Sleeper is worse than the novel that so clearly inspired it, with weaker prose and dialogue, and much worse pacing, especially towards the end (unfortunately, the game overstays its welcome). What’s really missing here, I think, is intertextuality. Citizen Sleeper owes a great debt to the Chambers's Wayfarers series and to Disco Elysium, but it also fails to really say or do much of anything that they haven’t. It doesn’t challenge them, or disagree with them, or add to the conversation those texts are having, except to say, “mhm, definitely!” Its politics are obvious if you’ve ever played, like, the modal indie game before. Its writing is much better than the average game, but weaker than the average novel. It entirely lacks a main plot, meaning that this is a game that’s basically only side-stories, a serious flaw when even Disco had its murder investigation and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet had its titular journey. The game really feels like a freshman effort, the bright-eyed attempt of a young team to emulate what they loved about their favorite art, and not going far enough to equal, much less surpass, their influences.

But what the hell, I teared up twice to the end of side quests in Citizen Sleeper. The bright-eyed young team might not do much that’s new, but they do enough that’s interesting, vulnerable, and human to make the game well worth your time. There are even a couple neat bits of commentary hidden in there. Like, with all of the different jobs you’ll be doing in a single day, the game can feel pretty gig-economy-y. In one day, I’ve tended bar for Tala, I’ve scrapped a ship for the union, and I’ve grown mushrooms for the commune. And this is actually built into the world, with a scene that depicts the difficulty characters have getting permanent work assignments, forced in the meantime have to take a ticket, wait in line, and hope their number gets called for scrapper work or whatever. There are a couple of neat ways the simple mechanics reinforce the world like that. A lot of extraneous little details that make The Eye feel more real, alive, and cohesively thought-out, with a strong sense of place. There are lots of ostensibly redundant restaurants or apartments with different meals and prices tailored for the class of the usual clientele. There are lots of different completely optional jobs, with different risks and pay rates. There’s a cat that only appears in one scene, but you can still feed it every day (in the futile hope it might one day turn up again). The Eye possesses such a strong sense of place, that it even weakened certain decisions. When two out of three main “endings” – the questlines that will roll credits; yes, you can do all three of them – involved the choice of whether to leave The Eye or set out for somewhere unknown, the choice was trivially easy for me. This place feels like home – why would my character, on the run all their life, leave it for another unknown? It’s also cool that you often have the option in dialogue to just… not say anything. I probably clicked “Stay silent” in my playthrough more than every other dialogue option combined, which allowed me to roleplay a type of character that you can’t usually get in RPGs – one I’m actually fairly similar to in real life, the more reserved, introverted type – and the writing very naturally accommodates this choice. So the game is at a baseline just well made, and it’s also not devoid of its own little charms.

Like I said, though, Citizen Sleeper really outstays its welcome. Its late game quests are easy to complete with the abundance of cash and skill points you’ll have, but have long timers between stages, meaning you’ll be spending a lot of days with not much of anything to spend your dice on and lots of time to grow tired of the game, only drawn forward by the tediously ticking timers and the nearly empty questlog. What sucks is that you know there’s no grand climax waiting for you at the end, just another (probably impactful) end to a sidequest that nevertheless won’t tie into a bigger picture or meaningfully develop a larger theme. So you’re just growing mushrooms for ingame day after day, looking forward with dread to the three post-launch endgame “episodes” that promise to be more of the same, for yet more hours.

Unfortunately, the episodes don’t make a strong early impression. By the late game, with nearly every skill unlocked, I found it trivially easy to complete all their stages, all their challenges, without ever being anywhere near a zugzwang, without ever having to think about how to spend my dice. And the writing is at its most overtly political, as you're challenged with handling a refugee crisis; here, again, Citizen Sleeper still says nothing revolutionary, and the more explicitly its characters talk about their political opinions, the less believable and the more clunky they sound. This only gets worse in the second episode when it becomes clear that the refugees in the flotilla, and the people on The Eye keeping them in stasis due to political and social anxieties, will have to join hands and work together to avert a natural disaster; an eye-rolling cliche; a painfully easy resolution to a problem that often, in the ral world, is deeply intractable and unjust. And once again, the final choice will be about whether to leave The Eye with the refugees, or stay on, with its tapestry of flawed people and flawed organizations. A choice I’ve made twice before, which will be no more interesting the third time.

I’ve been reading a couple books lately featuring leads who desperately want to go home. These are Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel Trilogy (don’t look it up, lest you think less of me), and China Mieville’s The Scar. These protagonists, Phedre and Bellis, they have experienced firsthand the cruelty and corruption of the imperial cities they grew up in, and yet, they are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get back to their homes, to protect them, not out of nationalism, but out of some aching, unnameable desire. Were I a few years younger, I wouldn’t have understood this feeling, but I think I get it now. As a kid, my family spend a lot of time – years, consecutively, always in the process of moving. When we finally settled, I was afraid that if my family found out about my identity, they would throw me away. As a young adult, I moved from the midwest to Texas back to the midwest back to Texas to a different city in Texas, uprooted by work and COVID and depression and transition. And I never felt like I had a home. Just, a lot of places I’d lived for a while. Then, three years ago, I moved with the ladies to Seattle, and suddenly, that was that. Suddenly I understood what it means to love a place so much you can never leave it. Suddenly I knew what it was like to be home.

For me, if Citizen Sleeper has an emotional core, more than the vague and predictable explorations of politics, personhood and identity it contains, it’s that story of finding a community and making a home for yourself that resonated with me along all its disconnected threads. And even if it’s frustratingly predictable and a little contrived and contains so many dropped commas that I wonder whether it was proofread, that third and final episode would, at least, be a nice bookend to the experience.

So, I settled in to play it, and was proven delightfully wrong about just about everything.

In the third and final post-launch episode to Citizen Sleeper, finally, all of the stories that you thought were finished, all the characters who never interacted and sometimes felt like they existed in separate worlds from one another finally come together to deal with the natural disaster threatening The Eye and the refugees. In a climax that feels so organic that I’d almost believe that it was planned, every major dangling thread, much of the worldbuilding, many plots that seemed totally disconnected all converge into an elegant and satisfying solution to the crisis. The cat even shows up again. And, breaking my heart, many of the citizens of The Eye, worried about whether this tenuous solution you devise will work, still say goodbye, and leave with the refugee flotilla for a new and uncertain future. If it’s a little slapdash as a climax, it still ultimately ties together all of Citizen Sleeper’s mysteries and provides a satisfying and gut wrenching goodbye to its world. And finally, the game also dares to say something a little bit new. It portrays The Eye as a society with no history, only a fledgling culture, and therefore no strong bonds between its people. They are in danger of being washed away by the tide of flux, yes, but also by the corporate structure vying for control of the system, by the internal conflicts in the station. Meanwhile the refugees retain a powerful relationship to their culture and history; are at once imprisoned and guided by it. Thus, saving the Eye and the refugees is not just about stopping the “natural disaster.” It’s about helping them shoulder the weight of their patchwork histories, and bear that weight forward into the boundless future. For the Eye, to create their own stories, their own identities, separate from the traumas that have defined them. For the refugees, to be able to move on without breaking their neck from craning it backward. Work that cannot be done in the space of the game, but hangs heavy over the ending, as I, predictably, choose to stay on The Eye and face the coming disaster with all those who remain.

For the first time in the game, the camera pans out, capturing the whole Eye in one single shot. The dialogue box promises crises, disasters, and tensions to come. Throughout the game, I’ve seen the corruption within this place and without: the people who want to bend it to their own ends; the people who hate what it represents, and want to destroy it. I’ve watched as normal, innocent people struggle against its inequalities, trying their best to find a sense of community and stability within it all the same. I’ve watched people leave, and felt sorrow at how the city will miss them, and hope that they’ll find what they’re looking for. But this place is my home. I never once thought about leaving it.

Because you can walk on walls and ceilings (and every surface, actually), the opening to this game is really confusing, disorienting, and exhausting. At the beginning, I could only play *Metro Gravity* in thirty minute bursts without getting a serious headache, and I found it impossible to build a conceptual map of the space in my head, like I usually do with Metroidvanias. But eventually, you do adjust, or I did, and the spaces started to make a lot more sense, link together more cohesively, and not make my brain leak out of my ears. That said, were it not for the fact that this is the only “M” game on my backlog, and part of the easiest Bingo on my card, I almost certainly would have DNFed just from how rough the beginning was. 

Once I adjusted though, and unlocked the grappling hook, moving around the levels was a genuine pleasure. The fact that every wall might have a door in it, but so might the ceiling and the floor, adds a level of depth to exploration that I wasn’t expecting, and the game makes good use of what I’ll call “falling puzzles” where the best way to traverse a room is to position yourself and align gravity so that it will make you fall towards your destination. These platforming challenges aren’t the only puzzles to be solved, of course. There are also electricity puzzles, laser puzzles, temperature puzzles, and block-and-button puzzles. Structurally, the game works like this: you find an area. In that area is a hub, with three or four chains or beams of light or wires leading off into nearby rooms. In each room is a puzzle or a battle; do the challenge, activate the power source or whatever, and once you’ve done all of them, the hub will open up or move aside or shine down to reveal a new area, or a boss door. This structure is, it must be said, extremely repetitive, but the areas and the puzzle mechanics are varied enough to keep things interesting, making good use of your unlocked abilities and offering a satisfying difficulty progression. The same cannot be said for the combat.

*Metro Gravity* has rhythm game combat, in a sense. It’s not that you have to attack or dodge on beat to succeed; it’s that, as I understand it, your inputs are kind of buffered and the moves don’t come out until the next beat in the music, so ultimately you’re sort of forced to be attacking and defending in rhythm with the enemy. Unfortunately, most enemies are just big health pools with one or two clearly telegraphed attacks that demand either a parry, dodge or jump in response; most enemies in the game, aside from bosses, feel more or less the same to fight, and it gets old by the end, so that’s a shame. The real standouts of the combat are those boss fights: there are five of them, by my count, and they’re all fantastic set pieces – really challenging attack sequences, set to great music, with the boss dragging you through several different locations, each one playing host to a new phase with a new attack pattern. These boss fights do a really good job of conveying the boss’s character – what they did that made them need to come to this virtual therapy world – without saying a word. It’s a bit unfortunate, though, that the boss fights are true rhythm game sequences; your attacks literally do nothing to them, except to increase your score and combo – until the song ends, whereupon the boss becomes a flaccid punching bag for you to finish off. It would, perhaps, be too much to ask for these fights to be actual fights, to have the music hold and loop until you did enough damage to progress to the next phase. That change would probably make the music much harder to compose, and make the boss fights feel less like a dance. But there’s a bit of a sense of a lack of agency with the boss fights that I wish the game did more to alleviate. The later boss fights do get a bit better by allowing you to, say, climb a snake in a big platforming section to continue the battle, which is what I’m looking for, but it’s still not quite enough.

It’s rare for me to actually enjoy the puzzles in a puzzle game – I usually find them either trivially easy or impossibly difficult, with no in between; it’s like, either I solve a puzzle very quickly, or I get bad tunnel vision and never solve it at all. But I actually found this game to be an exception, or maybe just I sign I’ve gotten out of that cognitive rut. There were a lot of puzzles that I kind of had to muddle through because the game doesn’t quite explain its gravity mechanics as well as it should – mainly, that when you change the gravitational direction of an object, it keeps that direction permanently, or until you change it again – but also, more than a few times where I had that satisfying “aha!” moment where the solution just clicked. It helps that this is a pretty obscure (read: underrated) game, and doesn’t really have any guides available for the tough puzzles – and at some points, believe me, I looked. So although I got stuck a couple times, and even thought about writing that I thought about quitting, I had a pretty enjoyable time pushing through and figuring things out. That said, I’m not going to fully 100% complete this game. Some of the optional puzzles make my head hurt just looking at them.

Metro Gravity is a really weird, niche game. It’s drawing on so many different influences and ideas that there are gonna be some parts of it that you dislike no matter what. In no world could the game be described as cohesive; for example, the rhythm elements and the puzzles have truly nothing to do with one another, ever. But it also feels very singular, polished, and well executed. This feels like a game that one guy really wanted to make, and even if not every part of it clicked for me, I still ultimately had a ton of fun. I mean, there’s great music, there’s a cat enemy that fucks with you by forcibly switching your gravity, there’s a grappling hook. What more needs to be said?