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.

With a set of refreshing themes unmistakably parallel to our modern lives, the story is rich with cathartic elements. I caught up with Gareth Damian Martin, the game’s creator, to dial into what’s behind its genius.

“Stories like this have always fascinated me from long before my time as a developer,” Damian Martin explains, “and even as a DM. When I first began my journey as a developer, I had two ideas in my head: In Other Waters, my debut game, and another looser one, about being a thief in a sprawling fantasy city trying to survive a life of poverty while becoming implicated in the many disparate political structures of the city.

“Through the fires of conceptualization, Citizen Sleeper is what emerged of that idea. Despite the jump to a science-fiction setting, the bottom-up perspective of a vast network of urban lives at the mercy of diverse machinations was what survived.”

It’s often these sorts of multifaceted stories, thick with fictional intrigue, that capture the hearts of fantasy and sci-fi RPG fans. Indeed, Damian Martin reminisced about the quaint introductions to new areas in Mass Effect, and how they couldn’t help but be enamored with the stories of bystanders and workers designed to give Commander Shepherd a snapshot of life on that particular planet.

“Every time protagonists find themselves at a mundane bar or discussing docking fees, I feel the urge to know more about the side characters who occupy those spaces,” Damian Martin adds. “These people in the margins of a bigger story who main characters glide past when they sweep through busy thoroughfares or crowded hangers. As science fiction stories drag the narrative toward explosive quests, I want to stay with these people living ordinary lives in extraordinary settings.

“This is something that I always adored about Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor. That game felt like such an honest portrayal of working a crappy job, which was wonderfully accented by the backdrop of a colorful spaceport. I love seeing how science fiction can be a powerful ambient space for slice-of-life narratives. A space to extrapolate stories about ourselves,” they explain.

“It’s like—the death star is there, off in the distance, but people are still living meaningful lives around it. The infrastructure needed for these sweeping set pieces affects thousands of lives which play out month to month, and have next to nothing to do with the Big Space War. That’s us. We’re all living around the death star right now, hearing about climactic events playing out somewhere else. Meanwhile, we’re getting through the day to pay rent.

“With Citizen Sleeper, I wanted to strike a balance between those two extremes of drama, by juggling a suspenseful, momentous journey in tandem with the relatable, intimate experiences of real people, especially those in society’s periphery.”

When discussing similar games in the 2022 lineup, Damian Martin shared that when they were preparing to pitch Citizen Sleeper to their publisher Fellow Traveller in 2020, one of the game’s hooks was that the protagonist would be saddled with an unfair debt that they would work to pay off by processing space salvage.

When Hardspace: Shipbreaker, a physics game about salvaging spacecraft to pay off a billion-dollar debt, was announced for early access, Damian Martin had to retool their presentation, but they admit the similarities even now. “There was probably something in the water around that time,” Damian Martin muses. “I had been inspired by the awful behavior of Uber, which had led to drivers in serious debt having to lease their cars while working 15-hour days spent evading plain-clothes repo men during fares.”

Ugly tidbits of the modern world have always inspired dystopia writers, but what Damian Martin was seeing in our world was something the genre had never gotten quite right.

“Dystopian stories have a history of portraying corporations as ruthless—and ruthlessly efficient,” they note. “In fiction, scary corporate power comes from their staggering thoroughness and productivity. Meanwhile, in our world, we’re seeing this ruthlessness starting to exist, but it’s not efficient at all, it’s poorly implemented, completely sociopathic, and spreading into every facet of life.”

The millennial zeitgeist has certainly been rich with the recognition that there is little to gain by asking for years of experience for entry-level jobs, disincentivizing sick days during historic pandemics, and monitoring workers so intrusively that they develop anxiety conditions.

Damian Martin went on to explain that when market experiments and disruptive practices are trialed to squeeze extra hours out of workers, the results play out across the bodies and minds of people with no choice but to work to survive. They state that a corporation is a dispersed agency by definition: No one person is ever required to take moral responsibility for their company, so we find they aren’t questioned enough.

You can feel the shadow of these concepts in the tension of Citizen Sleeper, fueling your synthetic body’s lifelong war with manufactured obsolescence, the hostile fail-safes of the station’s old networks, and the destruction across the station following the bankruptcy of its creators.

“I don’t think any corporation is truly evil, not only because they’re so dispersed, but also because they’re often formed of many people who would like to do the right thing, given the choice,” Damian Martin explains. “But that doesn’t change the fact that corporate culture is getting better and better at normalizing states of passive cruelty in ways that are increasingly challenging to hold to account.”

Other factions on the station, such as the port authority, the former union Havenage, and the loosely regulated and overly trusting Hypha commune, are organizations that are just as dispersed as any corporation and just as capable of institutional neglect. While Damian Martin has their politics, they aren't interested in veiled agitprop.

“I never wanted to make a story centering around taking down a comically evil conglomerate. I wanted to tell a story at capitalism’s periphery, where so many of us have learned how to exist.”

In many of their interviews about Citizen Sleeper’s depth, Damian Martin centers the concept of precarity, which inspired them as they read Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World, one of many brilliant works of contemporary science fiction alluded to in the game.

“So many structures around us apply pressure to our lives,” Damian Martin notes, “it’s on us to be healthy, successful, and content. We’re all scrambling to achieve these things in competition with one another, fighting over jobs, opportunities, property, even social standing.

“We justify this with the myth of meritocracy, which mandates that the only thing that separates someone from the comforts of success or the despair of failure is being arbitrarily judged as being good at something arbitrarily valuable. That’s an incredibly precarious method of validating our right to exist with dignity.

When you consider the implications of stock markets, international politics, or the restrictions that come with being an immigrant or another restricted identity, you find even more precarity. Our world is full of systems we can’t ever conceivably control. We are surrounded by tiny, fragile walls,” Damian Martin explains, “when these walls buckle and break, we tumble toward mental breakdown, bankruptcy, destitution, or even death.”

We feel these walls constantly in Citizen Sleeper. The game’s economic fears about being able to afford food are compounded with medical anxiety about where to secure the serum that sustains our failing body, or how to afford the solutions that may elevate us out of our dangerous circumstances. When caught among so many predatory systems during crucial junctures, rolling a low set of action dice can create cascading setbacks.

“The biggest defense against these unsympathetic systems, as I’ve found, is grassroots mutualism,” Damian Martin concludes. “While we can’t decide the value of what we earn or the rights we deserve, we can always try to show up for one another when we’re needed. When the people around us roll snake eyes. The intimacy of mutual support is essentially how everyone survives this world. From the very beginning, this was always going to be the arc of Citizen Sleeper, as it has been in my own life in many ways. I don’t think there are enough stories about people trapped in these precarious spaces.”

Citizen Sleeper is set to continue with three free episodes of DLC, the first of which, entitled “Flux,” tells the story of a refugee flotilla locked out of Erlin’s Eye by quarantine measures.

“All I’ll say right now is ‘Flux’ turns the focus towards issues around refugees, bureaucracy, and making space for compassion within democratic systems,” Damian Martin explains. “I hope players will find it interesting and will follow along with the episodic story as it unfolds this year and next.”