"Citizen Sleeper" is like "Blade Runner," but you are a replicant. An artificial human on the run from the corporation that manufactured you, you are hiding out on a space station that has become a rogue state, home to revolutionaries, refugees, and pirate gangs. While you worry about being cornered and dramatically shot from behind, you also worry about your daily survival.

"Citizen Sleeper" does a good job of encouraging them to live their daily lives. In "Cyberpunk 2077," he only went to bed when he had to activate a side quest, but here he goes through the daily cycle of sleeping, eating, working, and feeding the stray cats. Some things were mechanically necessary, others were pure role-play.

Every morning your synthetic body wakes up and a pool of dice is rolled. The more of those dice you have, the better job you do. You might spend a 6 on a job helping a local mechanic remove tangled sails from a ship, but since you didn't roll a 4 or higher, it will be a mediocre job removing overgrown sections of the greenway where you want to set up a mushroom farm.

Even though the numbers are low, there is another aspect to the station. In the data cloud, your consciousness is freed from the synthmeat that needs to eat and sleep, and you consume dice to hack the system. You can use one to see what the agents of the Yatagan gang are up to, or you can escape from the data cloud and work a shift at a noodle shop.

It's not all blade runners. Citizen Sleeper eventually reminded me of Planetes, about blue-collar workers collecting trash in space. Like "Planetes," "Citizen Sleeper" focuses on ordinary people. Exploring each section of the station introduces new characters, who are depicted with expressive animated portraits superimposed on the station, and beside them blocks of text tell their stories with moments of choice and consequence interaction.

Characters include a botanist studying a strange fungus native to the station, a bar owner who wants to renovate it, a shipyard worker who wants to leave the station in search of a better life for his daughter, and a mercenary whose "shipmind" has been stolen. You never know who is worth getting close to. Some may abandon you, waste your time, betray you. It's who you trust.

Their story unfolds over time; the UI will tell you how many cycles it will take before the next chapter begins, so while you wait, go back to work at the bar or farm, explore the rotunda or hub, and try not to fall apart. Thanks to the companies that have planned for your obsolescence, you are constantly decaying in condition status. As it goes down, you have fewer and fewer dice to use. Like a cell phone or a light bulb, you are not built to last. The stabilizers needed to replenish condition are expensive and difficult to procure.

Additional pressure is exerted by hunters. Companies and their freelancers will eventually seek you out, and every time you hack, you will be sniffed out by the beastly AI patrolling the station's cyberspace. Eventually, reckoning will come.

As the Citizen Sleeper progresses, you will get better at exploiting the system and finding solutions to these problems. Like many RPGs, gambling is the best way to get rich. I even moved out of the shipping container I was sleeping in.

When I found stories that I obviously should have discovered earlier, I started to feel like I was sequence breaking Citizen Sleeper, assuming that I didn't have certain items or hadn't been to certain places. Even before that, I had quests before I could build what I needed, stole loads that never showed up in my inventory, and kept getting the "upgrade available" message even though I had spent all my upgrade points.

The writing itself is excellent, but there are quite a few typos and punctuation errors. The focus on the mundane, on scavenging, on survival, makes the occasional glimpse of the profundity intense. Perhaps it is the poetic description of the flowing cyberspace data cloud and the impossible beings that inhabit it, or the endless physical space in which the station rotates and the small individuals who find hope in it.

"Citizen Sleeper" has multiple endings, some of which allow you to continue playing and find other endings. However, I freed the AI from the vending machine, thwarted several corporate plots to eat into the station, and refurbished the bar. I didn't want to leave, so I found the multiple endings in one play and pushed the credits three times. [Citizen Sleeper allowed me to build a life I wanted to keep living. When I go on my journey, who will harvest the mushrooms and who will feed the stray cats?