![]() “In fiction, scary corporate power comes from their staggering thoroughness and productivity. “Dystopian stories have a history of portraying corporations as ruthless-and ruthlessly efficient,” they note. ![]() 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. “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.” ![]() “There was probably something in the water around that time,” Damian Martin muses. 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. 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. I caught up with Gareth Damian Martin, the game’s creator, to dial into what’s behind its genius. With a set of refreshing themes unmistakably parallel to our modern lives, the story is rich with cathartic elements. 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. ![]() 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.Ī 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. Citizen Sleeper is a superb narrative adventure indie game about surviving the urban sprawl of a struggling space station. ![]()
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