Recent Playing: Citizen Sleeper

Alright Steam fall sale!!! \(@^0^@)/ I was not able to travel home for Thanksgiving so instead I have been occupying myself with new games. Have to enjoy them while I can, since I will be starting a final tomorrow (assuming all goes as planned). Today I finished Citizen Sleeper, a tabletop RPG-inspire sci-fi survival game. Steam's game description is:

Roleplaying in the ruins of interplanetary capitalism. Live the life of an escaped worker, washed-up on a lawless station at the edge of an interstellar society. Inspired by the flexibility and freedom of TTRPGs, explore the station, choose your friends, escape your past and change your future.
 

First off: I loved this game. It was totally worth the $15 I spent on it. You get into an excellent rhythm with the game's systems and I think they function very cleanly and clearly once you get the hang of it.

The game description is fairly vague, so to give some more detail: You play as the Sleeper. Your mind is the consciousness of a human being that was basically copied into a corporate-owned android. As such, you are the property of Essen-Arp, the corporation that owns your android body. The planned obsolescence built into your frame ensures that without regular maintenance from Essen-Arp, you will begin to break down. However, you've escaped from the company and landed on a small space station in search of freedom...

Having added this game to my library of Neo Cab, Night in the Woods, Frostpunk, and Life is Strange; True Colors, I realize there is an ongoing theme of corporate misbehavior and exploitation going on here...which is a direct result of the today's zeitgeist, I think.

Citizen Sleeper isn't graphics heavy. It mostly features simple, clean designs to help you navigate, but it's also populated with charming and detailed character images for those who you interact with regularly. I found the characters varied, interesting, and realistic. Most of them are not evil, they're just trying to survive, and some of them are willing to be more merciless to that end than others. Some are willing to stick their neck out for you and others aren't and feeling out who's trustworthy and who's reliable really gets you into the mindset of the Sleeper.

The RPG mechanics are pretty simple; there are 5 skills you can upgrade over the course of the game and you should be able to max the trees if you play through the 3 additional episodes Failbetter Games is releasing to supplement the core story (I have not played through them yet myself.) There are risk-taking mechanics in some of your daily actions, which usually have 3 possible outcomes of varying likelihood: Positive (gain something: money, energy, condition); neutral (gain or lose less of the thing); and negative (lose money, energy, condition).

The gameplay is not very difficult (by which I mean I had no trouble with it and that usually means it's pretty easy) so while there are high stakes for the Sleeper, this wasn't a game I felt stressed out about. There was tension, but not to the point that a few bad/failed decisions can irrevocably fuck you.

Citizen Sleeper isn't a long game, but I was delighted with it for its full runtime and I do plan to play through again and give the Sleeper a new class and a different attitude, and play through the free DLC episodes.

Overall, very worth the money spent, I really enjoyed this game!

Lies Came Between Them

I realized I never crossposted this!

“Long before, in the bliss of Valinor, before Melkor was unchained, or lies came between them, Fingon had been close in friendship with Maedhros.” 

Okay honestly I am fascinated by this line and I feel like it doesn’t get touched on much in fanon. The implication here (”lies came between them”) seems to be that whatever friendship Maedhros and Fingon had was already deteriorated to some degree by the time of the Flight of the Noldor, that they had begun to mistrust and be in opposition to each other which in a way, makes Maedhros’ apparent betrayal in Alqualonde/Losgar worse for Fingon--it may feel like the nail in the coffin to a friendship that was already on ice. It also makes it potentially more powerful for Maedhros that Fingon comes for him anyway, in spite of everything that had broken between them.

It also sets up a more awkward dynamic going forward in Beleriand. These are not necessarily two bosom friends reunited after a single misunderstanding. Clearly this relationship had issues before the Exile and while Fingon’s rescue of Maedhros was a grand gesture (although far from lacking in political considerations) recovering trust from someone you’ve lost it with is not easy, especially if they don’t yet realize the hand Melkor played in what went down in Aman.

It would also be fascinating to examine a more contentious and possibly even competitive dynamic between Fingon and Maedhros in Tirion, as their friendship goes downhill and they begin to mistrust each other as Melkor works the knife in between Feanor and Fingolfin. Which makes Fingon’s kingship in Beleriand even more interesting, particularly in light of the fact that by the Maedhros Rule (rule by the oldest/most experienced of the royal family), he could make a second bid for the crown, and Fingon has to be aware of that.

There just seems to be a lot of room for exploring a more complicated friendship between these two and how that affects them going forward.

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