A corporate shell architecture, an android body with pseudo-organs and a sensor suite made to mimic the five senses. In Citizen Sleeper you play as a Sleeper. Four and a half months later, the place it occupies in my mind has neither shrunk, nor has the sound of its song grown quieter. In the final moments of my playthrough, blinking through watery eyes, a familiar but distant thought sounded in my head: This is it. Citizen Sleeper, the newest game by solo-developer Jump Over The Age, Gareth Damian (dam-yan) Martin, slipped past every defense, cleared every checkpoint, and within days caught me a-broadsides, laying me out completely. It is even rarer when a game vaults itself all the way to the top of said list. I have been writing about games for twelve years. I have been playing games for twenty-three years. What I seek to elucidate here is perhaps obvious, still, there are only a few games that elicit a deep emotional response from me.
The smell of a dorm room, the sound of an Xbox 360 powering on, a musical note that raises the skin in myriad bumps, the taste of breast milk spit-up from that one time your daughter had unfortunately good aim. Each has bundled with it, particular and easily recallable sensations. I’m sure there are other games I found a peculiar liking for, but the upper echelon is saved for these few and far between experiences. Perhaps it is the high bar that I am using as a filter. It’s around here I start to struggle to find further entries. Mass Effect 2 and Halo: ODST have their files, quintessentials from an earlier time. As art is want to do, Outer Wilds and Terraformer created a video/audio palette for a 5 month period of 2019 that proved to be so impactful that a single song playing through my headphones or car speakers prompts a backdraft of emotions flavored like existential dread and the fear I won’t have enough time to do all that I want. Next is a dual function report detailing the overlap of Outer Wilds and Thank You Scientist’s third album Terraformer.
A world so deep and full of opportunity that I forgot my own sad existence for just long enough. Skyrim inevitably has a thick file, the game saved my life after all. A reimagination of a beloved formula, an old dog given fresh and violent new tricks. Splinter Cell: Conviction is the easiest to find. The heaviest, most dense reports number fewer than seven, surely. My mind rifles through the Rolodex of past experiences, rummaging for those few that have a file a little deeper than the rest. It’s not every year that you come across a game that has the innate ability to command your thoughts for weeks, even after completion.
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