NOTE: This will contain spoilers for Citizen Sleeper and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. If you haven't played thse two (excellent) games, parts of this will not make sense to you.
I think the world of Citizen Sleeper is one of the first times I have seen the idea of the Bronze Age Collapse translated into a proper hard sci-fi setting (and not pseudo-archaeological bullshit).
The Late Bronze Age Collapse in our history involved the near-total dissolution of the major civilizations of the time, as people actively reverted to simpler ways of living in the moment while continuing progress on technological development via improving the metalworking of iron. The Hittites collapsed, as did the Mycenaeans, and the Assyrian and the Egyptian empires barely survived. It was the lead-in to what is now known as the Greek Dark Ages.
The games channel the feeling of living in a period of marked civilizational decline, where the world is notably materially worse than before and we are visibly, actively regressing in the eyes of almost every single person across the world, where the best technology available is the detritus of a galaxy-spanning dominant company that went bankrupt ~70 years ago and took with it all the institutional knowledge that mage large parts of society function, forcing people to build something new in its wake.
And despite this, the new generation of talented people who want to make technological and social progress are not blind to the evils of the company that died, or the ones that came after - they are actively, consciously, deciding to preserve the good and discard the bad when it comes to pieces of the past. There is a profound sense of hope that we, the people, will get through this, and what will emerge on the other side of this slump is a better, kinder, more just world.
Juni is the most explicit example of looking to the past with fondness, but we see traces of this elsewhere as well, such as Feng's idolization of Erlin's ideals and in Yu-Jin searching for the fraction drive to try and escape. And even Juni remains aware that the systems of the past did a lot of bad, that needs to be dealt with for things to get better.
More subtly, we see this in all the AI systems that were either sapient or on the verge of it, that were built by Solhiem and only barely kept in check by the governance structures that could not be kept up by any successor authority. Hunter became arguably sapient, Neovend/Navigator definitely did become sapient, and the Gardener probably still counts as sapient despite how much it has ascended beyond what normal people can comprehend with ease. The Overseer and Warden are clearer still, in that they are both remnants of the old world that need to be reshaped into something better.
All this combined gives this image of a world in decline, but one that can be fixed - yes, life is hard, and widespread systemic collapse makes it harder, but there will always be kind people willing to lend a hand, a ear, a few bills, a bit of food, and maybe if we can pay that kindness forward, that can make the difference.
It's a profoundly hopeful sentiment that I find myself clinging into in the dark times we find ourselves in.
New announcement from Fellow Traveler about Gareth Damian Martin's next game!!
Today, we’re incredibly excited to reveal Signet City, the next game from Gareth Damian Martin, creator of the Citizen Sleeper franchise and In Other Waters.
Signet City is a first-person fungalpunk RPG about a coastal city in decline, in a world where the biological computer outgrew the silicon chip. You are a parasite, born in the brackish waters of the city's bay, with the ability to inhabit human minds. Guide your hosts, and the city itself, in its final season. From the stained wallpaper of the squats to the towering monuments that dot its skyline, grow through and into this strange city, changing it forever.
From the very beginning, Signet City grabbed us because it feels unlike anything else in the narrative RPG space right now. It carries the same emotional and thematic DNA that made Citizen Sleeper resonate with so many players, but mutates it into something industrial and rooted in post-punk culture, weird fiction, biological horror, and the failing systems that shape modern cities today.
One of the things we love most about the game is how fully committed it is to its identity. Fungal systems shape the philosophy, politics, visual language, and social structure of the world itself. Signet City offers a distinct vision of a richly-built world, one adjacent to our own, that both mirrors and distorts the familiar struggles of labour, power and ecological crisis.
The move into first-person perspective creates a very different kind of intimacy and tension, while the stark monochrome art direction and post-punk inspirations give the game an immediately distinct visual identity. Every frame is hand-authored and deeply human in the way Gareth’s work consistently is.
There will be much more to share in the future and, trust us, there's plenty more growing beneath the surface.
Welcome to Signet City.
I'M SO FRIGGING EXCITED!!!!!
GARETH DAMIAN MARTIN IS ONE OF THE GREATEST GAME DESIGNERS OF ALL TIME!!
It's actually a bit surprising to me that we haven't seen contemporary meta brainfuck indie games do more than they have with 1990s point and click adventure games' penchant for developer-intended softlocks. That feels like something you could very easily spin as Saying Something.
Honestly, having grown up with this bullshit is probably a big part of the reason I'm fascinated with player-hostile game design. Giving a puzzle three different solutions with fully voiced and animated reactions to each, except two of those solutions render the game unwinnable in ways that won't become apparent until hours later is a level of "fuck you" that most modern games with pretensions of player-hostility can only dream of!
I'm usually loathe to suggest TV Tropes as a resource, but given that only a person who's entirely unacquainted with the genre would be asking that question, a primer is probably warranted. Check out the Unwinnable By Design article and read the preamble for context on the types of softlocks we're discussing, then hit either the "Sierra" or "Infocom" links (yes, those two publishers each have their own dedicated sections!), pop open the "Cruel" tab, and get ready to read some stuff that makes you mad.
A critical piece of context that a lot of modern gamers completely miss is that Douglas Adams' adventure games are works of parody not only in terms of their narratives, but also in the sense that they're rather vicious parodies of adventure games as a genre. Each of their absurdly obtuse puzzles is lampooning some puzzle design trope or set of tropes that was legitimately commonplace at the time they were made, and many of the really nasty bits are crafted specifically to piss off experienced adventure game fans who otherwise wouldn't get caught out by that sort of thing. They're outliers in the genre only in the sense that they're putting forth extra effort to be annoying about it – most games of the type pull the exact same shit entirely without remark!
(Honestly, the player-hostility of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tends to be tremendously overstated owing to a combination of effective marketing and the fact that it's the only adventure game from that era that any significant number of current-gen gamers have ever actually played. In terms of sheer fuckery it's considerably friendlier than stuff like, say, Codename: ICEMAN.)
It helps to understand that point and click adventure games are one of the first genres the Git Gud crowd really fixated on, and a lot of these early design trends revolved around catering to that crowd. It only got reframed as a genre for filthy casuals in the wake of a demographic shift in the mid 1990s that saw the genre's player base skewing strongly female; it's practically the only example of a video game genre's reputation flipping directly from "hardcore" to "casual", and one of the most striking illustrations of the fact that which kinds of games are considered "real" games is more about identity politics than mechanics.
Every other site's algorithm: Here is an endless stream of content we have decided you might like. If you slip and forget to bookmark something, you will likely never encounter it again.
Tumblr's algorithm: Here is one post we have decided you WILL like. We are going to keep bringing it up, forever.
There will be millions of actions like this over the coming years. An important thing to remember is that for them to work (anywhere, not just libraries) is people absolutely can’t announce that this is what they are doing.
Not seeing constant acts of resistance doesn’t mean it isn’t happening all around you all the time. Some very effective methods require silence and secrecy.
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