Topic: Citizen Sleeper vs. Disco Elysium: A Contrast of Successful Narrative Design

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Hi y'all! It's been a while since I posted, but since this is my favourite place to discuss video games after all, I wanted to post the short essay I wrote regarding this topic here as well in case anyone has any thoughts and would like to engage. I hope you're all doing well and I'm glad to see familiar names around still after the exodus we had last year!

This topic has been on my mind ever since I finished Disco Elysium a month ago, so why not write down my thoughts to finally get it out of my head? I had attempted to play Disco Elysium years ago, back before it received its Final Cut update. The game and I didn't quite match at the time, which I attribute to probably not being in the right head-space for it and the amount of times I died trying to get a tie off the fan in the first minutes of the game. Yes, the game got a lot more enjoyable for me when I stopped approaching every dice roll like one I had to succeed. I came back to it just last month and binged it to completion in about a week, which took me a good 45 hours. I'm not going to talk here about what a fantastic experience it is and how impressive the writing here is, because I'd be echoing the sentiment of hundreds of posts gone before. What I'm more interested in with this post, is to compare the narrative design of Citizen Sleeper to the one on display here, because it's something I've been unable to get out of my head. Mind you, I am hardly a professional in the field of writing and all of my thoughts are just me trying my best to put my feelings into words. If I offend any narrative designers in the making of this post, I hereby grant you permission to curse me out in the comments.

I played Citizen Sleeper back in 2023, which was marketed to me as being in the vein of Disco Elysium. Given, both have major differences in terms of game-play and are not going for exactly the same thing, but I think the core comparison of a narrative-focused journey involving dice rolling and a large cast of characters with an emphasis on choice and consequence rightly puts them in a similar boat. At the time, I felt like playing Citizen Sleeper might be more up my alley as a big sci-fi nerd after the ''disappointment'' of Disco Elysium. I ended up finishing it the same day I started it — a rarity for me — but I was left unsatisfied in the end. It had enough good writing to keep me playing for the hours it asked of me and some proper stand-out moments, but something about it made me feel like the game itself didn't come together. I don't think I fully understood what my problem with it was until I ended up playing Disco Elysium again and the light bulb turned on in my head. It's two games where the narrative is the sole focus of the journey with differing philosophies in how this should be integrated in a game-play format, and I believe Citizen Sleeper was ultimately unsuccessful at turning a novel into an engaging piece of video game media.

The most obvious difference between the two is the perspective of our protagonist. In Citizen Sleeper, you play in a bird's eye view covering the whole station where events will pop up as they unlock with which you can progress the story. In Disco Elysium, you're directly controlling a palpable character and moving them throughout the world to engage with each item and character. Disco Elysium has the undeniably more personal approach, which helps to fully immerse you into its world with the help of its beautiful art. Citizen Sleeper certainly is no slacker in the art department either, but its perspective does keep you at a distance, which in turn makes its narrative retain more of a novel-like feel. It also means that the way you interact with the environment and its characters is exclusively through the pressing of pop-ups, which makes it feel more like you're going through a check-list of whatever is available to you at the time rather than the more natural feeling of exploring the world like with Disco Elysium. I don't know whether this approach was done out of stylistic reasons or budget constraints, and I would hardly want to fault a game for it if it is the latter, but the end result remains the same.

Why is this important? What does it matter if I interact by pressing pop-ups or character models? I think where the biggest problem with Citizen Sleeper lies is not that design choice specifically, but how the over-arching mechanics of the dice rolls and energy interact with it. The energy mechanic is a good one conceptually. You have to make sure you have enough energy at all times to survive another ''round'', or your character will allegedly break down leading to a game over. It's a great way to create stakes, but the execution of it leaves a lot to be desired. The opening hour is tense, as you already start with low vitality and your whole goal is to not break down in the limited time you have to fix yourself up again. Admittedly, I had a close call with this, and it was incredibly satisfying to get myself out of that hole just in time. Here comes the issue however: after that point, it never becomes a problem again. You'll have enough relationships built up and places discovered that running out of energy is never a threat again, because you'll easily be able to get it up again through whichever way you prefer. The ''game'' aspect of this largely visual novel is basically over.

At this point, you can easily go into a next cycle to retrieve more dice rolls to unlock conversations or events with without having to worry about anything, which makes this entire part of the game-play completely negligible. From now on, the game-play is basically non-existent outside of clicking pop-ups to progress the narrative. This is why clicking on pop-ups being your main way to interact with the world becomes an issue. I'm no longer having to worry about any fail state, so essentially what I'm doing is just passing the time before the game lets me have the dice I need for whatever I want to do next. I'm doing nothing more than metaphorically turning the page within the game with some added busy-work that adds nothing to the experience at this point, and this is where the narrative design starts to feel like its failing the framework of the game. You have this whole system to manage your character to survive — in a story that is all about survival — but it becomes utterly useless. Now, I'm doing nothing more than turning a choose-your-adventure book which in and of itself seems to offer limited interactivity or reactivity to your choices. It's become less of an interactive art form and entirely just reading a novel in more steps.

There's nothing wrong with reading a novel of course, as it's something many of us should probably be doing more of, but it wastes the potential of this medium to have the interactivity it has to offer simply not matter. Clicking a pop-up over and over again to progress a story is just not satisfying in the same way as having an existential threat I need to constantly manage to even be able to do that. The existentialism within the game-play is not matching the narrative tone of the story any further, and in turns cheapening its effect. I'm not one to advocate for games being harder in general, as I generally prefer to cruise through them feeling like a bad-ass as much as possible, but in playing through a story so rooted in challenges, it starts to feel like (say it with me) there's ludonarrative dissonance at play. And as for a more personal complaint, I don't think the story and characters itself hold up to the degree it would need to to be able to surpass that feeling and still have at least the story feel worthy playing. While it's not badly written and as said before, there's a fair few stand-out moments sprinkled throughout, it's nothing you haven't seen before if you're even the tiniest bit interested in sci-fi storytelling.

Some might argue that pressing pop-ups is not different from interacting with the world through character models, and to some degree I would have to agree with that. It's a different presentation, but it's not inherently different from one another. And this is where the narrative design of Disco Elysium, I believe, succeeds where Citizen Sleeper fails. There's no real fail state to worry about in Disco Elysium either. If you are even a little bit paying attention, you'll always have enough items on hand to manage your morale and health. Directly controlling a character in their movement throughout the world, however, already makes a game feel more interactive to begin with. I'm exploring the world at my own pace and discovering characters and events in a natural manner instead of just being led down a path by the pop-ups that show up on screen. Disco Elysium also gives a lot more leeway to role-play, with more dialogue options and more ways to shape your character. I never felt like I was reading a novel without game-play elements in this, as there were enough ways to interact with the environment and the items I can receive to make me feel like I had autonomy over the story I was telling. The thoughts were just another mechanic to solidify that feeling, and the pop-ups around my character's head I could get from doing the most unexpected of things only added to a sense of personal discovery and wonder. It's simply a better written game to begin with, but each game-play mechanic in the game actively reinforces the storytelling throughout the game instead of becoming of no importance after the very early hours of the game.

The saving grace for Citizen Sleeper becomes that it is a concise experience. It's not hard to finish the game under 10 hours and feel like you've seen it all. If it had been any longer, I feel like it would've prolonged the distaste too much and I might've grown to resent it. This is also why I didn't end up playing the free content updates they released at a later date, because I felt like I more than had my fill by the end of it. Truth is, if Citizen Sleeper had been a novel, I think it would've been a perfectly passable one. It's not a groundbreaking story to start with or anything that would truly impress within sci-fi storytelling, but it would've been one worth experiencing if you are at all interested in it conceptually. But as a video game, I think it leaves a sense of disappointment and lack of satisfaction in how it refused to interact with its medium in a meaningful way, or rather fails at doing so.

I hope what I was trying to say makes sense, as I've found it hard to put this feeling properly into words. If anyone feels differently or was able to see themselves in this critique, I'd love to hear it. If I got any details wrong regarding my explanation of Citizen Sleeper's mechanics, do let me know. It's been a while. I did purchase the sequel just this week, so I will be giving that a shot in the near future. I'm very interested to see how they'll have refined or iterated upon the game-play mechanics, and I hope to be enjoying my time with it a bit more. (I'm also just a sucker for anything sci-fi.) Thanks for reading!