Luke Beeman

A tabletop-inspired narrative RPG about life aboard a run-down space station as a sleeper—a copy of a human consciousness in an android body—on the run from your corporate owners. Each cycle, you roll dice and pick and choose what actions to spend them on, from working shifts at whatever jobs you can find or exploring the station to hacking systems and stealing supplies, with higher rolls giving you better odds of success. Citizen Sleeper is stellar (pun intended) at building tension; it's all too easy to find yourself with far too many spinning plates to keep up with everything as timers count down toward debts coming due or bounty hunters closing in while you also try to keep yourself fed and save up enough money to afford medicine for your constantly degrading body (planned obsolescence is a nightmare when it's your own body that's designed to quickly break down). At the same time though, the game isn't terribly harsh; much like Pyre, Citizen Sleeper is a game more interested in letting the consequences of your failures play out than hitting you with a Game Over and forcing you to start over. You might miss out on something or fail to help someone, but life goes on. It's also just a fantastically well-written game, with really interesting characters from all walks of life among each of the station's different factions who make sympathetic cases for their own ideological causes even as those causes put them into conflict with one another. I especially loved the first ending I got (which also wound up being my favorite ending), which did make me cry a little.