An Indie Backlog curated overview. We round up the best indie RPGs and how professional critics and players received each one — the scores and quotes below are theirs, linked to the source.
You wake as a Sleeper — a digitised human mind in an artificial body, indebted and slowly winding down — clinging to life on a rusting space station at the edge of a collapsed economy.
At a Glance
| Developer | Jump Over the Age (pub. Fellow Traveller) |
| Released | 2022 |
| Platforms | PC, Mac, Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series |
| Subgenre | Narrative / dice-driven RPG |
| Playtime | ~7 hrs (main) / ~12 hrs (more endings) |
| Metacritic | 82 / 100 |
| OpenCritic | 84 / 100 — Mighty |
| Steam | Very Positive (93% of 9,900+) |
| Steam Deck | Playable |
| Languages | 4 supported |
About the Game
Citizen Sleeper is the work of Gareth Damian Martin (Jump Over the Age), published by Fellow Traveller. You play a Sleeper — a worker whose mind was copied into a synthetic body owned by a corporation — who has fled to Erlin’s Eye, a ramshackle station full of drifters, dreamers, and people just trying to get by.
Each in-game cycle you roll a handful of dice and assign them to actions: working the docks, hacking, scavenging, talking to people. Higher rolls mean better outcomes; low rolls risk failure. Around that loop you juggle health, energy, and money while your decaying body demands medication you can barely afford.
It’s tabletop-inspired in the best way, with writing about labour, precarity, and found family that few games even attempt. Storylines branch across the station, and your choices steer you toward several very different endings.
Screenshots
Screenshots: Jump Over the Age (via Steam).
Why It Made the List
Citizen Sleeper earns its place because it turns the spreadsheet of survival into one of the most humane, quietly moving stories in games — proof that an RPG can be small in scope and enormous in heart.
What the Critics Say
Citizen Sleeper holds a Metacritic of 82 and an OpenCritic “Mighty” rating (84, from 46 critics). A couple of verdicts:
“…some of the finest video-game sci-fi writing out there.”
4/5 — The Guardian
“Citizen Sleeper stands out as one of the best games of the year, with great writing that avoids easy outs.”
What Players Say
Players love it too: Citizen Sleeper is Very Positive on Steam (93% of more than 9,900 reviews). Much of its audience also found it via Game Pass and console, where its quiet, session-friendly design fits perfectly.
Praise & Criticism
What critics and players tend to highlight:
Widely praised
- Gorgeous, melancholy writing
- Tense, tactile dice-driven survival
- Striking character and station art
- Humane themes of labour and found family
Common criticisms
- Light on traditional “gameplay” and combat
- Short — a sitting or two
- Stakes ease once you stabilise
Games Like This
If Citizen Sleeper clicks for you, line these up next:
- Disco Elysium — the gold standard of choice-driven, writing-first RPGs.
- Roadwarden — a text-rich, illustrated RPG where words matter most.
- In Other Waters — the same studio’s quietly beautiful sci-fi exploration game.
Where to Buy
Available on: Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch.
Plain store links for now — swap in your affiliate-tagged URLs once you’ve joined Amazon Associates and the eBay Partner Network. (Steam has no affiliate program; that link is for convenience.)