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Citizen Sleeper’s DLC has taught me total failure is sometimes inevitable, and that’s okayI’m definitely not the flotilla’s favourite person right now
I’m definitely not the flotilla’s favourite person right now
Image credit:Fellow Traveller
Image credit:Fellow Traveller
When my Sleeper escaped their ramshackle life on the fringes of Erlin’s Eye at theend of last year, they left behind a lot of unfinished business. I had to stop short my efforts to help Bliss make a go of her repair bay business, and Tala was left to finish making her brand-new distillery on her own. Yatagan agent Rabiyah probably has my name on an employment blacklist, too, after I upped sticks without telling them, and the spores of mushroom algae I’d been cultivating for Riko over in Greenway were no doubt left to rot and moulder somewhere. Instead, I jacked that all in to smuggle myself, my engineering pal Lem and his tiny daughter Mina onto a ship headed for some far-flung star out in the void. The Sidereal ship wasn’t going to wait. It was now or never.
Fortunately hitting an ending inCitizen Sleeperdoesn’t mean the end of your save. Booting it back up again for this month’sRPS Game Club, I wanted to play out a different ending to my Sleeper’s story. Turning my back on Lem and Mina still brought its own kind of sadness, admittedly, but I wanted to dig into the game’strio of free DLC episodesfirst and foremost, as that was another thing I never got time to start last year. I’ve only played through the first chapter, Flux, so far, but man alive, it was not an auspicious start for the refugee flotilla ship hoping to make a new life for themselves here. In fact, I don’t think it could have gone any worse, such was the monumental failure of my collective dice rolls and decision making. But despite absolutely beefing it in Flux, I also came to realise an important lesson. It’s okay to fail, and that failure can often make the consequences of your actions feel all the more poignant. Sure, it might not feel nice, and yes, I wish it could have gone better. But sometimes the odds really are stacked against you, and you’ve just got to roll with it.
Citizen Sleeper - Free DLC Episodes TrailerWatch on YouTube
Citizen Sleeper - Free DLC Episodes Trailer
As the game itself warns you before kicking off its Flux storyline, this is very much intended for late-game Citizen Sleeper players. It’s demanding, tense and difficult, requiring absolute focus and minimal distractions from any other ongoing storylines you might be pursuing. You’ll want to start it when you’re having a bit of a quiet moment, otherwise you’ll likely run into even further problems than I did.
I knew I was low on credits when I started Flux, but otherwise I thought I was in pretty good shape. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Fellow Traveller
But Eshe and her best friend Peake are who leading this mission are at slight loggerheads on how to proceed. Eshe will ask you to secure food, water and scrap components for the flotilla so they’ll have something to start their new lives with once they get through the cordon. Peake’s biggest concern, on the other hand, is actually getting the ship through the cordon in the first place, adding another three potential action routes to your to do list to ensure the best possible outcome. It’s a tall order, and one you won’t (likely) be able to complete fully.
At the same time, though, my credit reserves were dwindling fast. I didn’t have much in my pocket to begin with, and as the number of my daily dice rolls started shrinking in line with my deteriorating condition, I realised, ‘Hang on, I need money for a booster, stat, or I’m not even going to see the end of this.’ With the clock ticking and my health getting lower, I had to start sacrificing what few precious dice rolls I had left to earn enough cash to get my shot.
Siphoning off a water supply was theonething I did manage to do successfully.Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Fellow Traveller
Another cycle down. I’d fixed myself up with a fresh booster, and I was ready and raring to go to try and salvage this slow-moving car crash. I clicked out of my apartment, but who should show up but Bliss' assistant Moritz. He tells me that the missing payment had suddenly come through, and suddenly I was flush with 300 new credits to my name. The day after I sold off all my scrap! It was a ludicrous sum that could have easily bought methreeboosters and probably the rest of the spare scrap I needed for Eshe, if only I’d hung on a single, extra cycle. Gosh darn damnit, Bliss.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Fellow Traveller
Eventually, I chucked all my dice at a single task: hacking into the quarantine administration so the ship could pass unheeded through the cordon, assuming it even got through the rest of the dock’s security protocols and wasn’t caught, of course. Success - and with only a single cycle to spare.
Alas, there was nothing else to be done at this point. I’d made a lot of bad calls, thrown a lot of bad dice… I’d failed in almost every respect, fulfilling just two of six possible tasks I’d been set to give these people the best possible chance of survival. I felt like I’d spectacularly let them down, and I reluctantly ended my last cycle before the big day, fearful of what was to come. And yes, the end result was not pretty. While my plan to hack the quarantine barrier worked, Eshe and the ship were caught and was promptly arrested. She didn’t even manage to get the water onboard. Peake was distraught, and they fled the scene immediately, angry, hurt and disappointed that I’d been so utterly useless.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Fellow Traveller
I wondered for a long time afterwards what I should have done differently. The odds were against me from the start, no doubt about it, but could I have been luckier? Should I have healed faster? Or could I have been smarter about what to target in the limited amount of time that I had? ‘Yes’ is probably the answer to all of these questions, but it was just as likely to have been ‘No’ as well. It was certainly my first major failure in Citizen Sleeper, that’s for sure, and in some ways I felt fortunate that it had taken this long for my Sleeper to hit such a major bump in the road. But ultimately I realised that such deliberation was pointless. As my Sleeper themselves concluded after the dust settled: “What is done is done. No matter how many times you turn it over in your head.”
But there’s another reason why I’m glad I failed like this. Up until this point, life had been going pretty smoothly for my Sleeper out in the Eye, and despite the odd stumble here and there, I’d managed to resolve most of the game’s storylines fairly satisfactorily. Now, though, it brought those smaller victories into sharper relief. It made me appreciate the good luck I’d had so far, and that - this incident aside - I had a lot to be proud of in this little corner of the universe. If nothing else, it’s lit a fire in my belly to make up for all my earlier nonsense, and I’m determined now to put things right with Eshe, with Peake and with the flotilla. The Eye is my home, after all, and they have every right to want to call it theirs, too.
