“It’s at its worst when waking, when your self has spent many dark hours recalling what it felt like to be real, to be a person, to be in a body that was indisputably yours.” Right from the opening lines of solo developer Jump Over the Age’s (Gareth Damian Martin’s) Citizen Sleeper, the theme of the thickening liminality between machinery and biology, tech and life, is clearly established and then further embodied in its soundtrack. Citizen Sleeper is a quiet, understated game that nevertheless has much to say through the increasingly saturated cyberpunk genre. You play as a Sleeper, a human soul “emulated” in a synthetic body, trying to make a life of your own after escaping your corporate owners and waking aboard the outlawed, annular space station Erlin’s Eye. Thanks to its music, headed by composer and sound designer Amos Roddy, Citizen Sleeper’s chilly, minimalistic exterior is imbued with a depth and pathos too often forgotten in more bombastic, action-oriented forays into cyberpunk science fiction.
What’s more, Roddy pulls off one of the hardest (and most important) double duties a soundtrack can take: Citizen Sleeper’s music greatly heightens the atmosphere of the game while also remaining an enjoyable listen when divorced from its context. I listened to Citizen Sleeper for a long time before I ever played it and found it to be a very mellow, atmospheric, 23-track slice of life cut from an evidently lived-in science fiction world. This is not the music you take into a mechanically augmented firefight or the music that plays while you hammer on your keyboard and hack into the mainframe. (“I’m in!”) No, this is the music that buttresses the exotic drudgery of neon-soaked interplanetary capitalism: working your hands raw to strip a ship of its valuable metals, delivering noodles through megacomplexes of apartments owned by shady corporations, or saving up for the next dose of medicine to slow the decline of your biomechanical body. As a result, Citizen Sleeper is a mix of industrial, electro, and ambient sounds reminiscent of quieter moments from film and game soundtracks like Vangelis’ Blade Runner (1982), Kenji Kawai’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), and Kenji Yamamoto’s Metroid Prime (2002).
No two tracks are alike in terms of instrumentation. A short dial tone-esque tune runs through Opener “Density,” played over a series of cavernous industrial beats that blur the lines of the rhythmic and the melodic. “Shipwatching,” downtempo and dissonant with its low-fi synths, is the most Vangelis-core of the bunch, and suggests the simultaneous fear of and longing for the great expanse of space. The garbled voice sample in “Signal Haze” has etched itself into my mind, as have the layers of melodies both acoustic and mechanistic in “The Facsimile”. In game, the music never feels intrusive to the laid-back gameplay loop, yet the game would feel empty for lack of it. As a soundtrack to your real life, you can listen through Citizen Sleeper and be whisked between a variety of tempos and emotions without ever leaving the atmospheric groove it’s nestled in. Finally, it’s no coincidence that closer track “Possible Futures” (a rearranging of the earlier, more digitized “Relink”) is the most human and emotional of the lot: a simple piano-adjacent melody just barely submerged in a cavernous, digital filter. To peer through it is to see the soul within.
Citizen Sleeper’s soundtrack is available for streaming and digital purchase on a plethora of platforms. A 2LP vinyl printing was also released in 2024. You can read RPGFan’s game reviews here for Citizen Sleeper (2022) and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector (2025).
