Citizen Sleeper is free to claim on the Epic Games Store right now, no purchase needed, until June 25, 2026.
That's the one thing you need to know. Go claim it. You can decide whether to play it later, but you cannot unclaim it after the offer expires.
Now, here's why it's worth your time. You play an android who has escaped from a corporation that owns your body. You wake up on a decaying space station called Erlin's Eye, broke and dying. The corporation wants you back. You need to find work, build trust with people around you, and get access to the drugs that keep your body from failing. Every in-game cycle, you roll a handful of dice. Each die face has a number. You assign those dice to tasks around the station, and higher numbers give you better results. Run out of energy or get unlucky, and things fall apart. It sounds clinical. It does not play that way.
The game was made almost entirely by one person, Gareth Damian Martin of Jump Over the Age, with art from Guillaume Singelin and music from Amos Roddy. It launched in May 2022 and landed a 85 out of 100 on Metacritic and four BAFTA nominations in 2023, including Best Narrative and Best British Game. It also won a British Writers Guild Award. On Steam, 93% of roughly 10,000 reviews are positive. Those numbers put it in a very small group of games.
What players actually talk about is harder to pin down with a number. Citizen Sleeper does not have combat. There are no boss fights and no skill trees to optimize. What it has is a slowly widening circle of people you get to know: a cook who needs help with suppliers, a dockworker who is hiding something, a kid who lives by the docking bays. You choose who to spend your dice on. The story bends around those choices. Some characters you will never meet depending on the path you take, and that is fine. The game never punishes you for not doing everything.
The community calls it a "dice chill" game, which sounds like a contradiction, but fits. The tension is real, especially early when your resources are thin. But it never feels hostile. People who bounced off heavier RPGs or who wanted something closer to a good novel than a game often cite this as the one that stuck.
If you want to buy it outright, it costs $19.99 normally and is currently 70% off on Steam at $5.99 until June 21, 2026. It is also included with Xbox Game Pass on PC and console, and has been part of PlayStation Plus Extra since December 2025. So there are at least three ways to play it right now for free or close to it.
The sequel, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, came out January 31, 2025 on PC, Mac, PS5, Switch, and Xbox Series X/S. It received similarly strong reviews and a 50% discount on Steam as of this writing. A Nintendo Switch 2 edition of the sequel launches June 25, 2026, the same day the Epic giveaway of the original ends. If you claim the first game now and end up wanting more, the second is there.
Is it worth playing? Yes, clearly. The more specific question is whether it is for you. If you want action or a power fantasy, look elsewhere. If you want a game that takes its story seriously, builds characters you will think about after you finish, and trusts you to figure things out without a tutorial holding your hand, this is an easy recommendation at any price under twenty dollars. At free, it is a no-brainer.