Citizen Sleeper

Citizen Sleeper is a game about playing as a robot who escaped from big capitalism. The company in question likes to put copies of people's minds in to these robots that are programmed to fail unless they sate their drug addictions (which come in the form of patented drugs) or else their artificial bodies decay. You escape and end up on an ancap space station and from there basically have to find and do odd jobs to buy your food and drugs to stick around.

Each "day" you get a number of D6 rolled based on how well maintained your body is. You then perform actions by dragging the dice in to slots which tells you how likely to succeed or be punished you are. There is also a hacking mechanic that requires putting the exact correct die in to it to progress.

The die mechanic with hacking can mess up your time table. You have to go check if its a good day to go hacking (if you've got the exact die you need) and it's the same for each task available so you may not be able to do any computer tasks that day. Hacking doesn't really play as big of a role as you would think though. It's needed for a particular ending to the game and there's a couple minor bonuses for it. But I neglected the matrix and just did other things.

It turns out one of the best ways to get money in the game if you are an intelligence character is to just play the stock market (it's an action in the game so there's no RL analysis involved) until you unlock the area which allows you to scam people at cards. Then you just scam people at cards and comfortably afford your drugs and food for the rest of the game.

There were genuinely sad moments in the game. Other friends who were hinted at that didn't make it (and you only know about some of these things by doing optional stuff instead of what you were supposed to be doing) and finding other robots who end up getting shot because of reasons. Choices aren't really all that meaningful. Optional side stuff just gives you access to lore that you can't do anything with in-game. There are a handful of walls put up that require you to dump dice in to them day after day.

There are various hard timers and events that run on cycles. It's not a big problem though. As long as you understand that action dice are needed to do anything and you keep your body condition maxed you don't really have a shortage of actions. And there is a perk you can buy that allows rerolling the die once per day. So if you get some trashy rolls you just spend the good ones, reroll whats left, and its probably fine. The hard timer for the story can actually be cancelled through story events as well. Although some story events make this harder (by completing one quest line you actually end up cutting off a black market contact so you can no longer buy drugs from them.)

Overall I liked it. I played it in one sitting for around 6-8 hours before getting some endings and binning it. Although you're never much more to anyone than a robot that is really useful for difficult tasks. And nobody ever asks what your name is.