In an unsettling paradigm shift, it forces you to think of influencing The Eye in a magnitude large enough to handle an influx of human life. It’s a sharp addition that changed the way I approached my entire playthrough - far from feeling appended, Flux wove itself naturally into the existing tapestry of gameplay.

The DLC introduces a new variable: refugees living on a flotilla who seek a home on The Eye, but are trapped in limbo thanks to station bureaucracy. The Flux update kicks off in the Greenway, a mid-to-late-game location less densely packed than the rest of the station, and an excellent spot to park new storylines. You must take jobs and help out where you can, finding ways to afford your meds in order to fight another day. The station has been abandoned, and a number of the remaining people on it have organized across political factions - others simply attempt to live another day or find a way out.

The game unfolds across Erlin’s Eye, a ramshackle space station that’s the victim of late-late-stage capitalism. Your body is designed with “planned obsolescence,” and you must take a proprietary kind of medicine to stay alive. In Citizen Sleeper, you role-play as a Sleeper, a character who’s not quite human and not quite machine, but entirely owned by the megacorp Essen-Arp. But it’s also a great excuse to start this melancholic game for the first time - it left an impression on me and is still one of the best releases of the year.

If you loved Citizen Sleeper, the text-heavy sci-fi RPG, then the game’s new free DLC, Episode One: Flux, will be a welcome addition it adds tough new story decisions while also deepening the well of wonderful world-building and vivid characters.

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