Though both are recent games that utilize branching narratives, Citizen Sleeper forgoes one questionable feature from The Quarry, which ultimately makes Citizen Sleeper a better branching narrative in the process. Both games were released within a month of each other, with Citizen Sleeper released in May 2022 on Nintendo Switch and PC, and The Quarry released in June on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. While Citizen Sleeper leans more into tabletop RPG influences, The Quarry is strictly an interactive drama.

The Quarry from Supermassive Games, the development team behind Until Dawn, puts a lot of emphasis on the flexibility of its narrative. Every character one sees can either live or die by the end of the story, depending on their actions. The Quarry can be played in multiplayer mode, and it's surprisingly fun with a group of friends. This has also helped to make the game successful on Twitch.

Related: The Quarry: Every Famous Actor In The Cast

Despite this, there is one feature from The Quarry that Citizen Sleeper lacks, and is a better game for it. In The Quarry, when making certain decisions, players will be greeted with a screen saying "Path Chosen." This represents that a choice has just been made leading to a major branch in the game's story.

Citizen Sleeper Avoids Problems With Player Choice The Quarry Embraces

A screenshot indicating "path chosen" in The Quarry.

On the other hand, Jump Over The Age's Citizen Sleeper has little to no immediate feedback for player decisions. Usually, players have to wait to see the reactions of other characters to their decisions in order to decide whether the net result was positive or negative. Only in-game days after a decision is made in Citizen Sleeper do players know what the true consequences of their actions are.

Because of this, players never feel like a decision they've made is "wrong" or "right." With The Quarry, however, it's hard not to feel a sense of dread and an overall worse ending coming for The Quarry cast after seeing "PATH CHOSEN" on the screen. Some decision the player just made is likely now leading to a character's death, making players feel like they potentially made a bad call.  Because paths are never explicitly stated in Citizen Sleeper, different decisions instead just feel like different stories, not stories that are objectively better or worse. This helps Citizen Sleeper encourage further playthroughs, to see how every member of the game's wonderful cast of characters ends up. With The Quarry's characters' fates feeling like life and death are the only options, most players will likely be satisfied after one playthrough, as long as their favorite characters survive.

Overall, Citizen Sleeper's soulful, sci-fi RPG morality system and lack of immediate feedback succeed where The Quarry falters. In The Quarry, a bad decision feels like a player just messed up their Quarry playthrough irreversibly. Citizen Sleeper takes time with its story and shows how the consequences of decisions play out in a way that's much more compelling, making the game much more replayable in addition to simply being a stronger and better-executed branching narrative than The Quarry.

Next: Everything The Quarry Does Better Than Until Dawn