That’s my favorite game from 2025! Source: jumpovertheage’s Bluesky account

On October 24, Citizen Sleeper 2 from Jump Over The Age, the one-person game development studio founded by Gareth Damian Martin, received the Code the Rights’ Best Game 2025 award from Amnesty International.

If Amnesty International having awards for games is news to you, there’s a good reason for that. Created in Poland, the Code the Rights award competition is relatively new. It began in 2024 and aims “not only to highlight existing games that effectively engage with human rights aspects but also to inspire young developers to explore important issues in their future projects,” according to Amnesty International’s website. Director of Amnesty International Poland Anna Błaszczak-Banasiak is quoted expressing a similar sentiment, saying the organization wanted to recognize creators that “don’t shy away from difficult global issues shaping our world, such as social inequalities, armed conflicts, migration, and refugee crises, but approach them with care and thoughtfulness. They use the power of media to present wise diagnoses, ask the right questions, and bring important topics into the public debate.”

Two awards get handed out as part of Code the Rights. The first is the Best Game Award, which recognizes a game that fully addresses themes of human rights. Both the game’s narrative and how players interact with the game’s themes are evaluated. Games eligible for the award must have been released between August of the current year and August of the previous year. In 2024, the first Code the Rights’ Best Game award was given to Larian Studio’s Baldur’s Gate 3.

The second award, the Special Award, is granted to a game containing a particularly interesting element. Specifically, Amnesty International says an interesting element could be “a side story, innovative technological solution, creative approach to difficult topics, or other features that contribute to promoting human rights values.” Moreover, an unorthodox feature of The Special Award is that it can be granted to an older game that, regardless of its release date, features “exceptionally accurate commentary” about an urgent human rights crisis or global challenge. The 2024 Code the Rights’ Special Award went to 11 bit studio’s This War of Mine, which came out in 2014.

As for why *Citizen Sleeper 2 *won this year’s Best Game 2025 award, Amnesty International says the game ”shows that human rights are not just grand declarations – they are a daily struggle for survival, an effort not to lose hope and trust in others,” and that the game allows players to reflect on what it means to live a world “devoid of empathy.” Additionally, the Special Award 2025 went to *Detroit: Become Human, *which launched in 2018, for how it encourages players to reflect on what it means to be human, as well as who gets to decide that.

When asked about winning what’s effectively Amnesty International’s Game of the Year award, Gareth Martin expressed immense gratitude for the recognition. Over email, they said that *Citizen Sleeper *“has always been a project about human rights, where sleepers provide a way of exploring who gets to be considered human, and whose rights are respected by our societies. In our current moment, when hostility and divisive politics are being encouraged to the benefit of the powerful, when trans people are being undermined and demonised, when basic human rights, to protest, to resist, to exist, are under question, I think it is important that video [games] form part of the resistance to rolling back and undermining human rights and the rights to bodily autonomy.” They added that Amnesty International recognizing games is a welcome step toward “encouraging games to engage with human rights and recognising those that already do.”

*Citizen Sleeper 2 *isn’t just getting recognition from one of the world’s largest human rights organizations. The sequel to Citizen Sleeper has also been nominated for both the Narrative and Game of the Year categories of Six One Indie’s The Indie Game Awards, in addition to a nomination in the Best Indie category of The Golden Joystick Awards. Evidently, outside of Citizen Sleeper 2’s advancements to its predecessor’s dice-rolling mechanics, as well as its addition of interesting and diverse crew members, the game’s themes around human rights, bodily autonomy, and finding community while surviving a capitalistic nightmare has resonated with people across the world.

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