I wish there were more RPGs like Citizen Sleeper. I struggle way too much with the 50-100 hour Personas, Final Fantasies, Xenoblade Chronicles, and the like – great games, no doubt, but so demanding of my time that they may as well be another job. Citizen Sleeper is different. It’s deliberately short-form and nearly devoid of fat – a fascinating narrative journey that removes all combat and focuses its effort on the strength of its prose, not at all unlike Disco Elysium, which is, oh, you know, only one of my favorite games of all time.
While comparing any narrative-focused RPG to Disco Elysium is a losing battle for most, Citizen Sleeper captured my heart in 2022 as one of my favorite games of the year because even in its own niche subgenre, it dared to be quite different. It showed you a futuristic, dystopian world through the eyes of a Sleeper, a humanoid machine existing solely to harbor a copy of the human mind and be sent into indentured servitude.
Upon escaping your corporate overlords, you spend the game trying to survive on a spaceship called The Eye, where random dice rolls and strategic building of skills determine your daily success in completing jobs, succeeding in skill checks, and determining the overall course of your journey.
The thing about Citizen Sleeper, though, is that while its abundance of reading and relatively simplistic gameplay wouldn’t be for everyone, it’s a game without many flaws, and one that felt like a breath of fresh air in a genre that could use some more compact experiences. So how does any developer follow that up with a sequel that isn’t just more of the same for a game whose mechanics are primarily there to serve the plot?
To be honest, more of the same would’ve been fine by me. I love Citizen Sleeper for everything it is. And yet, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is the rare sequel that manages to meaningfully iterate on its predecessor, becoming bigger and better in every conceivable way. And I can’t wait to tell you about it.
Now, let me answer the most pressing question for some of you – do you need to have played Citizen Sleeper in order for Citizen Sleeper 2 to make sense? The answer is no, you really don’t at all. While there’s some character overlap between the two games, the sequel is actually an entirely new story set within the same universe. Frankly, if there’s any reason I’d recommend you play Citizen Sleeper first, it’s only because it’s a great game, and Citizen Sleeper 2 is so meaningfully better that the original’s gameplay may seem a little simplistic in retrospect if you choose to play this one first. But hey, no pressure. You do you, girl.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector again puts us in the shoes of a sleeper, but one whose dependence on stabilizer, the drug that keeps sleepers functioning and reliant on their captors, has been broken, albeit with some strange malfunctions taking its place. You awake with no memories as your friend and partner, Serafin, saves you from the clutches of Laine, the creepy leader of a criminal gang with enormous influence on Darkside station. As you escape Darkside and make for the Starward Belt, it’s clear that both Laine’s influence and the impact of an inner-system war make your safety far from a foregone conclusion. So begins the story of Citizen Sleeper 2, a much grander affair than the original in the sense that you’ll no longer be restricted to a single colony, but collecting resources to travel to numerous destinations along the belt, helping out interesting new characters and learning more about yourself and why it feels like you’re mysteriously changing from within.
The original Citizen Sleeper’s slice-of-life pacing helped define it in terms beyond just being a great science fiction story. Rather, for a game so visually and mechanically simplistic, it felt astoundingly immersive. And Citizen Sleeper 2 keeps what worked about the original’s pace but adds to it with surprisingly well-imagined survival mechanics that add a unique layer of suspense.
As with the original game, each day gives you a number of dice that ostensibly represent your sleeper’s energy to perform different functions. That may mean working at a local bar to gain some valuable cryo currency and earn the trust of its owners, or mapping the pathways to the data core of a derelict spaceship. Each dice-based activity will require a certain skill, like Engineering, Endurance, or Intuition, and your proficiency with that skill will determine if your dice will function as intended or become strengthened or weakened accordingly. Completing contracts and objectives will give you upgrade points to invest in buffing up these skills, but getting to that point is hardly a trivial matter.
Your starting proficiency in the game’s five core skills will be determined by one of three classes you choose at the start of the game. I chose the Operator, who specializes in Interfacing but is weak in Endurance, meaning any interface dice roll would enhance the power of each die, while every endurance dice roll would be weakened. And you want to make sure the dice you’re rolling have generally high values because that’s what determines the outcome of a particular action.
Slotting a value of six will always guarantee a 100% positive outcome, slotting a five will guarantee a positive or neutral outcome with equal probability, and slotting a three or four will grant a 25% chance of either a positive or negative outcome and a 50% chance of a neutral outcome. You get the idea.
Now, what these outcomes actually mean is dependent upon the action in question, as each action in the game is rated as Safe, Risky, or Dangerous. Progressing the story in Citizen Sleeper 2 is a case of throwing enough neutral or positive dice rolls at a given objective. Hitting a neutral outcome on a Risky action, for example, may still progress your objective slightly but take away some of your energy, a health bar of sorts to be usually replenished by getting yourself some food at a local bar. But getting a neutral outcome on a Dangerous action may actively accrue Stress, a new mechanic in Citizen Sleeper 2 that can drastically change the course of a given mission.
Accruing Stress while your ship, dubbed The Rig, is ported in a colony is usually not a big deal, as you can return to The Rig to rest it off or remove large chunks of it while traveling to another colony. The more that stress builds up at the top of your screen, the higher probability it has of damaging one of your dice when you rest between each daily cycle. That’s right, each of them has a separate health bar, and three points of damage to a die will break it entirely and require you to buy components to repair them on board the ship. Unforgivingly enough, you can only repair a die if it’s broken entirely, so taking a bunch of them with one point of health on a contract is probably not an amazing idea. Because depending on what difficulty you choose at the start of the game, breaking all of your dice will have consequences – in fact, on the hardest difficulty, it’ll result in permadeath and require you to restart the game from the beginning.
While the build-up of stress while in port is fairly easy to handle, that’s much less so the case while on contract. Contracts are new to Citizen Sleeper 2 and are the result of a character giving you a mission that requires traveling somewhere else in the Belt, usually a local destination like the abandoned ruin of a ship that needs to be scrapped for salvage. Dice cannot be repaired on contract and you can’t rest to get rid of stress either, so every decision you make very much matters. If you start a day by rolling a bunch of ones and twos, you’re not going to have a good time unless your skills are really built up, because each time a suboptimal roll accrues stress, it can not only impact the health of your die, but also stress on the contract itself.
Contract stress builds up slowly but can rapidly spiral out of control, as every few points will trigger a crisis. A crisis is an urgent problem with its own unique location on the contract that you’ll have to use your dice to resolve quickly, because ending a cycle with a crisis active will accrue one stress for each. Given that you go into every contract with a limited number of supplies, one of which is consumed each day, you don’t have too many cycles to complete the contract successfully, and each successive crisis that unfolds will only put the mission in jeopardy. The game doesn’t completely throw you to the wolves with contracts though, as it’s now possible to recruit allies onto your ship and choose up to two of them at a time to go into each contract with you. This choice is important, as you want to make sure your allies have skills that do a good job of complementing your own, as each one of them will have two additional dice per cycle that you can use to complete objectives.
It's hard to describe just how stressful these contracts can become when you’re not in the thick of them, but they’re a brilliant addition to Citizen Sleeper 2 because there are so many well-calibrated moving parts to consider. And while yes, the gameplay technically just consists of strategically choosing which dice to roll and when, the consistently excellent writing makes each segment feel like far more than the sum of its discrete parts.
There’s another new gameplay feature in Citizen Sleeper 2 that I don’t want to forget to mention, and that’s the glitch dice. Certain actions will grant you a temporary glitch, which is not a gift you want, as it will replace one of your normal dice with a glitch version that will always guarantee an 80% chance of a negative outcome and a 20% chance of a positive outcome. Using the glitch dice will remove the temporary glitch, but on the normal difficulty setting, letting all of your dice break will give you a permanent glitch, which I promise you from personal experience is really annoying and you want to avoid it. I do like it as a mechanic though, as knowing it can happen palpably ups the stakes even further, especially with the stress mechanics considered.
For any fans of the first game, you should be getting the impression by now that Citizen Sleeper 2 is not a sequel that’s content to rest on the laurels of its predecessor. Its emphasis on travel between numerous colonies, brilliantly well-realized new mechanics, and overall grander scope lend it the feeling of a much grander sci-fi journey while keeping its intimate character-driven storytelling intact. It’s also a much longer game, with my journey taking 16 hours to run the credits while having done most but not all side content, compared to the 9 or 10 hours it took me to complete the original. And despite this sequel’s additional layers of complexity, the game’s choice-driven narrative still feels like I have a guiding hand in everything that happens, even if not every decision feels like a major fork in the road.
It's truthfully hard to criticize a sequel to a game I love that manages to build on that game in only positive ways. But much like the original game, it’s possible to see a couple of ways that its ambition surpasses its budget. For one, Citizen Sleeper 2 requires an enormous amount of reading without any of the corresponding voice acting of a game like Disco Elysium. I don’t see any way around this without having compromised other parts of the experience, but it’s worth pointing out for those of you who don’t want to feel like you’re reading a novel rather than playing a video game. Not a problem I personally have, but if you do, I get it. Furthermore, Citizen Sleeper 2’s visual presentation is fairly aligned with the original in that most of what’s happening is left to the imagination.
You don’t control a player avatar at any point in the game, but rather cycle through each location’s key points of interest and activate events accordingly. I’m personally a fan of this approach, as it keeps the pacing brisk and avoids long stretches of aimless walking between events that might have been the alternative, but there are times when the game’s detailed, vivid prose feels out of sync with what’s actually being shown on the screen. The game might tell me I just entered a colony that’s bustling with activity, ships coming and going, people of all sorts of identities and occupations swarming through its various markets and docking bays, and yet all I can see is a zoomed-out view of a colony that’s relatively lifeless and still.
Part of the beauty of Citizen Sleeper is that the power of its writing invigorates the imagination, as all high-quality writing should. But part of me did wish that the increase in the sequel’s scope would’ve resulted in a bit more visual clarity to make each location feel more alive. Its graphical style’s minimalist approach remains mostly effective, though, and the greater variety of locations relative to its predecessor can be striking in their own right.
The game runs great on the Steam Deck too, with just a few areas of slowdown but otherwise fully capable of running at a consistent 60 fps with full controller support.
What’s odd about Citizen Sleeper 2, though, is that there are literally no visual settings – not even resolution – meaning the game seemingly renders at whatever the resolution of your monitor is. So, if you do have any performance issues when running at a high resolution on weaker hardware, know that lowering the displayed resolution of the monitor itself may help you out. While Citizen Sleeper 2’s sound design is about as minimalist as its visuals, this is in no way a bad thing. Each location is backed by ambient noise relevant to it, whether that be the eerie hum of a derelict spaceship or clashing utensils in the background of a busy restaurant. And the soundtrack, while mostly aiming to be gentle and unintrusive, has some genuinely great original tracks that often played in my head even once I turned the game off.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is a rare breed these days – a sequel to an already excellent game that manages to build on everything its predecessor set up while adding a meaningful set of its own mechanics to intuitively enhance the experience. Anybody who enjoyed the original should view this release as absolutely necessary, and as long as you’re not bothered by all the reading, you’ve got one heck of a journey ahead.
ESSENTIAL
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