Bodies tear, break, grow, shrink, endure, decay. I occasionally think of myself as a sack of skin transporting around a pure, permanent, irreducible self protected from oblivion by its mortal shell but also transcending it. But as I get older, weaker, more tired, the act of self deception, for better and for worse, becomes harder to maintain. The body keeps the score, whether we want to see it or not. “Everyone has to contend with the entropy of their flesh,” Citizen Sleeper 2‘s narrator tells me. “And, in that realization, you suddenly feel less alone.”
A sequel to the 2022 sci-fi visual novel RPG and launching January 31 on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and PC, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a beautiful, tedious, harrowing sci-fi adventure about a copy of a human consciousness stored inside an artificial body (what’s called a Sleeper) who’s on the run from cruel corporate owners. Survival entails endless gig-economy toil across a dozen or so asteroid colonies called the Starward Belt, scattered throughout the remnants of a once powerful governing federation whose ghosts still haunt the crime-ridden backwater. It’s a slow burn, and a memorable one.
Order Citizen Sleeper 2: Humble Bundle
If you played the first Citizen Sleeper, you’ll recognize its sequel following a similar but greatly expanded blueprint, leaving behind the atmosphere of a single planet to discover an entire solar system’s worth of possibilities—more characters to meet, bad situations to scrape your way out of, and tools for navigating the harsh realities of an interstellar existence ruled by perpetual scarcity. And like its predecessor, Citizen Sleeper 2 is primarily a game about words and dice and relishing the serendipity when the two combine in unexpected ways.
Image: Jump Over The Age
Inspired by tabletop mechanics, Citizen Sleeper 2‘s quests and storylines are governed by a fickle equation of resource balancing and probability-based skill checks. Want to escape the mining asteroid you’re on before your corporate overlords catch you? You’ll need fuel and supplies. Visit some nearby nodes on the map offering work, slot in your dice, and hope your rolls successfully complete the job and net you extra cash. There are no big victories in Citizen Sleeper 2, just the patient accumulation of small wins.
But now you’ve exhausted your dice and need to go to bed. Wake up and you realize you need food or risk a cascading set of bodily failures that will result in one or more of your dice breaking. Eating costs money too. Better take a contract that’ll let you cash in big-time. Except you follow the job to the middle of nowhere and now you’re running out of food all over again, some dice are breaking and others are glitched from permanent damage, and you botched the job so badly that the asteroid you were supposed to survey for water is now breaking up. Back to the nearest colony in even worse shape than when you left.
It’s a credit to Sleeper Citizen 2‘s excellent writing by creator Gareth Damian Martin that, rather than burning me out, the repetition of its resource gathering and the constant tension of things inevitably going sideways keeps me compelled, serving as a richly textured backdrop against which the game’s real concern—a burgeoning family of misfits on a busted-up space ship—takes center stage. Survival in Citizen Sleeper 2 is merely a catalyst for setting up collisions with other people, including a series of similarly flawed and fragile strays who slowly join your crew
Serafin, a rude and short-fused pilot, is the one who rescued you from the company that made you, and who got you both on the run. Bliss is a tranquil mechanic always ready to take the temperature down a notch. Juni is a hacker obsessed with uncovering information from before the collapse, when the local system was dotted with massive ships and baroque facilities run by powerful artificial intelligences. And the only thing Yu-Jin likes more than drinking and gambling is chasing bad intel in the hopes of finding a long-lost interstellar space drive that can help him escape the Starward Belt.
Image: Jump Over The Age
Like any true family, they fight, piss each other off, and occasionally let one another down. But they also add their own hopes and dreams to the mix, help shoulder one another’s burdens, and, most importantly, don’t cut and run when shit hits the ceiling, which is where it inevitably ends up in Citizen Sleeper 2. These social bonds are borne out in the missions you go on with your crew, where their unique skills and dice rolls are added to yours. The relief of having friends was never sharper than when their fives and sixes helped me narrowly complete a job that would have been impossible on my own.
I fucked up early in Citizen Sleeper 2. Made some bad calls, got sloppy, and lived with the consequences of that through to the very end. My dice broke from stress, which made it harder to get the materials I needed to repair them. I blacked out a few times and permanently damaged myself, resulting in glitched dice that only ever had a one-in-five chance of not completely screwing me. I uncovered hidden space cathedrals and helped launch corporate rebellions, and yet no matter what I accomplished or how lucky I got, the jobs never got much easier. The work continued, though; my crew grew, and we managed to scrape together a life for ourselves, at least for a little while.
Flesh is soft and prone to injuries, but it’s also flexible and resilient. It fights the slow erosion of order and meaning into chaos and emptiness for as long as it can, which isn’t enough but at least it’s something. In Citizen Sleeper 2 the struggle can end up feeling like much more, thanks in part to the seamless melding of art and interface, as well as plaintive, industrial melodies of minimalist electronic composer Amos Roddy. Life is messy in the Starward Belt, but its evocative beauty is only brought into such sharp focus because of the uncompromising precision of its elegant presentation.
There was no game quite like Citizen Sleeper when it first came out. It’s nice to finally have another one.
Order Citizen Sleeper 2: Humble Bundle
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