Citizen Sleeper 2 makes you live with the consequences

Playing choice-based RPGs for over twenty years has made me something I disdain: a save scummer. I quick-save before hitting a skill-based dialogue option or pull up a walkthrough before starting that endgame-sounding mission just in case the point of no return isn’t telegraphed. I rarely have real life FOMO, but I constantly have the fear of missing a quest in roleplaying games. Citizen Sleeper 2 takes that anxiety, ramps it up to 11, and weaponizes it as a game mechanic. And I love it. 

Citizen Sleeper 2 wants you to know two things innately: you cannot stop time and no matter how hard you try you will make mistakes. With the same dice mechanic as the first Citizen Sleeper and the lack of any save options at all, you truly have no choice but to accept these facts and try to survive nonetheless. 

I feared this tension would slow me down and make me mull over every choice, but instead it’s propulsive. There’s not a decision clock ticking down, but it feels like you don’t have time to think. You won’t be able to unlock every hidden area on every station, so I found myself committing to the first few quests I unlocked. 

In many ways, Citizen Sleeper 2 is a perfect sequel. Developer Jump Over the Age kept the best parts of Citizen Sleeper: the tense dice and clock mechanics, the mysterious world, the cadre of characters, and some of the best writing in games. Starward Vector just made it bigger and better in almost every way.

Just like the first game, you play as a sleeper, a human consciousness uploaded into a synthetic body. In the first game, you awoke on a single station and unraveled the mysteries within, filled out a pantheon of rich characters, and tried to survive. You used your dice to complete skill checks that either progress a goal-oriented clock (wander the docks to discover a new bar) or progress a consequences clock (the police are on the hunt).

The first game is interested in a single place, peeling back its layers to reveal more complex dystopias and the people clawing for survival within it. You’ll work for mechanics or bartenders to scrape together the money you need for Stabilizer, a drug that keeps your synthetic body from degrading.

Instead of hunting for Stabilizer in Starward Vector, you are an amnesiac on the run from Laine, a terrifying mob boss and the game’s antagonist. You’ll spend your time scrounging for just enough money to buy supplies and fuel to either run from Laine or start a contract to gain a powerful edge.

The contract system is my favorite part of Starward Vector and truly an innovation on the Citizen Sleeper formula. As you play the game, you’ll run into people who need something: a data core from an old corporate ship or an ice-rich asteroid sampled. You’ll take the contract, hire on an interesting crew member to help out, then hoard whatever fuel and supplies you can before jetting off to a new location. 

Once there, you have a finite amount of time to finish your business. You’ll use your dice (and a reduced pool for your crew members) to progress clocks on the mission to get you closer to your goal. Each day, you’ll reset your dice, but your supplies go down by one. As you progress through the contract, you’ll inevitably fail a roll resulting in stress (which can damage your dice, reducing the pool you have to use) and progressing the contract’s fail clock. If you fail a roll too many times, complications arise that will spread your stressed out crew even thinner. It’s all quite harrowing. 

Your real world clocks are still ticking too. In one of my first contracts, I managed to finish the job after a few cycles, hit the fail state on the structure I was working on, then was shuttled directly back to hub area. The “Laine finds you” clock ran out while I was on contract so I returned to Hexport to a pretty brutal cutscene that incorporated my failure to escape. 

Citizen Sleeper 2’s magic trick is its ability to let the player fail forward. I don’t miss the ability to quick save my game and save scum because the game wants you to fail, it wants to show off how it thought of that. The difficulty settings allude to dying and a game over, but so far I haven’t failed hard enough to die. I’ve kept Laine at bay and I’ve been caught. Each success or failure enriches the story and makes this trip across the Belt feel like it is your own. I’ve found the story to be far more responsive and engaging than my time with Baldur’s Gate 3.

In an Eurogamer interview, Gareth Damian Martin, Citizen Sleeper’s creator, revealed that there are over 230,000 words in the script of Citizen Sleeper 2. As a game of just rolling dice and reading text, I believe it. The writing is prose: rich with a cyberpunk style that is grounded, but lush when it needs to be. I couldn’t help being reminded of the writing in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner oscillating between matter-of-fact neo-noir and the poetry of “glittering C-beams off the shoulder of Orion.” 

I played Citizen Sleeper 2 primarily while traveling back to Wisconsin for my grandfather’s funeral. It was as sad an affair as a celebration of life for a man who lived to 95 could be. Lately, it feels that the background hum of modern life is a Vonnegutian “So it goes” as institutions are toppled and we become unnaturally okay towards death “post”-pandemic. Life is a frantic hurrying for a “break” that never feels restorative or peaceful; a storm before the storm before the storm.

This melancholic backdrop of expected death and humdrum meandering towards inevitable collapse was my experience of Citizen Sleeper 2. It’s a poetic (both literally and metaphorically) exploration of life in the face of inevitability. As much as Citizen Sleeper 2 is a despairing look at survival among the stars, it is also a story of community, hope, and camaraderie. It’s about living with the hand you’re dealt, while striving for more. It’s about desperation, regret, and life.