Fellow Traveler, Double Jump Communications and Jump Over the Age were kind enough to grant me a review code for Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. Thank you!
Game- Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector
Developer- Jump Over the Age
Publisher- Fellow Traveler
Release Date- January 31st, 2025
Available Platforms- Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X/S (Game Pass Day One), PC
I played on- PC (Steam Deck)
Play time- 12 hours
Accessibility Options: Three difficulty options, screen text size, scroll speed, music volume level, sound effects volume level
Citizen Sleeper, released in 2022 by Gareth Damian Martin's Jump Over the Age, landed at number four on my list of favorite games of that year on the strengths of its sci-fi worldbuilding, audiovisual presentation and use of survival-lite, tabletop-inspired RPG mechanics to reinforce the precarious situation that your character, an escaped Sleeper, found themself in. This year's sequel, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, doubles down on everything that made the first game work while addressing one particular point of (warranted) criticism pointed at the first game. Read on for more details, but so as to not bury the lede- Citizen Sleeper 2 is a fantastic follow-up that uses its intuitive dice-based RPG mechanics to drill into the emotional core of the story and world even better than the first game did.
In Citizen Sleeper 2, you again play as an escaped Sleeper, an emulated consciousness placed into a robot "shell", forced to work off your debts while your human body "sleeps". As you may expect, the corporation that owns your shell does not take too kindly to escaped Sleepers, and so you need to place your trust in shady individuals, make plans and take jobs that you may not feel confident in, and always look over your shoulder for the corporation's hunters. In the first game, you were on the run from these hunters, trying to carve out a life while also trying to find a steady supply of Stabilizer, a drug that counteracts your shell's planned obsolescence. In Citizen Sleeper 2, however, your Sleeper has already entered into a back-alley arrangement with a man named Laine who has broken your dependence on Stabilizer in exchange for you working for him. One form of servitude, traded for another. The game begins with your Sleeper waking up from an aborted reboot procedure, unsure of anything except for a single feeling- fear. You're running for your life, Laine is angry, and Laine is coming to find you.
A Sleeper can never get too comfortable. Image courtesy of Fellow Traveler.
The biggest change between Citizen Sleeper and Citizen Sleeper 2 is that instead of managing multiple survival meters as your Shell continues to break down due to planned obsolescence, you are now managing one survival meter (energy) and constant pressures coming from multiple directions. The life of a Sleeper is an uncomfortable and anxious one- never knowing which seemingly friendly face is going to ultimately betray you, but the first Citizen Sleeper game only kept up the feeling of pressure on the players for a short time before a combination of familiarity with systems and learning what's real and what's artificial led you to a feeling of comfort that clashed with the desperation your character supposedly never stops feeling until the end (maybe). In contrast, Citizen Sleeper 2 never lets off the pressure until it is narratively appropriate, and while most players will experience the pain and frustration that comes with stacking failures and consequences, those consequences serve to reinforce the struggle that is day-to-day life as an escaped Sleeper. The first Citizen Sleeper was almost cozy in a weird way, but Citizen Sleeper 2 can be downright punishing at times. The common refrain out there is that video games are supposed to be "fun", and there is nothing "fun" about everything falling apart around you, maybe even through no fault of your own. Citizen Sleeper 2 makes the confident assertion that the low points are worth experiencing too, and it's an assertion that I greatly respect, even if I may have been cursing out loud when the dice didn't roll my way.
Choose your strengths (and weaknesses). Image courtesy of Fellow Traveler.
Citizen Sleeper 2 begins by allowing you to pick your starting class out of three possible options, and unlike the first game, there is always one (of five total) skill that is completely unavailable to you. You'll use these skills to gain bonus points on dice rolls and skill checks in this game's dice-based RPG systems. Each day, you'll roll five dice, and those dice serve as a limit on how many things you can do and your likelihood of success in doing them, and using dice like this really gives this game a tactile, tabletop-esque feel, beyond the abstracted or even hidden dice rolls of many other RPGs. In Citizen Sleeper 2, your dice are everything, and new to Citizen Sleeper 2 is a dice health mechanic; oftentimes you will choose to do a risky or dangerous action where failure can accumulate Stress. Higher Stress leads to a higher probability of breaking your dice, which will hamstring your effectiveness until you are able to fix them. Less possible dice means less actions you can take, which means less resources you can collect or decreased efficiency while out on contract jobs. Oh, and remember Laine? He's constantly tracking and following you, making it so that you can't stay in one place for too long, so if you've found a place you can comfortably camp out and gather resources, you have a limit on how long you can do that. These pressures can often play off of each other and lead to compounding misery, and there was one part of my playthrough that legitimately felt like I had hit rock bottom. But then again, Sleepers are often put into difficult situations, doing dangerous jobs, and while these consequences can feel frustrating as one risky decision and a little bad luck can lead to a world of pain, it serves the narrative and life of a Sleeper in a confident way. An emotional journey has rises and falls, peaks and valleys, and your low moments in Citizen Sleeper 2 will also give you an opportunity to claw your way back, and your successes taste sweeter when you remember where you came from.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is a game about found family and community. Image courtesy of Fellow Traveler.
The Citizen Sleeper series explores the ideas of community and home, despite the lonely and paranoid situation that an escaped Sleeper must find themselves in, and Citizen Sleeper 2 furthers this by not only introducing you to friendly folks in the various locations you travel to, but also through a new crew-building storyline. As you move from little hub to little hub, you'll meet and have a chance to recruit various NPCs to your ship's crew, eventually forming a little community of misfits and left-behinds like yourself. Where Citizen Sleeper was about finding a place to call home, Citizen Sleeper 2 is about forming a community and possibly taking that home with you. Your crew will bring their own various skill sets, questlines and optional activities with them, and you'll be able to select two crew members to go out on dangerous contracts with you, potentially doubling down on your strengths or covering for your weaknesses. Your crew members also have their own backstories, insecurities and personal drives, which add a certain degree of...unpredictability to the contracts you take on together. There were definitely times where I felt that a certain character was potentially a good fit for a job, but also due to their personality or personal backstories...they might fuck this whole thing up. This is in addition to the fact that you are often taking on contracts with incomplete information, so you may not know who the perfect crew members are to accompany you. You're left to select your crew members and hope for the best on multiple fronts.
However, despite feeling a strong connection to the crew's fit within the game world and the Sleeper's journey, I didn't always feel a close connection with the whole crew as people. This is a quirk of my experience with this series, as certain characters return or are referenced from the first game and I didn't always recognize them, despite the relatively small cast. This isn't to say that they are poorly written or shallow- they are well-sketched and (mostly) likable characters, but oftentimes the game offers you the choice to put yourself in a risky situation to help a crew member out, and I mostly chose to do so more out of a desire to see what would happen or to potentially save a character that covers up for a weakness of mine, rather than jumping at the chance to help out of an intense connection with them as a person. I have a hard time pinning down why this is the case- it may be in part due to the relatively short amount of time you spend with this crew, as opposed to your Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate 3 companions, but I don't want to pin it solely on the length of game as that doesn't seem fair to any of the games mentioned here. It's a minor thing, it's not the case for every character, and it's not something that I expect to hear from many others who play these games, but if there is anything about Citizen Sleeper 2 that didn't connect 100% with me, that's it.
Citizen Sleeper 2 also explores the existential nature of being a Sleeper, pondering how different you are, as well as how human you still are, and how your life compares and contrasts to the non-Sleepers that make up your crew. Your crew members have fewer dice to work with, and can handle a lower degree of Stress than you can, which helps to gamify the difference in make and capabilities between your synthetic Sleeper body and their human bodies. Gareth Damian Martin explores these themes with their usual deft writing touch, saying a lot with just a little, never relying on overly flowery prose to provoke deep thought and emotion from the player. There were dozens of times throughout my playthrough where I stopped to re-read a short passage, making sure to soak it in before moving on. Many people will choose to play Citizen Sleeper 2 for its world, characters and narrative, and they will not leave disappointed.
You'll need the right crew for each job. Image courtesy of Fellow Traveler.
Throughout Citizen Sleeper 2's 12 hour runtime, I went through high highs and very low lows, all in accordance with the dangerous nature of life on the run. The risks I took sometimes bore fruit, but sometimes they turned to ash in my hands, which then set off a cascade of more and more desperate decisions as I tried to claw myself out of the hole I had dug for myself. Such is the life of a Sleeper, I suppose. Along the way, my crew and I navigated a minefield of physical, mental and existential threats, which made the little pockets of home that we carved out for ourselves along the way feel that much more earned. Add in another fantastic, moody and atmospheric soundtrack by Amos Roddy, and we have another winner. Gareth Damian Martin was already a member of the "Day-One Buy" club, so this isn't a surprise to me, but 2025 is off to a very strong start with the release of Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. Expect to see it on the best-of lists at the end of the year.
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