Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

‘Yes, and’ might nowadays mostly be known as a song by Ariana Grande, but to me it will always be the main principle in improv comedy. In this context, it means that as a performer, you accept the story beat another performer has introduced and then build on that premise rather than going against the flow of the scene. The first Citizen Sleeper, a TTRPG-inspired sci-fi game by Jump Over the Age, was a game that really rewarded sticking to this principle. Many of its characters asked you to trust them, to put faith in their abilities or their word, despite not really knowing them. It’s a big ask in these times of general uncertainty and distrust. Given that Citizen Sleeper feels like a continuation of our current timeline, with capitalism causing unknowable amounts of damage to entire communities and individuals, there are plenty of reasons not to give that trust to someone else. That’s before even getting into the fact that the game sees you play as a Sleeper—a kind of android that’s been loaded with a real person’s memories—on the run from the company that owns it.

But giving that trust—accepting the outreached hand and grabbing it—is so incredibly rewarding, as it sets the game up to give us hope. Citizen Sleeper might be a science fiction game set on a space station and starring a robot, but as with all of the best sci-fi, it uses these ingredients to tell incredible human stories. That means that sometimes that trust will be betrayed, but in other moments, you get surprised in the best possible ways. Ways that allow for real connections to be made, whether they be between humans or even between a Sleeper and a human. Now, this might be a very long-winded intro for those of you who want to know about the game’s sequel, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. If you’re interested in this game, it’s probably because, like me, you loved your experience with the first game. In fact, the game received universal acclaim, with it in constant conversation for 2022’s Game of the Year awards. And all that for a game with gameplay that’s mostly making dialogue choices and inputting dice to advance the story. That just tells you what an incredible job Jump Over the Age’s solo dev Gareth Damian Martin has done.

Their work was complemented beautifully by Amos Roddy’s fittingly moody score and the beautiful drawings by renowned comic book artist Guillaume Singelin. So getting those two incredible talents back on board for the sequel was a great first step. It gives this sequel a sense of continuation, despite some gameplay elements from the first game having been dropped and new ones being introduced here. Even though you’re playing as a different Sleeper this time around, this is still the same universe that saw you escape to Erlin’s Eye in the first game. This time around, you are once again on the run. You wake up from an interrupted system reboot. This reboot was supposed to wrestle away control from Laine, the man who claimed ownership over you, and allow for a fresh start. Your buddy Serafim set this up, but the sequence was stopped when Laine crashed the party. You barely manage to make it out of this struggle alive, and from that moment on, you have to stay on the move. The only problem is that you barely remember anything from before the reboot. Who is this Serafim person anyway? And why is Laine still in your head, despite you making it out of the fight safely?

While the first Citizen Sleeper was set on a single spaceship, the sequel goes bigger—like most sequels do. This time around, you have an entire subsection of space to play around in: the Starward Belt. You also have a ship at your command, the Rig, and a friend to fall back on in Serafim, hopefully. The game is all about trying to figure things out while staying on the move and keeping Laine off your trail. It sees you travelling from station to station, getting to know people on each of these, and maybe forming a network of people to help you and possibly befriend.

The big new addition to Citizen Sleeper 2 is the introduction of contracts. These are missions you get to do away from the space stations, whether it’s recovering artefacts or looking for people or cargo. While you might not have the fuel and rations to make it to another station, these contracts can be a nice way to earn some chits, or maybe even find items that will advance any of the multitude of stories on offer. They will also see you gain people’s trust as you try to figure out if that trust should go both ways. On these contracts, you always get to choose who accompanies you as crew as your network builds. Choosing who joins you is important: since you choose a class for yourself at the start of a game, with its accompanying skills, it’s useful to have people with you with a skillset that complements yours. But ask yourself: do you trust this person enough to come with you on this contract?

It’s interesting to see the dynamics between your Sleeper, Serafim, and the people who join you as crew and outsiders constantly shift. Every decision you take throughout the game will affect your relationships with others, and maybe not always in the way you’d like them to. And like I said before, all of this happens through dialogue options and using dice to perform actions. These dice are pre-rolled every cycle (or in-game day), so you might have a pretty rotten hand to begin with. Another new mechanic gets introduced to help you force your hand, so to speak. If you’re struggling to get good dice rolls, you can use the Push feature to get a reroll. Use it wisely though, as it can have bad outcomes as well. If you feel unsure on whether to use this feature, I managed a complete playthrough without using it, so it can be done.

You still use your dice to perform actions, as I said, and those in turn advance clocks that unlock the next chapter in certain stories. You only have five dice per cycle, and some clocks are time-sensitive in that they need to be completed before another clock runs out, so you will have to make choices. Your skills also influence your dice rolls, with them adding to or subtracting from your score depending on the skills you started with and invested in later on in the game. And beware with low scoring dice: negative outcomes can put stress on your dice, which can cause them to break, or when the damage is too much, cause some dice to be rolled as glitch dice, which always have a 1 in 5 chance of being positive but no safety net of a neutral outcome.

I can imagine that seeing the gameplay reduced to these complicated instructions can make the game seem a bit obtuse, or maybe even boring. But that’s because I’m bad at words, and the game is way more intuitive to play than I make it sound here. Every mechanic gets introduced in a way that’s easy to understand, and you don’t get access to all of them all at once. Just like with the first game, you are eased into understanding the mechanics of the game. If you feel throughout your first playthrough that things are a bit too hard, it might be a good idea to go back and start over once you’ve learnt more of the game’s tools and how they interact with each other. You’ll be able to set yourself up for a more enjoyable experience, and there’s plenty of replay value here anyway.Because that’s the thing with having so many stories cross each other and there only being five dice to use in a cycle: you’ll have to choose which tales to pursue. You won’t get to see the ending to all of them; hell, you won’t even get to see the difference between good and bad endings. So there’s plenty of reasons to go back, especially with the game also introducing characters from the original crew on Erlin’s Eye, although I won’t spoil here who you get to meet up with once again.

But that brings me back to probably my favourite part of the game. This universe is so full of life, even though you only meet a couple of people on every space station. There’s a history here, but also a present, and clearly a lot of hopes, dreams, and fears about the future. People don’t have backstories just for the sake of it; they have become who they are because of the world(s) that shaped them. There’s a huge war going on in the background, far away from the Starward Belt, but that doesn’t mean that its consequences don’t reach this far out. There are people who have loved and lost, who have gone through survival mode, who have been broken and put back together. And none more so than your Sleeper, who is evolving, but it’s unclear how or why. Seeing them go through experiences that might be familiar in some ways to so many people is so very interesting, especially if you can relate.

The only thing that makes me a little sad about Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is that it came to an end. Especially since the dev has already confirmed that this will be the final videogame in the series. Luckily, there’s still the Cycles of the Eye solo ttrpg, which you can order through lostincult.co.uk; there are the Helion Dispatches, which you can find through Gareth’s Substack; and work is being done on a full Citizen Sleeper ttrpg that will hand the game’s world over to us and let us discover what else is still hiding within the many systems of this universe. But my time with Citizen Sleeper 2 isn’t over yet. I’ll be diving back in to discover the stories I haven’t managed to complete yet. With its 12-hour-long story, there’s no reason to not dive back in again and again.

To put it bluntly, it might only be the end of January, but this is already Game of the Year material. My So Many Games colleague Jason agrees, and you can find our spoiler-filled thoughts over on our YouTube channel from Monday, 3rd February. But sincerely, if you have any interest in the human side of sci-fi, the stories like Duncan Jones’ Moon or Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, you can’t miss out on Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector.

Verdict

5/5

Through incredibly tight and eloquent writing, gameplay that invites you to experiment and learn from your failures, gorgeous artwork, and a fittingly moody soundtrack, this game has everything you could want from a sequel to such a classic as Citizen Sleeper. It’s a game that doesn’t just challenge gaming conventions but, like its titular Sleeper, travels the universe in search of its limits. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is an absolute tour de force, one that will stay with me for a long, long time.

Release Date
31st January 2025
Platforms
PC, PS5, XBOX Series S/X, Nintendo Switch, Mac
Developer
Jump Over the Age
Publisher
Fellow Traveller
Accessibility
A guide for all of the game’s mechanics, difficulty settings, text size, scroll speed, music and ambiance levels.

Many thanks to the publisher for the review copy.