Gareth Damian Martin has done it again with intelligent anti-capitalist scifi storytelling.
Crunch time. The clock has run out for this renegade sleeper. I’m being pursued by a terror that’s threatening my bodily autonomy, my chance at freedom and a new life. I’m going to have to take a risk and hope that it pays off.
Our ship is broken down, nearly out of fuel and requires a precious engine component to guarantee our escape - there’s one catch, I’ve betrayed the owner of the local repair shop, choosing to side with a tech expert who wants to salvage and repair the mysteries of the past instead of turning ancient space-wrecks into slag and spare parts.
My escape now comes down to fate - the role of a die. The percentages are in my favour, my sleeper’s rig is built to endure physical stress and manual labour, but I come up short.
My attempt to rob the repair shop ends with a mad dash to escape the station, and a stray bullet hitting me on the way out the airlock. I’ve survived to keep living for another day, but not without consequences and complications.
This is the beating heart of CITIZEN SLEEPER 2: STARWARD VECTOR . It’s stress, time management. weighing the odds and taking chances.
The stakes? Your life, freedom and the future of your friendships and the ragtag crew you’ve assembled who are all trying to eke out their own little home in a dystopian, capitalist future.
The original Citizen Sleeper was a meticulously crafted and tightly wound narrative experience. You played as a sleeper - a fabricated artificial shell, brought to life the cognitive imprint of someone who had sold their neural patterns to a corporate entity to work as slave labour.
You spent the majority of your time on a space-station, trying to work out a solution to escape your corporate leash-holders, while making friendships and trying to stabilise your body’s systems and components that were designed to break down without regular corporate maintenance.
This grind and struggle was represented through a gameplay system that drew heavily from table-top gaming; with your sleeper assigned stat points based on their skills (are they good at repairing? Are they intuitive? Do they have engineering skills?) and dice rolls representing potential actions you can take each daily cycle on the space station.
Citizen Sleeper 2 expands this world out into grander spaces and dimensions. Our hero awakens mid-procedure, freed from their need to rely on corporate stabilising fluid, but with their memory wiped and their mechanical shell malfunctioning. Immediately you’re paired up with your friend Serafin who has been assisting you on your quest to free yourself, and head on the run together from some shady criminal pursuers.
Escaping requires a vehicle, so Citizen Sleeper 2 arms you with a portable base - the rig, a small ship that can travel from different outposts and facilities across the belt and serves as the location where you’ll rest, recover and unwind after a day of activities.
A ship requires a crew, which brings in a new wrinkle to the world of Citizen Sleeper - companions. Throughout your travels you’ll have the chance to befriend characters who can join your crew to assist you on your main quest, side missions and contract jobs.
Companions have their own personalities, goals and alignments that may not gel with your own plans. They also come with their own set of skills and can help fill out gaps in your own sleeper’s skillset on the game’s many dangerous contracts and missions.
Missions amp up the tension and strategic decision making of the original game to new heights. You’ll want to complete missions regularly for attribute points to grow your character power as well as to build up a healthy supply of credits, spare parts for repairs and other resources.
To find contract missions, you’ll need to engage in exploration, rumour gathering and odd-jobs around the various space stations and bases you can dock with. After you’ve unlocked enough side-activities on these bases, you may uncover a contract or job to be completed that requires heading off to an entirely new location.
Missions are varied and can see you working with a local scrap-collector to salvage an old asteroid, encountering a corporate missile drone in space (perfect to salvage or deactivate) or even exploring the bowels of an ancient space faring ship for technologies.
These contracts work with a new resource called stress which is shared amongst both your main character and your companions. Failed dice rolls and bad outcomes will accrue stress, which at the end of a cycle/day, can run the risk of your dice losing energy on their health bars. Accumulate too much health-damage to a particular dice and you’ll lose access to it, severely restricting how many actions you can take until you make repairs.
It creates nail biting tension as you weigh up the risk of possible damage to your systems vs the short-term goal of achieving your contract as fast as possible. Many contracts will result in surprise events, such as a sudden risk of a decompression event when salvaging a ship, that have you weighing up the value of responding to the immediate danger or rushing forward with your original goal.
Each class also gets access to a unique ‘push’ ability, allowing you to try to tip luck on your side. For my bulky, scrap worker, I had the ability to take stress damage in return for significantly boosting my crew mate’s action die for more favourable outcomes.
It’s gripping stuff, with many of the contracts feeling like bite-sized moments of tense science fiction tv, painting more depth into the world of Citizen Sleeper 2’s space setting the Helion System.
All this plate-spinning and gameplay tension is tempered by the softer moments of Citizen Sleeper 2; it’s many narrative interludes, the pictures it paints of life on the outer-rim of space.
Like the original game, it’s these softer moments of humanity in space that stand out amongst the standard fare of science fiction writing in most games. Getting to know the captain of a water freighter who hauls supplies around the belt can net you some contracts and crewmates, but it also paints a picture of how life continues to move on, regardless of the systems it's constrained under.
Everyone is moving through the belt trying to make a life for themselves. Some have become criminals, others work collectively to make their lives a little bit better under strenuous conditions and some live out on the absolute fringes, as scrappers and traders.
Citizen Sleeper 2 extends that same option to you. How will you survive on the fringes of space? How will you evade the existential threat hunting you, and what sort of friendships, life and world do you want to build for yourself.
This is the stuff of science fiction epics, and not to be missed.
A copy of CITIZEN SLEEPER 2: STARWARD VECTOR on PC was provided to SIFTER for the purposes of this preview.
