Citizen Sleeper 2 Shows Us How To Keep Going In A Shattered World

As pursuers close in, you pilot a sputtering shuttle through the Starward Belt, weaving through decaying spaceports created by an interstellar corporation that disappeared from this solar system like a receding wave. It’s all dead rocks and inhospitable planets, the last place you would expect to find human beings, but even a generation after all warp-capable ships returned to the core worlds, life here persists. Those left behind squeeze out a tough existence on the backs of solar reflectors and excavated asteroids, always one disaster away from floating lifelessly through the void of space. And times have only gotten harder now that two of the biggest remaining companies are locked in an all-out war, sending refugees further toward the frontier.
This is the world of Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, a system picked clean by insatiable moneyed interests who tried to devour the stars. But despite its overbearingly bleak setup, this sequel to one of 2022’s best games delights in hard-won moments of human connection earned in the face of these dire circumstances. At the core of its success is how it fills in the details of this setting and the people in it, mixing authored storytelling with the dice-roll-based outcomes of a tabletop RPG. The result is a thoughtful, personable sci-fi story that not only conveys the trials and tribulations of those living in this difficult situation but also what allows them to keep going in a place that can never be fully fixed.
For those familiar with the original game, we return to the Helion System, a collection of lunar bases and space stations abandoned by the Solheim company decades ago. You play as a Sleeper, an artificially created person whose consciousness is an emulation of a human’s mind, but this time around, your Sleeper is already free of the tracking device and stabilizer used by the Essen-Arp company to keep its workers in line. But while they’ve escaped the clutches of the corporation that created and exploited them, they’re in the crosshairs of a different villain: Laine, a gangster trying to seize ownership of their body. Having stolen a ship alongside their friend Serafin, the pair flee further into the Starward Belt, taking on a ragtag crew as they search for a way to escape their former captor for good.
While the specific circumstances are slightly different this time around, the most striking similarity to the game’s predecessor is its similarly affecting prose. The easiest way to describe Citizen Sleeper is that it’s like playing a tabletop RPG orchestrated by a Dungeon Master with a knack for always teasing out what’s just beneath the surface. Gareth Damian Martin once again uses their pen to poignantly capture a people abandoned in the far reaches of space with little hope of ever touching solid ground, a circumstance that sounds like a waking nightmare with little reprieve. But where Martin deviates from the seeming “cyberpunk-ness” of a star system dominated by power-hungry megacorps is in how they so convincingly capture the interior lives of those who refuse to be crushed by these circumstances.
As the Sleeper navigates mining colonies and impromptu cities constructed in the husks of Solheim superstructures, they meet a Rolodex of complicated characters affected by the political headwinds of a nearby corporate war. Many are kind, some are rude, and a few are truly irredeemable, but the vast majority are driven by nuanced motivations that stem from the realities of a life spent in space. Of these, many can be recruited as crewmates, and while few begin entirely as allies, each is portrayed with a delicate touch that makes their journeys engaging. On top of Martin returning to scriptwriting duties, comic artist Guillaume Singelin once again handled the character art, giving even minor figures memorable designs that mix futuristic overtones with the necessity-born flourishes of scavengers—much like the script, these details grant everyone personality.
These characters go on interesting personal journeys as their goals are tied to the larger socioeconomic concerns of this world. For instance, the Sleeper struggles with deteriorating health and dehumanization at the hands of corporations and their former captor, capturing the anxiety of living with severe illness in a healthcare-less nightmare. And while the Sleeper has a lot on their plate, they’re still the Captain of the Rig, taking on crewmembers with their own problems. One plotline deals with someone confronting the deep-seated dread of never being able to leave this solar system, while others address labor issues as you’re allowed to help or hinder an ongoing mining strike that impacts your closest friend. Throughout these tales, Martin follows through on meticulous sci-fi worldbuilding by delivering rewarding conclusions that tie into the story’s greater themes about the power of collective action and community. Or at least, these outcomes can be rewarding, depending on your decisions.
As you can probably guess based on the tabletop RPG inspiration at work, you make plenty of choices that determine these characters’ fates, most of which are also impacted by the dice system. At the beginning of each day, you roll five six-sided dice that can be used to perform one action each. The higher the roll, the higher the probability your action succeeds, while lower values are more likely to result in neutral or negative outcomes. Your upgradable stats further modify these rolls, increasing or decreasing your likelihood of success. When you’re off-mission and exploring one of many space stations in the Belt, these skill checks will determine things like how well you do at a day job or if you successfully scout out new locations where you can buy equipment or get food to refill your energy. However, things get particularly white-knuckled when it comes to one of Citizen Sleeper 2’s most significant additions: contract missions.
As you take on jobs that bring you to remote mining facilities and wrecked cruisers, you and your crew work against the clock in multi-day gauntlets of dice rolls. For every mistake, you’ll build stress, which makes it increasingly likely your dice will take damage and potentially break, leaving them unusable for the rest of the mission. Losing all of them can lead to very bad outcomes or even a permanent Game Over on the hardest difficulty.
Luckily, each of the three starting classes comes with special Push abilities that can get you out of tight situations, like the Machinist’s skill which lets you increase the value of your lowest dice while decreasing stress if you get a positive outcome. On top of this, your crew members can also lend a hand, and although they also accrue stress with screw-ups, they can help cover for your weaknesses. All of these additions, from your new tools to the more complicated mission design, introduce strategic layers to the experience that make these interactive elements much more engaging than in the previous game.
And these missions are all the more intense because the game weaponizes its well-written characters, threatening their fates as you cross paths with bounty hunters, gangs, and other deadly circumstances that can wipe them out if you fail (and there’s no way to save scum either!). As a result, this sequel addresses the biggest shortcoming of the original by making it much harder to game the system. Even in the missions where things went relatively smoothly, it always felt like I was a few mishaps away from disaster, maintaining an anxious edge that matched the setting without ever feeling outright unfair. In short, this follow-up even more seamlessly blends its mechanics and narrative so both halves complement the other.
Considering that Citizen Sleeper was one of the best games in the last few years, this sequel had a tough task in matching the affecting turns and memorable writing of its predecessor. While admittedly, the focus on hopping through the Starward Belt makes each individual location lack the same staying power as Erlin’s Eye, and its side-missions don’t quite reach the same highs as some of the first game’s most memorable encounters, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector has enough of its own strengths to largely compensate.
In every line of dialogue, dice roll, and ambient thrum of Amos Roddy’s contemplative score, we can feel the paradoxical pull of the Belt: on the one hand, this is a hell, an inescapable dead-end at the fringes of space, a hopeless place where it seems that the corporations have already won. But despite acknowledging these horrifying realities, Citizen Sleeper 2 isn’t entirely subsumed by them. It conveys how community can persist even in the worst imaginable circumstances. It captures how worthwhile endeavors can be built in the ruins of what came before. At one point, while sifting through a corporate bunker, there was a line that perfectly sums up this underlying ethos: “Even in the endless dark, people find ways to live.” Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector fleshes out its predecessor’s RPG systems, develops a convincing cast of characters, and gives you the tools to be the space captain of your dreams, but its greatest accomplishment is how it makes you feel the full force of that quote in each fleeting moment.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector was developed by Jump Over the Age and published by Fellow Traveller. Our review is based on the PC version. It’s also available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch.
Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.