Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review

I try not to think about my body as a 'vessel' too much, if I can help it. The idea that my mind is just a rider in something that can wear, tear, and break down isn't a comforting thought—but it's an increasingly pressing one. Citizen Sleeper 2 reminds me of this fact twofold: It's a game about the slow degradation of the body, sure, but it's also a sequel. It's an attempt to show growth, to do more. But in trying to grow, it's become fuzzier around the edges. Fractured, bumpy, nicked in places, and lovely in its own way.

Citizen Sleeper 2 understands that you don't get to choose how your body grows. You can decide on some things if you're one of the lucky ones, sure, but eventually everything bends and falls apart. The solution for your character, an android 'Sleeper', is to start stapling bits of yourself back together with spare parts.

As a story, it understands that for Sleepers and humans alike, our bodies barely belong to us in the cosmic scheme of things—they belong to the universe that made them, subject to its weights and pressures. Which is a pain in the arse, really, because I'd like to not have back problems and my shoulders hurt.

While Gareth Damian Martin's first game hinged around building and finding community in a strange place, Citizen Sleeper 2 turns the gaze inward to the self. The body and how it might change—naturally or because of others—is the threat. But it pushes ambitiously outwards, as well, broadening its scope from one space station to an entire slice of asteroid belt, and its quality suffers a tad, much like my aching shoulders do.

Take my eyes, take them aside

In case you haven't played the first game, here's a primer: Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a game about dice that mimics tabletop RPG systems like Powered By The Apocalypse and Blades In The Dark. Each day, you get a batch of dice. Each day, these dice let you do stuff, and your chances of failure scale with how well you rolled.

Citizen Sleeper 2 has four things to keep a track of: energy, stress, dice breakages, and glitches. Lose all your energy, and you start taking stress. Take too much stress, and your dice start breaking. Break all your dice, and you get a glitch, which saddles you with a chance to roll a glitched out die. These chuck away all your stats to give you a 20% chance at success or a 80% chance at failure, no matter what.

It's a fun way to represent the slow degradation of one's body—as for why that's happening, well, you're a Sleeper: An android copy of a living, breathing person invented to circumvent anti-AI regulations, while also allowing heartless corporations to benefit from what is, essentially, slavery. You escaped your corporate masters and stumbled right into the yoke of a criminal one, a right bastard named Laine, and the game begins as you scramble away from his clutches—a botched reboot wiping most of your memory.

Laine's belief that your body belongs to him looms over the whole narrative. It also drives you and your flesh-and-blood buddy (and fellow escapee), Serafin, to leg it in a little rust-bucket. Cue a series of Firefly-esque missions, packaged into an adventure-of-the-week style format. You balance a bunch of other secondary resources—cyro (space dollars), fuel, supplies, and the like—while trying not to let your body crumple apart.

This setup plays out well on the whole, because Citizen Sleeper 2's story is filled with charming characters, excellent knife-twists to the heart, and fascinating worldbuilding. While the first game limited you to a single space station, this Citizen Sleeper 2 feels like a DM taking their training weights off and finally showing off their lore documents. Revelations about the mysteries of the bleak, corporate war universe abound.

Each mission is a fun exercise in risk assessment, one that rewards you with charming narrative as well as in-game resources: You meet rogue, lonely AIs in destitute space stations. You scramble to dodge cannibalistic drill machines in desolate mining rocks. You help an old, stranded woman fix her mess of a ramshackle engine. Citizen Sleeper 2 is a great adventure, with enough texture to get me thinking about a campaign of my own.

It's also a warm, thoughtful treatise on what it means to be a broken thing. The Sleeper is a machine, so the metaphor is writ large, but the game also makes it clear that your fleshy friends are going through the exact same thing on a drawn-out timescale. It outright states this to you: "No one gets to choose their own body. Everyone has to contend with the entropy of their flesh."

It's fitting, then, that the game itself suffers from its own kind of entropic pull. Citizen Sleeper 2 is more ambitious, widening the scope and increasing the amount of plates you need to spin. But it's this desire to go bigger that ultimately makes it a little flawed, much like your body's own degenerating machinery.

My arms and legs, they get in the way

Citizen Sleeper 2's mechanics just don't gel as well with its themes. In the first game, your initial scrambling for resources—and the slow, gradual comforts you achieve afterwards—paired nicely with the desperate circumstance you found yourself in. Citizen Sleeper 2, meanwhile, never quite properly gets its dice rolling in harmony with its storytelling.

The game is keen to start you off with a sense of feeling hunted, and it's not impossible to slide into a death spiral from the get-go—but as long as you build up just the slightest bit of momentum, this pressure rarely ever risks catching up to you.

It's possible I just got lucky, but I only had a little difficulty stockpiling the resources I needed. All Laine's initial pursuit produced was a "right, move along now" clock I had to pay the barest bit of attention to, one that sort of just melts away in the latter half of the game. There comes a point where, outside of the mild stresses of missions, you're just pleasantly ticking off a list of errands as you nip across the galaxy in your clown car of well-written buddies.

This slow easing of pressure worked wonders in the first game, because the slide into comfort, familiarity, and routine was sort of the point—it doesn't work nearly as well in a game that's meant to be aping the 'adventure of the week' structure of shows like Cowboy Bebop, even though its story nails the vibe.

There is a harder difficulty, mind, but it also fights with the game's themes as well—instead of fearing a slow breakdown of your body via glitches (which manifest when all of your dice break due to stress), it's just game over. Thematically, the permanent scar from a mission gone wrong is far more interesting—and the hardest difficulty has to throw that away in the interest of challenge.

Take my hands, they'll understand

The crew system, while neat and novel, also doesn't quite click. Because your Sleeper is forever barred from being good at one task, the choice of which crew members to take along isn't determined by story, but convenience. Because you never know what stats a mission'll demand of you, you're only really trying to patch up your blind spots.

When the story's working its magic, your crew are a fleshed-out set of misfits with complex motivations and flawless characterisation. When you're on a mission though, they're just meatshields and dice vendors, there to hedge your bets with the occasional dialogue bubble.

There's also a little weirdness when you're not on missions—in which case, your crew is completely unavailable to help. Here I am, busting my Endure-adverse arse to scrounge enough fuel from Helion Gate, and you're telling me Yu-Jin's too busy to help? We're in the middle of nowhere! What's keeping him, a stirring game of holochess?

There's also an absence of real, proper friction between your crewmates—while there are some fun early choices to make, the more I played, the more Citizen Sleeper 2 made me realise that my 'unilaterally trust everyone' bleeding heart wasn't ever going to get punished in a meaningful way, other than a few less Cyro here and there.

That's not to say the game never has its moments. One mission in particular was very memorable. To be as spoiler-free as possible: I was isolated, cut off from my crew, and desperately scrounging to survive. I almost broke my whole tray of dice just pushing myself to get things done in time, and it worked beautifully with the narrative swings I was taking. The fact remains, though, that I had to have most of my toys removed before I started to feel the burn.

I've (not) grown tired of this body

Despite my gripes and complaints, though, I can't help but look at Citizen Sleeper 2 with a burning fondness—there are parts of it I don't like, but they don't spoil the parts I do enjoy.

This is, after all, a game about the beauty of broken, flawed, and fractured things—and it's fitting that the machine of it all creaks and groans under the strain of being well-loved by its creator. There are enough instances of this sort of thematic representation in the story that I almost suspect Martin and Co. knew this was happening, but forged ahead regardless.

I would almost get this pleasant feeling of kayfabe whenever some of these foibles (in some instances, minor spelling mistakes and grammatical errors) showed their ugly mugs. The feelings of frustration at missed opportunities somehow managed to resonate with what it was trying to tell me.

I felt like I was being invited—earnestly, often, and with a lot of intimacy—into a world that had been pent up in a busy mind, and was coming out all at once. It's a universe that's desperate to share itself, but the more it lets that yearning show, the more things start to flake and peel. As such, Citizen Sleeper 2 is not the perfect sequel, but I think that's more than fine.

It's a game that overextends itself, rattling against the mechanical bars of game balance, budget, and scope. It yaws steeply into unfamiliar territory and groans under its own weight. But it trades mechanical grace for a more developed, complex, and fragile glimpse into its world—and its Sleeper's body. I've come away energised, moved, and inspired by its busted-up heart.