Review: Citizen Sleeper 2 Is Punishing and Poignant in the Best Ways
Image via Jump Over The Age

Review: Citizen Sleeper 2 Is Punishing and Poignant in the Best Ways

Great games make you feel things. This isn’t limited to joy or delight. I feel like if it can evoke any kind of meaningful emotions that aren’t overwhelming frustration tied to bad gameplay or broken elements, it’s a some sort of success. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector did an incredible job of leaving me feeling lost, desperate, enraged at in-game entities or opponents, and like I was struggling to survive in a galaxy where every decision mattered. It feels like both an important piece of literature and a well-crafted indie game.

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Citizen Sleeper 2 begins with a harrowing operation and escape. You’re an entirely new Sleeper, a person whose self was uploaded into a cybernetic body to act as essentially a work slave for other individuals. Memories are lost in that initial process. However, yours in this instance are gone because of an interrupted procedure to remove a reliance on the Stabilizer needed to keep Sleeper units going. Your former boss Laine discovered you were attempting to escape. Your only ally is someone named Serafin, who seems distraught at your amnesia, as the two of you head on the run throughout the galaxy.. The process seems to have damaged your body. Your ship is old and falling apart. You’re being hunted down. There’s never enough time, money, or supplies. It’s a lot.

Gameplay in Citizen Sleeper 2 is nearly identical to the original game, albeit with more space travel. This begin with you choosing one of three roles, which are Machinist, Operator, and Extractor. Each has one Skill they excel at and one that is just not there. You can invest in Skills and Push abilities, the latter of which increase stress in exchange for some sort of boost. I found the Endure, Engineer and Intuit Skills most useful, but every one of them has their time and place. Likewise, your eventual allies have specialties that will help in situations, and if they are set as your crew you can rely on their dice too.  

After the player’s Sleeper and Serafin escape, Citizen Sleeper 2 falls into a sort of pattern. Arrive at a station. Perform actions in different areas to open up access to job contracts, new crew, new locations, opportunities to get supplies, and information. You have five dice available each Cycle, which can randomly roll between a 1-6. You use a die for each action, both on stations or when on Contracts, which determines if you’ll have a positive, neutral, or negative result. On Contracts, allies’ dice can be used as well. However, you’re reliant on supplies you bring in, you don’t know what Skills you may need there, and you can’t just quit and leave a Contract area in the midst of it. Your Skills can also result in an extra boost or debuff to certain actions, depending on your proficiency, with 1 always being the minimum and 6 the maximum. Getting a 6 means a positive result and you’re safe… but otherwise you can be in real trouble. You also can increase stress with failure or if you’re away from a station and reliant on supplies that are running out, which also causes your character to become more hungry or starving as time passes. 

Once all dice are used, you need to return to the ship to end the Cycle, roll, and begin a new day, with the Cycle Clock timer showing how close your pursuers are cranking down as time goes by. Oh, and you also need to eat, as you’ll increase stress and wear out your dice if you don’t. Depending on your difficulty, running out of dice health means you just can’t use them and progress until they’re repaired. Once you gained enough money and resources to move on, you can continue running to the next location. Good and bad outcomes are taken into account, lending weight to every action and decision.

It’s complicated! And Citizen Sleeper 2 starts and plays in such a way that it feels like Jump Over the Age assumes that you played the first game. So certain elements about Skills, your Drive motivations, and just generally acting, let alone more complicated concepts like using a Push to help yourself a long or understanding Glitches, aren’t properly explained.

The situation in Citizen Sleeper 2 means you’re constantly faced with these dire situations filled with compelling characters. While Serafin is the first, the game is packed with people with fascinating tales to tell. I was concerned about Juni early on, considering how she ended up joining a list of possible crewmates, but her actions and background proved her to be a reliable ally on missions. I adored Serafin and felt so bad to see my first companion in such pain upon realizing these two individuals took a major risk together, only for one to completely forget what they had and it to go terribly awry. I would love to hang out with Kadet, because her responses are hilarious. The narrative is so strong both when it comes to this Sleeper’s story and the characters around them. I loved it. I often found myself choosing responses on my first run that showed consideration to anyone I met who seemed like they were as downtrodden as I was. Then, in my second, I made different choices that were more selfish, and enjoyed how the results differed.

What I didn’t always love is the weight of certain gameplay elements. While this story is very well told and exceptional, I couldn’t spend hours engaged in a session the way I could with the original Citizen Sleeper. I feel like the difficulty in Citizen Sleeper 2 is much higher than the original game due elements like the dice health, timers, and nature of Contracts. Early on, upon first escaping from Laine, it is possible to find yourself in a desperate state due to poor dice rolls. I felt like stress and dice health loomed over me in such a way that I didn’t ever find myself in the sort of secure positions, like I sometimes did in the original game. Since each die also has the aforementioned health bar, it feels possible to immediately fall into dire straits once access to even one is lost. It is absolutely possible to survive and keep moving on! But it kept me from enjoying the sequel as much as I did the original, and I don’t think I ever had a play session last longer than an hour.

While I do feel it affected Citizen Sleeper 2’s balance in a way resource management didn’t in the original, I will say I sometimes appreciated the tension it added to the adventure. The stakes really felt dire, especially as I experienced a constant struggle to maintain resources and manage actions each Cycle to ensure I could constantly keep moving as the Hunt timer ticked down and danger loomed. Getting food to stave off starvation, fuel to keep moving, and scrap to deal with broken dice was a constant weight on my shoulders. I felt as desperate as my character likely did. It’s immersive. However, that anxiety over getting by and burden meant I needed to take more breaks when I’d play Citizen Sleeper 2, especially if a new Cycle started with poor dice rolls and I didn’t want to risk using the Push mechanic to increase stress to make them more viable. 

It didn’t help that I felt like the easiest of the three difficulty options didn’t actually make the experience any less grueling. If you select Easy, you can still use broken dice and have them count as a “1” for actions, you don’t need to worry about dying, and stress won’t be as influential. However, since a “1” could result in a terrible result, I sometimes felt like it was as bad as not having a die at all. Some situations seemed even more hopeless as I played on the easiest difficulty, because I’d keep tossing the broken dice at situations, would see them get negative results and not move the needle, only building up stress and making me starve sooner. Stress also still felt, well, stressful!

All that said, the story and mechanics in Citizen Sleeper 2 clearly illustrates what life is like for those who are at the whims of the power and large commercial entities when paired together. Many of the people we meet and ally with are forced to do whatever they can to survive. Contracts may deal with the after effects of potential abuses of power or the harm a company can do when a hazardous device is left behind as space trash. We meet the people dealing with the consequences of actions they didn’t commit or agree to. 

In Citizen Sleeper 2, players are tossed into a well-realized future and forced to survive as best they can. This is also while hopefully fostering relationships with people who might help them feel as though they’re actually living, rather than getting by. The systems in place take some getting used to, and both the weight of them and varied consequences make it feel like each one counts. While the original Citizen Sleeper‘s gameplay stuck with me more and was the sort of game I could spend hours playing, the sequel is still quite special in its own right. I just wish the gameplay was as strong as its story.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector will come to the Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on January 31, 2025.

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Citizen Sleeper 2

A dice-driven RPG, in a human and heartfelt sci-fi world. You are an escaped android, with a malfunctioning body, a price on your head and no memory of your past. Get a ship, find a crew, and take on contracts while you navigate across the Starward Belt. Switch version reviewed. Review copy provided by company for testing purposes.

Citizen Sleeper 2 did an incredible job of leaving me feeling desperate and like I was struggling to survive in a terrifying galaxy where every decision mattered.


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Author
Image of Jenni Lada
Jenni Lada
Jenni is Editor-in-Chief at Siliconera and has been playing games since getting access to her parents' Intellivision as a toddler. She continues to play on every possible platform and loves all of the systems she owns. (These include a PS4, Switch, Xbox One, WonderSwan Color and even a Vectrex!) You may have also seen her work at GamerTell, Cheat Code Central, Michibiku and PlayStation LifeStyle.