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.
Developed by: Jump Over The Age
Played on: Steam
Length: 15 hours
A review key was provided by Double Jump Communications.
I’m more than a little late to the Citizen Sleeper hype, admittedly. The series was sitting in my backlog collecting dust for years, but with the recent BAFTA Games nomination for Citizen Sleeper 2, I decided it’s about time to dust off my copy and head off into space. What I found there, floating in zero-g among the debris and scrap metal, was an experience I’m unlikely to forget any time soon.
Quick disclaimer right off the bat: don’t play Citizen Sleeper 2 if you haven’t played the first Citizen Sleeper. Even though it features a standalone narrative, the sequel does take place after the first game timeline-wise and contains several key characters from the first title. There is also crucial world building in the first game that doesn’t get explored to the same depth in the sequel. And for a title as narratively dense as Citizen Sleeper, you’re going to get a lot more out of the experience if you play them in order.
Another reason is that you’re simply not going to be prepared for the sequel. From a fairly contained setting of a space colony in the first game, the sequel quite literally gets blown out into space. Citizen Sleeper 2 puts you in the shoes of an escaped android, constantly on the run from one colony to another to shake your captors off your trail, while taking on dangerous contracts in order to survive.
The stakes are higher, the tension is inescapable, and Citizen Sleeper 2 responds by ruthlessly upping the gameplay difficulty. While the first game already presented a challenge, it also kept its solutions dangling in plain sight. As long as you followed the path of the narrative, you were always given time and resources when you needed them, and eventually, gained enough excess to be sitting on a stockpile by the end of the game. For better or for worse (but mostly better), Citizen Sleeper 2 is the complete antithesis.
With an active bounty on your head and the entire Starward Belt within reach, Citizen Sleeper 2 transforms what began as a resource management game into a constant gamble of risk versus reward. Fuel and supplies become your biggest resources, but money is scarce and resources are constantly depleting, as your bounty ensures you and your crew can’t stay in one place for too long.
The stakes are raised even higher with the introduction of the Contract system, which marks the point where Citizen Sleeper 2 becomes truly unforgiving to its players. After all, there’s no fun in working for minimum wage when you can take on dangerous contracts and potentially earn a big pay-out; especially when each Contract comes with new characters to add to your crew and fresh narratives to uncover.
Contracts are unforgiving but not impossible, yet the learning curve is painfully steep. After having my butt handed to me by the tutorial section, I learned the hard way that it only takes one wrong move to set off an avalanche of bad consequences. It doesn’t matter how much you prepare in advance, or how much caution you decide to exercise over your dice rolls. Contracts feel like ticking time bombs that are rigged against you; if the countdown timer doesn’t get to you first, then your limited supplies and growing stress levels will.
To that, Citizen Sleeper 2 also introduces two new dice mechanics that only serves to add salt to the wound: Broken Dice, which causes you to lose a dice slot until you collect enough resources to repair it, and Glitched Dice, which overrides any given die into a 20% positive and 80% negative split. If you end up dying on a Contract, you also gain a permanent Glitched Dice which cannot be removed through any means.
While there are ways to circumvent failure, such as preparing enough supplies and making sure your dice HP is as high as possible, you can expect to sink an immense amount of time into grinding resources. The further you sink down the hole, the more Broken and Glitched Dice you have, the longer this process of accumulating resources takes. Not to mention, it’s harder to climb out of the hole once you’re already stuck in it, which can be unrightfully punishing when you’re paying late-game consequences for a mistake you made at the start of the game.
It is a complex system that is barely covered by the game’s tutorialisation, and punishes your ignorance without giving you any time to learn. But at the same time, it is a system that encourages careful experimentation and strategising, and becomes immensely satisfying once you learn your way around it. If you’re up for a challenge, play the game on Risky difficulty for the intended experience, or choose Safe mode if you want to save yourself the stress. Either way, the gameplay difficulty can be changed at any time throughout your playthrough.
All of this does beg the question whether it’s worth taking on Contracts to begin with, or are they designed to make your gameplay experience tougher without cause. Having played through the whole game, I’d say suffering is a core part of the experience. In a game where political strife and dwindling resources are everyday topics, where your once-human consciousness is trapped in a state of rapid entropy, Citizen Sleeper has always been about placing your hope in the impractical.
Even if you come back from a Contract bruised and battered, without a single dime to your name and permanent debuffs littered across your dice row, the narrative rewards you for the risks you decide to take. There are times when I had to turn back with my tail between my legs, but the shared failure brought me closer to members of my crew. An equal amount of times, I stared death in the face and thought all hope was lost, only for the game to serve me a miracle that allowed me to grit my teeth and pull through.
Even as a chronic perfectionist when it comes to branching narratives, I find it hard to stay frustrated at a game where even failure is a meaningful narrative device, and it is even harder not to lose myself in this rough and tumble Mandalorian-like sci-fi world that Gareth Damian Martin has created. It is even rarer to see a sequel that manages to successfully expand on its foundation without betraying it, retaining the same reflective and cautiously optimistic tone that defined Citizen Sleeper, while capturing the sheer desperation for survival and human connection that comes with being interstellar fugitives.
It makes it even more meaningful to find familiar faces from the first game along your journey, although you’re meeting them as a completely different person. Citizen Sleeper has always done a great job with character building, but it adds a completely new dimension to see how their character has changed since the last time you saw them, and getting to know them all over again as a different Sleeper.
Not only that, being able to spend time with your crew and experience their story unfold over cycles and contracts feels completely organic. Oftentimes side characters can feel like isolated plot devices for their personal questlines, but Citizen Sleeper 2 takes every given opportunity to weave your crew into the main conversation, whether it is through unique dialogue when you bring them on Contracts, or a surprising connection to the main plot. It’s evident that a huge amount of care went into making each character feel as human as possible, and as a result, it becomes one of the best parts of the entire experience.
Fifteen hours later, did I have any regrets from my Citizen Sleeper 2 playthrough? Plenty. I wished I didn’t miss my chance to recruit that one character, and there were half a dozen Contracts I think I could have handled better. But ultimately, I’m satisfied with my experience. I survived a long journey, I made good friends, and true to the video game fantasy, I said yes to a whole lot of things I shouldn’t have said yes to — and I come away a better person because of it.
Verdict: A True Sci-Fi, Survival Experience
Citizen Sleeper 2 is a rare sequel that manages to successfully expand on its foundation without betraying it, retaining the same reflective and cautiously optimistic tone that defined the series, while introducing elevated stakes and truly challenging gameplay that takes this series from a resource management game to a thrilling gamble of risk versus reward.
