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It’s good to be back in this far-flung future world. Like the game that preceded it, Citizen Sleeper 2 is packed with evocative portrayals of everyday life in outer space, from farmers tending zero-G crops in an asteroid greenhouse to water miners rising up against the cartel that controls them, everyone eking out a meagre existence in crumbling space stations left to rot by a long-dead mega corporation.
Once again you’re cast as a Sleeper, a robot with a digitised human mind shorn of the memories of the person it was copied from. In the first game you were on the run from the firm that made you, attempting to wean your robot off its reliance on a stabilising drug. In the sequel you play a different Sleeper who has successfully managed to ditch Stabilizer, but at the cost of being enslaved to a gang boss called Laine.
Whereas before the action was confined to a single space station, Erlin’s Eye, the second game roves much more widely across a sector of space called the Belt. Your explosive escape from Laine sees you hot-footing it from station to station, with a timer signalling how close on your tail the gang lord is. In this opening section it’s a race against time to gather enough fuel and supplies for the next leg of your journey, all the while searching for a way to sever the mysterious link Laine seems to have with your body.
Each destination offers a visual backdrop of wherever you happen to be visiting, whether it’s a long-abandoned space border crossing or a populated asteroid, but mostly you’ll be reading text descriptions of what’s going on and clicking through conversations. As in the previous game you have five dice that are rolled at the start of each day (or “cycle”), and these can be plugged into various activities at each location, with higher numbers delivering a higher chance of success.
But now, the dice can break. On timed, high-stakes missions, failure accumulates stress, which in turn can damage your dice. If a die’s energy reaches zero, it’s broken, unable to be used until it’s repaired. If all five dice break on normal difficulty, your character gains a permanent glitch: a die that always gives an 80% chance of failure.
You’re joined on these contracts by up to two crew members. Like in Mass Effect 2, you can gather crew for your ship, The Rig, and each comes with two dice that are attuned to their specialities. You can also use a “push” once per cycle, increasing the number on your lowest die at the cost of raising your stress. All of this makes contracts wonderfully tense and involving, as you decide how far to push your luck at the risk of outright failure. And failure stalks Citizen Sleeper 2: whereas many games promise power fantasies, here each day is a valiant struggle (at least at first). Some missions are locked off if you’re don’t get to them in time. It’s a game that encourages repeat plays, to see how things might have turned out differently.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is around twice as big as the first game, with many more locations to visit. But this does mean it feels a little stretched thin compared with the previous title. Rather than getting to know one place intimately, we instead have a scattering of space stations with a handful of activities in each. The crew also feel underused: it’s a shame there isn’t a way to upgrade their abilities or integrate them more into gameplay.
Yet the characters are also the game’s greatest strength, and throughout they are expertly drawn, both literally (with comic book artist Guillaume Singelin once again providing some gorgeous portraits) and in terms of their compelling and heartfelt backstories. Despite its bleakness, the world of Citizen Sleeper 2 is full of compassion, and it’s a joy to return to the universe Gareth Damian Martin has created.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is out on 31 January
