Citizen Sleeper is the most narrative-focused game I’ve ever enjoyed. 

I’ve tried to play visual novels here and there, but they never hold my interest. Last year I got caught up in the hype of 1000xResist, but the lack of a “game” there has kept me from really sinking my teeth into it. But Citizen Sleeper, with its gameplay entirely summed up as “choose six things to do every day” was just enough of a hook that I became deeply invested in the choices that I was making and the way that my digital avatar was interacting with and impacting the world around him.

I’m over ten hours into Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, with my game saved on the precipice of choosing how my story will end, and I find myself wishing that the gameplay would get out of the way of the storytelling.

Overview

Whether you played the first game or not, Citizen Sleeper 2 is a great jumping-on-point. It’s a sequel in that it takes place chronologically after the first game in the same universe, but otherwise, it stands alone. Returning characters reference their backstory just as much as brand-new characters do, so returning players will get moments of familiarity, but there’s no heavy connecting tissue that will push new players away.

Once again, you play as a Sleeper: an artificial body run by an artificial mind running an emulation of an indentured person somewhere out there in the universe. The way that you have found your independence when the story begins is very different than in the first game. However, we are once again exploring a sad, quiet, rundown, edge-of-dystopia space setting in a story that addresses capitalism, the ravages of war, personal autonomy, community, body dysphoria, unionization, and a laundry list of other issues.

Familiar(ish) Gameplay

The core gameplay of Citizen Sleeper 2 looks similar to the first game, but things quickly change. Just like the first game, your primary action each in-game day is to choose how to distribute six six-sided dice that are rerolled each morning. Using low numbers for relatively safe actions – like spending an afternoon working in a canteen – lets you save high numbers for risky maneuvers – like hacking into a secure storage facility to steal engine components.

The original Citizen Sleeper puts pressure on your available resources through sustenance and a built-in addiction to a restricted compound. Neglecting either reduced the number of dice available to you until you took care of yourself.

This time around, the addiction is gone, but there’s now a stress system that can cause damage to your dice and a glitch system that can temporarily replace one of your dice with a likely-to-fail-facsimile. Theoretically, this isn’t more punishing or restrictive than the systems from the first game, but in practice, I kept feeling like there were too many things to keep track of. Even hours into the game, I kept getting surprised when one of those systems snuck up on me and ruined a day’s roll. 

All I Ask Is A Tall Ship

Tonally, Citizen Sleeper 2 feels very different from the first game.

The first Citizen Sleeper took place entirely on one station, full of interesting NPCs, opportunities for work, and layers and layers of secrets to uncover. The second game shifts to a larger scope by giving you your own ship and crew, allowing you to explore several locations throughout an asteroid belt.

There are a half-dozen or so “Hubs”, which range from farming colonies to a barely held-together flotilla of debris and docked ships. None of these locations are nearly as expensive as The Eye from the first game but serve as temporary respites where you can find work and stock up before setting off on salvage scrapping missions or moving on to another hub.

Unfortunately, this more spread-out system means spreading out the activities you can spend your dice on as well. In the first game, I always felt like there was some task that was worth spending my dice on. In the sequel, I have multiple times found myself stranded on a hub where there weren't any tasks that my Sleeper could do with any kind of proficiency. In one case, I spent several in-game days at a hub with no way for me to earn fuel, waiting for one of my crew to randomly discover enough for us to leave.

There were plenty of times in the first game where I spent a few days spending my dice on relatively mundane tasks while I waited for a clock somewhere else to tick through, but it was always exciting to see what would happen when I finally got there.

In Citizen Sleeper 2 I keep finding myself stuck doing mundane tasks just so I can leave.

Crew and Contracts

The addition of crew changes the vibes in Citizen Sleeper 2. The first game was incredibly lonely throughout. You met people and built relationships, but those connections were still distant. In the sequel, you've got someone else bound to you from the start.

Not only does that shift the narrative tone, but it also makes a major difference in mechanics. At a hub, you play as just your character, just like in the first game. When your crew takes on a contract, however, you get your dice and two dice from each crew member. They also bring their own skills, which changes the way that you strategize your daily resources.

This shift makes contracts feel like a sort of heist-focused minigame. Having those additional dice and skill sets to contend with is an awesome fresh experience. Unfortunately, it's so “gamey“ that it completely disconnects me from the narrative. Having so many options and incorporating different characters stops me from being a Sleeper, and instead makes me feel like a gamer.

Practically, that distance between me and my character made me play more risky. I played dice I would have just skipped if I was more connected with the dangers my character was facing. I stopped being in the story and started playing the game. I had fun every time I went out on a contract, but it completely obliterated the “grabbing a burrito after work” feeling that made me adore the first game.

Interface Issues

I played through Citizen Sleeper 2 on the Steam Deck, almost entirely handheld using the built-in controller mapping. The game is listed as “Playable” on the deck, with the only flag being for text size. The default is a little hard to read, but a large text option resolved that issue completely.

I didn’t love the interface and user experience in the first game, and I think it’s slightly more complicated and therefore slightly worse in the sequel.

Just about every single system in this game is represented on-screen at once all the time. Your dice are at the top, your inventory is at the bottom, and you can hit L1 and R1 to check out your current objectives and character stats. You can see what tasks you have your crew assigned to while docked at a hub. Everything is there, and it’s incredibly overwhelming.

Readability and Reliability

Too many things happen at once at the start of a Cycle. Your dice get rolled, the results of the die can cause them to take damage depending on stress, the clocks tick down, and your crew finds resources. All of these things just sort of happen at the same time when a day starts, and I can't process all of them at once. Maybe this won’t bother others, but in a game where you are so precise with your actions, it felt like the game was doing “it’s turn” too fast for me to process.

Additionally, selecting locations is weird. You use the analog stick to shift around to look around a location, and then use the D-Pad to go to nodes in that location. More than once, I found myself unable to play without using the trackpad as a mouse. Usually, this was because two nodes were near each other, and I couldn’t figure out how to move the D-Pad to select the one I needed, but in one case, the D-Pad was just totally non-functional until I used mouse mode to click on and then leave a node.

Finally, on more than one occasion I was frustrated by a lack of things to do at a particular hub, only to realize that if I held the analog stick up for a full second or more the camera would just keep panning across a station until I found a new node. Make sure you look everywhere when you get to a new location.

Final Thoughts

I loved Citizen Sleeper, and despite some frustrations, I love this game, too. The slight changes to the mechanics and the shifted focus help this feel more like a sequel than an expansion, and the contracts show off how the “gameplay” works, even if they also pull me away from the story a bit.

Ultimately, I think that Citizen Sleeper 2 is a slightly better game than the first with equally incredible writing. Unfortunately, it also feels a bit like the difference between The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, but in reverse. By locking you into one location, the first game forced you to learn about and fall in love with that place and the people who lived there. In Citizen Sleeper 2 I love the crew that travels through the belt with me, but I’m finding I connect with the locations I visit and their inhabitants way, way less.

Throw in some frustrations with the interface, and I’m finding myself wishing I could just see the story through with a bit less work. Still, when I look back on this game I know it’s moments of story and writing and choice that are going to stick with me. 

At one point, I started to run short on cash, so I took some extra shifts at a casino. Eventually, I became well-known enough that I was invited to play the tables, and started winning enough that it aroused suspicion. People thought maybe my less-than-human physiology was giving me an advantage. Out of spite, I kept playing and winning to the point of physical exhaustion, and half of my winnings were going straight into repairing braking components. I got so hooked on this loop that I forgot about my pursuers, and ended up escaping town the day before they were due to arrive!

That’s what I’m going to remember.