Citizen Sleeper is, in my opinion, one of the best narrative games ever produced. It deals with massive themes of self, sacrifice, desperation, and the impact of choice in such a way that you can agonise over every story beat. It would always be a tough act to follow, but that follow up has arrived in Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, bringing a new story, a wider location, and with added gameplay mechanics.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector follows the path of a new Sleeper and not the protagonist from the original, but there are similarities between the two. Just like the original Sleeper, the new Sleeper is on the run and trying to find their freedom, though in this case it is a criminal gang boss that is the pursuer rather than a mega corporation. They’re in far worse shape, though, with a memory full of holes and a body that is failing and glitching, and which is getting worse as time progresses.
Instead of being confined to a single space station, you’ll now be able to visit other places by jumping in your Rig. This Rig needs a crew, and this another new thing as you recruit crew members who can help on missions.
In Citizen Sleeper, your character needed stabiliser to continue functioning, but here that is not the case due to changes in how the new Sleeper operates. The risk now comes from stress and broken or glitched dice, with the former also having an impact on crew behaviour in missions. If a dice breaks it can be repaired, provided you have the components to carry those repairs out, whereas glitched dice become permanent and more numerous as the Sleeper’s system glitches build up.
Where a regular dice has different odds depending on its value, a glitched dice’s outcome value will always be 20% positive / 80% negative, meaning you are only likely to be successful with a glitched dice 1 in 5 times. The impact of stress impacts decision making and performance. The higher the stress level the worse your outcomes are likely to be, including dice breaking. If a crew member’s stress level reaches maximum during a contract mission they will abandon their role, removing their two dice and their skills from the equation.
The crew of the Rig is integral to the success of missions, with each having a combination of skills that can complement the Sleeper’s skills to get through missions efficiently. Ideally, you pick crew that have different skills to your Sleeper, and ones that will be viable on mission. However, as you will not know which skills you need on missions, you may make the wrong choice and take someone whose skills do not lend themselves to the task at hand. However, this does not make them useless, as you can still use their dice but with a penalty imposed. For example, if a crew member has a dice valued at six, the value will go down to four if used for a task they have no proficiency with. There was also a Push ability that lets you re-roll dice in the hope of getting higher values for the lowest value dice. Outside of missions, you can have the crew do odd jobs to acquire money or source fuel and food supplies, needed for travel and survival alike.
Narrative is the core aspect of the Citizen Sleeper, and each location in Citizen Sleeper 2 has its own stories occurring, which feed into the bigger arc. On one station there is talk of mutiny, while on another the focus is on growing food to be self-sustainable. There are the relationships between the characters to take into account too, with a few familiar faces popping up from the first game, with these also having an impact on some of the story progressing.
While Citizen Sleeper 2 has some very good writing, it doesn’t quite hit the same heights as the original. The story is still quite personal, but in the first game the story and relationships felt a lot more impactful. The writing is very good too yet, again, in the first game it came across as more concentrated and harder hitting. Branching out in terms of the scope is welcome in this sequel, but some of that magic from the original has been spread a bit thinner here.
Ultimately, I feel it comes down to the glitched and broken dice and the frustrations that they can cause. Either one or the other system would have been plenty of change to the original game, while both can make completing tasks much tougher than necessary.
