I’ve promised someone important to me that I’ll watch my back. In the silence of space, as I float to a destroyed ship, I hear their plea over and over again. They’re too injured to come out with me, and all I have for help is a stranger that neither of us trusts. But there’s something we need on this wreck. I don’t know what happened out here, but I know it was bad, and it makes me shiver. I don’t have much food left. I need to get into the cockpit, but I’m struggling to hack into the derelict mainframe’s machinery or break the door open with my own strength. I only have one more shot at this. The stranger, exhausted and stressed, is watching me. I take a deep breath, and roll the dice.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector held me in a vice grip with situations like this for four days. When I wasn’t playing it, I was thinking about it. When I was sleeping, I was dreaming about it. When I walked my dog outside, I looked up at the stars and imagined what I could be doing up there.
In a year of much-hyped indie sequels, Citizen Sleeper 2 is a stellar (pun not originally intended) example of how to do more and do it right. The original Citizen Sleeper and its sequel, out tomorrow, were made by Jump Over the Age, a one-person game development studio founded by Gareth Damian Martin (they/them). As a fan of Martin’s inaugural sci-fi, story-driven RPG, I was expecting a thoughtful story, but I couldn’t have imagined an interplanetary adventure. The result is a clear improvement over its predecessor, and a trip well worth taking.
Wake Up, Sleeper
In the 2022 award-winning indie hit Citizen Sleeper, players go to a galaxy far, far away and take on the role of a Sleeper, a machine clone of a real person with a debt to pay who’s been put in a coma while their emulated mind works. The Sleeper is trying to break free of their corporate overlords, so they run away to a space station. However, freedom does not come that easily—they have a substance reliance to keep them functional, and a tracker embedded in their brain.
The player’s goal is to get the Sleeper to find not just freedom, but peace. There are several different characters and factions to align with, each presenting their own benefits and problems. The gameplay is half sci-fi visual novel and half strategy game, with players trying to succeed at various tasks using a mix of skill checks and randomized dice rolls.
Martin demonstrates a deep understanding of what made their first game click, and what could inspire moving forward.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is everything that gamers loved about the first and more. In the opening moments, the game succeeds at landing one of the trickiest challenges for any game developer: creating a storyline that feels both satisfying for returning players and inviting to new players. Our Sleeper has lost their memory during an interrupted reboot, so players are experiencing relationships anew. Thus, you don’t need to play the first Citizen Sleeper to enjoy this one, though if you did, you’ll find a myriad of connections to enjoy.
When I look at video game sequels, I want more of the same but also better of the same. I want to see a tangible effort made to not only improve, but to advance and explore new elements. Despite not being a coder, Martin demonstrates a deep understanding of what made their first game click, and what could inspire moving forward.
The world is no longer your oyster—now, it’s a solar system.
In the first game, Sleepers were stuck on one space station, desperate to make a life and find a way out. In the sequel, players have immediate access to a spaceship, and the galaxy folds out before you. There are new resources to keep track of—like food and fuel—as well as new relationships. Previously, the Sleeper hoped to make connections with random people in the city. Now, the Sleeper can build out a crew and handle difficult contracts.
Sleeper is on a journey to find and understand themselves. The world is no longer your oyster—now, it’s a solar system.
A Game of Chance
The dice are also back in Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. Players have five six-sided dice per day (“cycle”) that are randomly rolled, and players will use these dice to try and achieve tasks like negotiating with a security officer or scouring a scrap pile for something useful. In my Top 10 Games of 2022 list, I likened Citizen Sleeper’s mechanics to D&D and other tabletop experiences. But this time, the dice are combined with a few new systems layered on top to add extra challenges.
For example, there’s a Stress system that can make it harder for the Sleeper to roll higher numbers. That makes sense—we often don’t do our best work when we’re burnt out! If you don’t rest and take care of yourself, this stress can lead to dice breaking, giving you even fewer options to work with. Citizen Sleeper 2 invites players to make strategic choices not just for their protagonist, but for crewmates as well.
Martin has imbued regular six-sided dice with skill, worry, fear, hope, and possibility.
In another significant change, Citizen Sleeper 2 introduces Contracts, which are essentially off-station missions, such as to an asteroid or a wreck. As the game goes on, you can recruit other lonely travelers with different skill sets, and they can roll a few dice on Contracts, too. Each Contract has a ticking clock of some kind (for example, a corporate drone that recognizes you’re trying to scavenge a hivemind) that can ramp up speed if you’re blowing it. And wow, it is easy to blow it.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is harder than I remember the first one being. Or maybe I just cared more this time? I started on regular difficulty and ended up moving to easy a few hours into my playthrough because I wanted to get a sense of everything the game had to offer in time for my review. I frequently swore out loud or murmured, “Yes!” when a skill check passed. Martin has imbued regular six-sided dice with skill, worry, fear, hope, and possibility.
Shoot for the Stars
Every character in Citizen Sleeper 2 has a dream. Some are wishing to grow a plant. Others want to bring down a terrorist space gang. Another wants to find love. Martin wrote great characters the first time around, and with the new gameplay changes of a spaceship in the sequel, Martin has the room to do more. There’s more banter, more drama, more story. The side quests throughout feel naturally embedded into the world.
Martin, like the Sleeper, can’t do it alone. They’ve brought back the amazing character artist from the first game, Guillaume Singelin, as well as its composer, Amos Roddy. Both are instrumental to the franchise’s look, sound, and feel. I don’t often think about sound design, but both Citizen Sleeper games made me aware of the power of great mixing. When I traveled to the impoverished neighborhoods of Far Spindle, I heard the cacophony of the markets. When I climbed an abandoned satellite array, I felt oppressed by the relative silence. It’s truly a surround sound reading experience.
I have a Master of Fine Arts in fiction, and as I played Citizen Sleeper 2, I was in deep admiration of the craft work that went into this project that totals over 250,000 words. (For context, the average bestseller novel these days is closer to 85,000.) In addition to Unity, Martin utilizes Ink, a software created by the inkle team for creating games with writing at the heart. There’s great descriptions of atmosphere as well as character-appropriate dialogue, interspersed with the occasional beautiful existential reflection. Martin uses they/them pronouns, and Citizen Sleeper 2 deftly uses the sci-fi setting to quietly explore themes around selfhood, bodies, and identity.
As one would also expect in such a big text project, there are a few typos here and there, particularly in late-game side missions that probably had received less of a fine-toothed comb-through. There was also an occasional glitch where a crewmate’s dice would be represented by an unclickable black box. However, I was playing an alpha build for review, so I imagine a lot of these issues will be gone by the official release. Even if they’re not, these technical errors were so few and far between in my 12-hour playthrough that they felt like mere specks in the galaxy.
Final Thoughts: A Fantastic Sequel
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector iterates on everything its predecessor accomplished, maintaining the same heart while adding new challenges. It will delight anyone who played the first, and also serves as an exciting entry point for anyone new to the interactive novel genre.
The original game offered plenty of replayability with different character builds and skill sets, as well as different factions to align with. While the “good” path here is more obvious than the original, I already look forward to playing it again and making different choices this time around. After all—the sky’s the limit.
Score: 9.5/10
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, developed by Jump Over the Age and published by Fellow Traveller, releases on January 31, 2025, for PC, Mac, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. MSRP: $24.99.
Disclaimer: A review code was provided by the publisher.
