How spacefaring Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector upends RPG norms
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a spacefaring RPG, but not as you know it. You play as a Sleeper, an android once doomed to a life of servitude, now on the run from Laine—an intergalactic mobster who presumes to own you after wresting control from your manufacturer, Essen-Arp.
He’s wrong. You escape into the Starward Belt, the most remote fringes of the galaxy, with the help of an old friend who—thanks to an ill-timed malfunction—you can’t even remember. Your former captor in pursuit, you acquire a ship and a crew with designs on finding your own place in this precarious universe, and a slim hope you might reverse Laine’s dangerous meddling in your synthetic guts.
It won’t be easy. There’s a Stress mechanic for a reason. It will certainly be memorable though, as Citizen Sleeper 2’s tabletop-RPG inspirations and experimental storytelling chops jettison RPG conventions into the cold vacuum of space.
Deep encounters
In this standalone sequel (barring some cameos) to 2022’s celebrated narrative RPG Citizen Sleeper, you won’t touch the ground of another world like The Outer Worlds’ Terra-2 or Starfield’s Jemison, or gaze out over expansive alien horizons beckoning you to put on your astronaut’s boots and explore.
In Citizen Sleeper 2, you conduct space exploration almost as a disembodied being, floating above the space stations and asteroids you encounter. Vast spaces and warrens of activity are reduced to a few nodes of interest and storefronts, explored by dice-driven actions, cash, and sheer persistence.
Replacing traditional overworld exploration and combat encounters creates room for alternatives to take center stage. Tense encounters and negotiations with the Belt’s movers and shakers. Deeper and more meaningful relationships forged with the crew you adopt, like Juni, the obsessive budding data archeologist, and Yu-Jin, genial rogue-for-hire. The elusive nature of your wayward robotic mind.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is as vast as any open-world. It just doesn’t involve endless marches towards the horizon or battling hordes of enemies.
And despite its tabletop influences, the skills to engage with Citizen Sleeper 2's Belt go beyond Dungeons & Dragons and its many imitators. There’s no Strength stat, or even support for violent builds. The closest you get to physical prowess is Endure, a trait used for patient mining jobs or dangerous excursions. Rare scuffles to disarm an armed assailant or barge past a guard may be solved with checks against your Intuit or Engage skill, testing invention or the capability to assess and exploit a scenario instead of your workout regime.
When first docking into Flotsam, you're greeted by a daunting assemblage of interlocked ships and wrecks combined into one colossal city. The narrator notes, correctly, that to call this haphazard construct “labyrinthine” would be a major understatement given its slapdash pathways and jury-rigged entries. Your first objective on arrival: simply to get your bearings in a city which defies logical understanding.
This demands a full Cycle (a.k.a. one orbital rotation), at a minimum. An entire day’s effort applied to understanding just how to navigate your environs. No locks to pick, no entry terminal to hack—the barrier here is your capacity to understand a giant bewildering space and uncover hard-won new locations. Sometimes you succeed. Sometimes you’re lost down a blind alley. Familiarising yourself is a game in and of itself.
There’s more to dice than the rolls
The original Citizen Sleeper introduced a tabletop-RPG inspired approach to dice actions. At the start of each Cycle, you roll five dice. They serve as resources, your predetermined inputs for the day's actions. Luck still plays a part, in most cases—your rolls narrow the range of outcomes for any given action, but the outcome still remains somewhat random.
For example, I aided a damaged water transport vessel and attempted to stop their cargo from streaming out into the cosmos. Using one of my daily dice with a "6" result would mean a 100% likelihood of a positive outcome. Using a "4" granted a 50% chance for a neutral outcome, plus a 25% chance for positive and 25% for negative.
Think of it as feeding coins into a picky vending machine. A valuable "6" gets you closer to your target, with an increasing risk of negative outcomes the cheaper you go. A "1" might even get swallowed by the machine—or turn the vending machine into a bomb. It's a risky affair, and you'll learn to look for options that grant positive modifiers based on your class (and to curse negative modifiers with a steep -2 penalty).
Dice are typically the roleplayer’s reliable tools. Here, they can betray you—and with more than just an ill-timed snake eyes. Accrue Stress from negative action outcomes, running out of food, messing up on a contract, or using the Push-Your-Luck mechanic, and your dice will begin to take damage when certain values are rolled. With only three HP apiece, it doesn’t take much to lose them, leaving you with one less daily action.
It won’t end there. If you possess the right components, you can restore your android body to its full capabilities. More likely, you’ll find yourself struggling for resources and needing to use whichever scrap components you can source. Now, your makeshift fix means your dice glitch—fragile, unpredictable, with 80% risk of failure and a mere 20% chance of a positive outcome.
Decisions have long-term consequences
Glitching or broken dice are just one way things can go wrong. In one playthrough, hobbled by broken and glitched dice, I found myself destitute and starving on the long-abandoned Helion Gate, an old interstellar waypoint lost to aeons of disrepair. I scavenged remnants of fuel tankers for the means to reach civilization, or at least a warm meal. Delayed by my increasingly useless dice, the odds were against me. I took multiple cycles to get the fuel I needed to reach the nearest restaurant, and then longer still to scrape together the resources I needed to recover and venture forth again.
The bitter effects of my misadventure were long-lasting. Impeded by glitched dice, my next mission also ended in disaster. Unfortunate action checks took out my crewmates one by one. Desperate and alone, I ended up at a final choice my class was entirely unsuited for, a choice between Engineer and Endure skill checks with hefty negative modifiers. Out of options, I played the odds, feeding my dice into the machine—now less like a vending machine and more like a hopeful gambler at a slot machine.
My Stress meter kept rising. Eventually, any dice result except a "6" caused damage, until I ran out of dice entirely. Fade to black. I rebooted, now with a permanent glitch. The first of several I acquired.
Having spent 20 minutes circling the drain, bleeding out (metaphorically) as every resource shrank to naught, you may ask why I didn’t reload an earlier save? None existed. With impressively frequent autosaves and only one save slot per playthrough, you’re truly trapped by the irreversible consequences of your decisions and fateful die rolls. Like a good DM, there’s no threat of a game-over—events merely adapt, a branching narrative that accounts for your party composition and the myriad twists and turns of fate.
With my contract complete, I came into impossible wealth. Once I had nothing. Now I was rich—but also damaged beyond repair. No amount of chits can fix the harm I’ve done to myself, or extract the glitching dice from my body.
Exploring inner-space in outer space
Few RPGs are as introspective as the Citizen Sleeper series. The series exists in a rarefied class with Disco Elysium’s liquor-induced odyssey of self discovery and '90s classic Planescape: Torment.
Citizen Sleeper 2's story is about a galaxy and the people in it, the ties that bind them and the power structures that oppress them. But more than anything, it’s about a Sleeper’s personal battle with a robotic psyche which, at times, it can barely call its own.
The game explores the disconnect between body and mind—an enduring science fiction theme that, as developer Gareth Damian Martin previously outlined for us, originated from an operation gone wrong, a terrifying moment where they awoke and didn’t even know their own body.
Reading Citizen Sleeper’s story is magic. It’s a world drawn with precision, in finely composed prose and evocative art portraits. A fleeting observation communicates in a sentence what would take an animator days. The words conjure an image, a feeling, a slow unraveling of an abstract concept. You empathize with the strangeness of your Sleeper’s body, the latent treachery, with sly turns of phrase like “You take a calming breath, before realising how superfluous that is when your frame requires no oxygen."
You may find Citizen Sleeper 2 stressful. Relax. Take a breath. Feel the oxygen swell uselessly through your bionic chassis. For a moment, you were someone else—something else. Wake up, Sleeper. The spell breaks. You return to your own body, let oxygen fill your lungs, and enjoy the familiar sensation of stretching your body’s flesh-and-bone joints. After life as an android in the Starward Belt, you may just understand it anew.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector releases on the Epic Games Store on January 31.