Citizen Sleeper 2 Is A Tense Tabletop-Inspired RPG With A Muddled Message

How many versions of you have there been? Maybe as a kid you moved to a new school or made new friends and found yourself changed as a result. Maybe you achieved or abandoned a dream and struggled to find what to do next. Maybe you got sick, got better, found a new job, transitioned, or were simply changed by the passing of time. However many of you there have been, all you can do is be the best version of who you are right now.

The protagonist of Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector finds themselves very literally a new person after a botched operation to free their robotic body from its reliance on Stabilizer, a life-saving substance controlled by their former boss, Laine. While they’re free of their chemical leash, their memories are lost along the way. Citizen Sleeper 2 retains the shining prose of its predecessor while building on the dice-based system that powers your interactions to build in more tension and more meaningful decisions. But not everything made it from the original intact, leaving the sequel to one of the best RPGs of the decade feeling thematically adrift and with fewer standout characters among its expanded cast.

Rolling Dice

Two major changes set Citizen Sleeper 2 apart. This time, you’re not alone, and you have a ship. Where the first game’s intro saw you struggling to find a foothold in the chaotic space station known as Erlin’s Eye, this time your ship gives you the power to recruit a crew of people as desperate as the original Sleeper to go on jobs. Rather than staying put and entrenching yourself in the local community as in the first game, the sequel sends you jetting from station to station to stay one step ahead of Laine, helping the locals with whatever job needs done along the way.

Every morning, you roll a hand of six-sided dice, which you use to perform actions throughout the day, whether that’s working a kitchen shift in exchange for dinner or hacking a ship’s computer to harvest valuable corporate data. Each of these actions is tied to one of your skills (like Engineer for technical tasks or Endure for physical ones), and your skill level is added to the roll to determine your outcome.

A few tweaks make Citizen Sleeper 2’s dice system much more satisfying than the original. Each of the game’s three classes is locked out from one skill, meaning any roll you make on a check with that skill gets two subtracted from its total. Roll poorly enough and you’ll gain Stress, which can eventually cause your dice to break. You can’t use broken dice until you pay to repair them, leaving you with fewer actions to use each day.

Odd Jobs

These new systems make it much more important to choose your rolls wisely, and play into the single best addition to Citizen Sleeper 2 — contracts. Contracts send you off of whatever station you’re currently on for specific jobs, from salvaging a derelict ship to finding a missing person. You can bring two crew members on contracts, each of which rolls two dice of their own each day.

While on a contract, you can also use your Push skill, which lets you self-inflict a point of Stress in exchange for rerolling dice. Even with the extra help, contracts are the most difficult part of the game. While on a contract, you can’t heal Stress or repair dice, and each contract has its own Stress track as well. Fill it and you fail the job outright.

Citizen Sleeper 2’s mechanics sing when you’re on a contract. Every one feels tense and difficult, asking you to balance multiple Stress tracks against the potential payout for pushing yourself a little harder. Some Stress is relieved after each contact, but not all of it, meaning performing poorly can actually leave you worse off than you started, struggling to find more work to make up for the loss.

Citizen Sleeper 2 isn’t just a game about rolling dice, though. It’s about the story of your Sleeper and the characters they meet along their journey. I found it odd, then, when I noticed that my crew members didn’t speak much on contracts. They may offer a line or two about how the job is going, but they don’t say much to deepen their own stories, much less their bonds with each other and your Sleeper. They might get a story beat on contracts directly tied to their lives, but otherwise, it feels more like you’re carting around an extra set of dice rolls than a crew of actual people.

Back on the relatively solid ground of space stations, your crew plays even less of a role. Outside your ship, you’re on your own, without the benefit of their extra dice or their companionship. That results in the feeling that your crew members essentially don’t exist except for when you need something from them or vice versa.

Strangers On Board

The freewheeling structure of Citizen Sleeper 2, which has you moving to a new station every few in-game days, also has drawbacks. At each stop, you’ll generally encounter a handful of new characters and one or two contracts to complete. Once you’ve wrapped them up, there’s no reason to hang around and get to know the locals, and storylines for different characters rarely intersect. Citizen Sleeper’s single setting allowed for stories that wove in and out of one another, forcing the player to make choices about who to help in the community and gradually defining their Sleeper as a character of their own. The short time you spend with each character in the sequel makes them all feel a bit flat and turns your Sleeper into a largely anonymous entity, flitting around the solar system from one job to another.

Your Sleeper is a character without a past (that they can remember anyway), but Citizen Sleeper 2 leans a bit too much on the stories told in the original. Time after time, you’ll head off to meet a new character, only to find a returning face from the original game. After the events on the Eye, it seems, everyone there packed up and moved more or less in the same direction. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the characters’ pasts don’t actually play into what happens in Citizen Sleeper 2, and the same trick is pulled off enough times to make it distracting. For the most part, their reappearances carry all the weight of a surprise cameo in a Marvel movie.

Seeing the same faces return drives home how much less fulfilling character stories generally are in the sequel. There are a handful of fascinating new characters, from the operators of a pirate radio station to the no-nonsense chef working to feed refugees to a questionably sentient computer program protecting corporate secrets. One of the game’s best characters returns from the original, having given up on their long-held dream, discovered they’re non-binary, and done their best to get over their toxic ex. They embody the story’s themes of embracing who you are untethered from the past, making do with what you have in the moment, and doing your best to support those around you, no matter how different your path looks from what you expected. But between the constant shifts in setting and the flood of cameos, the stories of all these characters are given little room to breathe, and Citizen Sleeper 2 has less to say as a result.

This all adds up to a game that feels deeply divided. Any time I was on a contract, I was captivated. The palpable tension of every dice roll left me with sweaty palms and a racing heart, wondering if this would be the job that finally got the better of me. But in slower moments, what takes up the majority of the game when you’re not on the clock, Citizen Sleeper 2 never quite clicked with me. It’s still a stunningly well written game, full of prose that took my breath away, but with a story that overall seems listless and unfocused. There are shining moments of Citizen Sleeper 2 that I’ll carry with me, but in the end it’s much like its protagonist, searching for the core of its own identity and coming up short.

7/10

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector launches on January 31 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. Inverse was provided with a PC copy for this review.

INVERSE VIDEO GAME REVIEW ETHOS: Every Inverse video game review answers two questions: Is this game worth your time? Are you getting what you pay for? We have no tolerance for endless fetch quests, clunky mechanics, or bugs that dilute the experience. We care deeply about a game’s design, world-building, character arcs, and storytelling come together. Inverse will never punch down, but we aren’t afraid to punch up. We love magic and science-fiction in equal measure, and as much as we love experiencing rich stories and worlds through games, we won’t ignore the real-world context in which those games are made.