When I dove into the world of Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, I couldn’t help but picture a “whale fall.” You know, the way a whale’s massive body sinks to the ocean floor after it dies, turning into a feeding ground for an entire ecosystem of deep-sea life. The backdrop for this sci-fi tale is the collapse of the once-mighty Solheim corporation, leaving behind remnants that everyone now relies on for survival—like scavengers picking clean the bones of a gigantic beast. The Sleeper’s story is but one fragment of this enormous cosmos, all living off what’s left of a fallen giant.
Reflecting on my love for the first Citizen Sleeper, I initially doubted the need for a follow-up. The original felt perfectly finished. What more could there be to uncover? Turns out, plenty. I found myself enchanted once again with this gritty-yet-beautiful transhumanist universe. By the time the credits came rolling, I felt a twinge of sadness. Much like its predecessor, Citizen Sleeper 2 embraces being reflective, subversive, and utterly absorbing in its storytelling.
Once more, you step into the shoes of a Sleeper, a human consciousness housed in a prosthetic vessel, all wires, metallic bones, and synthetic flesh. You awaken with fractured memories—your past is intact, but the short-term is elusive. After a chaotic frenzy, you’re on the run again, having escaped your corporate creators, only to now dodge a “friend” turned formidable foe. It seems space gangsters frown upon autonomy.
On the lam again, you’re forced into survival by freelancing and the luck of dice rolls. The narrative is vivid, as your Sleeper paints the world through sights, odors, and sounds. The visual aspect shows just basic location exteriors and clickable map markers that unlock events. Citizen Sleeper’s RPG mechanism spins around a dice economy. At each day’s start (or cycle), you roll five dice, using their outcomes to complete tasks and objectives by ticking through clocks. Higher rolls spell better success. Energy and money drive you; thus, gig work is crucial.
The initial game confined you to a single space station, cultivating familiarity—where to snag work, get a bite to eat, forming ties with familiar faces. Security, however, vanishes in Citizen Sleeper 2. Your Sleeper hops from place to place, wary of rooting down lest discovered. The Sleeper’s new journey spans a broader network of stations and satellites called The Belt. Sticking around simply isn’t an option, and the tension of staying ahead of your pursuer keeps you on edge.
This nomadic lifestyle underscores the key difference between CS1 and CS2: tension—delicious tension. Citizen Sleeper 2 is masterful at amping up the pressure. A critique of CS1 was its tendency to let you grow too comfortable too easily. Not so here, and that elevates the experience. This new reality hit home for me on Day Two, when my shipmate jolted me awake with a blunt, “we’re in trouble.” Breaks seem elusive for the Sleeper, and by relation, you.
The game ups the excitement with bold, exhilarating new systems. Contracts are a standout addition—high-risk, high-reward missions that demand you travel and complete objectives under tight deadlines. You must gather a crew to assist, each member coming with unique skills and assignable dice.
Contracts teem with potential calamities, notably stress management. Every failed skill check adds stress to a character, risking them bowing out if they’re overwhelmed. Over-straining your Sleeper breaks dice, sidelining them until fixed, a dire outcome. Failed checks can also spark crisis events, necessitating resolution to keep missions on course.
Between dice, stress counters, crisis events, and countdowns, Contracts are devilishly entertaining. Strategically divvying up my crew’s dice while constantly evaluating numbers and symbols, gambling with risky moves felt like tinkering with explosive mechanisms. The nail-biting moments, betting against a 50% chance of negative outcomes and hoping for the best, were thrill rides I chased again and again, pushing me toward far greater risks than in the first game.
Building the right crew becomes essential. Navigating potential problems requires planning and foresight. Your Sleeper’s RPG-style class allows ability upgrades, yet one skill remains permanently locked, urging reliance on others to cover weaknesses—mirroring real life.
Stumbling upon an event demanding expertise none of your crew possess can spell trouble. This system might tempt you to view characters as nothing more than sets of dice, but over time, their survival stories unfold. You can invite selected characters to join your crew, drawing out their depth and backgrounds through this bonding. They become more than just tools; they’re companions like the Sleeper. Together, you turn your spaceship into a sanctuary, welcoming drifters of The Belt.
On this journey, you might bump into familiar faces. Your current Sleeper is not the same as in the first game, yet seeing these old names surfaces a bittersweet solace. Years have passed since then, and the toll shows—they’ve become weathered, hardened. It’s a stark reminder of how relentless corporate capitalism wears down individuals.
This thematic revelation is brilliantly conveyed through Citizen Sleeper 2’s superlative writing, as evocative as its predecessor. Gareth Damian Martin crafts vivid worlds and breathes life into the inanimate—his storytelling is unparalleled. I took countless screenshots I longed to preserve, my folder now like snapshots from beloved book pages rather than virtual holiday postcards.
The narrative proves exceptional even when disaster strikes, occasionally becoming more engaging amid chaos than tranquility. RPG-style decisions punctuate the storyline, reliant on your abilities instead of chance, guaranteeing wild outcomes even when things don’t go as planned. I’ve drilled into the heart of a frozen asteroid, botched a mutiny plan on a labor ship, laid foundations for a colony on a space rock, and conversed with a deteriorating machine’s fractured consciousness—the escapade has been nothing short of spectacular.
One salient storyline involves Serafin, a character encountered in your early wakefulness. His shared history with you is complicated by your amnesia, rendering past connections void for your Sleeper. This loss weighs heavily—Serafin mourns a forgotten friendship, while the Sleeper reckons with the remoteness from someone who remembers them well. The resulting emotional landscape makes for poignant drama, grounding the game from start to finish.
Yet through rebuilding lost bonds, the central theme emerges—that change is perpetual, that the Sleeper and their universe are in relentless flux, constantly reshaping. It’s about constructing anew from remnants, seeing ruins not as endings but beginnings.
Citizen Sleeper 2 weaves reflections on transhumanism, capitalism, and power with narratives of real people. No space wizards, laser-packed spaceship battles, or daring heroes. Just individuals persevering. It’s a grounded take that’s rare in sci-fi, one I wish we saw more of. This ragtag universe feels owned by junkyard scrappers, diligent engineers, repair mavens, cargo bearers, and anyone else navigating this patchwork asteroid realm. Forget the glam of Starfield, Star Wars Outlaws, or Cyberpunk 2077. I crave real, gritty stories of ordinary folks, and that’s Citizen Sleeper 2 in a nutshell. A brilliant start to 2025.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector launches on PC, Xbox Game Pass, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 5 on January 31. I wrote this review from a PC code courtesy of the publisher.
