The life of Sleepers is full of dangers. They gain consciousness in a state of slavery, emulating a human mind inside an android body, forced to work until they are thrown away. Those who escape do not live long due to trackers in their bodies and a hard-wired dependence on a drug known as Stabilizer. Without it, the Sleeper's body will eventually give up its biosynthetic organs.
If this sounds like the worst excesses of modern technology taken to extremes, you understand that Citizen Sleeper 2: Star Vectors creator Gareth Damian Martin moves on.
“Citizen Sleeping I built on things when I was in my early 20s,” they tell me. IN pastMartin talked a lot about how their time spent as workers in the gig economy contributed to the alienation and atomization of the workforce that was present in the original game they released for widespread critical acclaim in 2022.
“WITH Citizen Sleeper 2I don't look at things that way anymore, I think a little more about how we can continue to build a future when we know it's going to fall apart. We know that there is an inevitable entropy in everything, not only in political systems and structures, but also in our lives and our physical bodies. We know things are going to fall apart, but every day we keep getting up and keep doing something.”
For plot reasons I won’t spoil it, the main character of the upcoming Citizen Sleeper 2 managed to turn off their tracker and no longer needed the Stabilizer, but this did not make their existence any less dangerous. Where Citizen Sleeping took place exclusively on one space station, Citizen Sleeper 2 allows the player to explore the Star Belt, a location that is mentioned frequently in the first game.
With the change in location, the player will have to control the ship and crew, and the scale also increases dramatically. Volume approximately 250,000 words. Citizen Sleeper 2 The script is almost twice as long as the original game. The stakes are also higher: a corporate proxy war threatens to consume the Star Belt.
Martin was working on Citizen Sleeper 2 for almost two years, or about the same amount of time it took them to complete the original game. All the necessary systems were already in place, allowing Martin to spend more time experimenting with gameplay and writing stories, particularly drawing on two of the most beloved (and deeply human) space operas.
“You know, Cowboy Bebop “It’s a really good story about the gig economy,” Martin laughs. “And people forget how few characters there are in firefly we like each other, right? They're more colleagues than friends, so there's something really interesting about that.” Martin notes that while working in the gig economy, they have met many people from different backgrounds and places, and although the work keeps people apart almost intentionally, workers still find solidarity and human connection.
The new game inherited many of the gaming systems of its predecessor. Each day or “cycle” the player has up to five dice that they can assign to actions that can earn them money or advance the story. The chance of an action being successful depends on the die the player places on it. For example, a five has a 50/50 chance of leading to a neutral or positive result, while a six guarantees success. Each task also carries a risk factor, with negative dice rolls resulting in more severe results for “risky” and “dangerous” actions.
There's also what the game calls a “clock,” a system that ties everything together. Most story objectives require the player to complete the task over multiple cycles. At the same time, there are often competing clocks counting down to the story deadline.
At first glance, everything Citizen Sleeping the systems are simple, but they are put together in a way that enhances the game's narrative. At least that's how it was in the beginning. On my first playthrough Citizen Sleeping, my character eventually made enough money that getting him a Stabilizer wasn't a problem. Martin tells me that this was by design.
“I knew I needed the players to be on my side,” they say of the first game. “I needed to win over people. If the game was too tough, I felt the players wouldn't give it the time I wanted. This time I feel in a completely different position.”
Citizen Sleeper 2on the contrary, it represents a more confident game – both in itself and in the fact that its players accept a certain degree of suffering. There are story points and content that players can miss, which was largely absent from the first game. It also has multiple difficulty settings, and on the hardest setting, the player's Sleeper can experience permanent death. (If you want to continue saving, you'll need to lower the difficulty, but your Sleeper will be permanently changed.)
“I didn't know how Citizen Sleeper 2 was going to end when I started making it,” Martin tells me, describing it as a “dangerous game” for a developer. “But since I made the first game, I was confident that I could play this game and that something really exciting would come out of it.”
Estimated effect from Citizen Sleeper 2 is to make the player feel like Martin is guiding them through the tabletop role-playing game, e.g. Dungeons and Dragons or Blades in the dark. The story should feel improvised, surprising and moving.
Nowhere is this newfound confidence and TTRPG inspiration more evident than in Contracts. Sleeper Citizen 2 signature new gameplay feature. Contracts allow the Sleeper and his two companions to carry out missions far from the safety of the populated areas of the Star Belt.
One of the first instructs the Sleeper team to neutralize a damaged corporate combat drone. In practice, this meant deactivating two separate systems on the spaceship, but the catch was that as soon as I gained access to one system, the timer for both would start ticking. Each Contract is a miniature pressure cooker with its own risks that cannot be eliminated until the Contract ends or the player fails.
The contracts also allowed Martin to explore one of the Citizen Sleeping less fully realized ideas “that the dice are the body of the Sleeper.” During Contracts, negative and neutral rolls made during risky and dangerous activities will cause the Sleeper's stress bar to increase, a system reminiscent of the need to obtain Stabilizer in the first game. As the gauge fills up, certain throws will begin to damage the player's bones. Each of the Sleeper's five dice can withstand three hits before breaking; they cannot be repaired until they are completely broken, not until the Contract expires. Teammates also have voltage gauges, and if filled, they will be disabled for the rest of the contract.
To further complicate matters, even after fixing the Sleeper's dice, they don't immediately work properly due to another new mechanic called “Glitch”. Depending on the components the player uses to repair the Sleeper's body, they fill the Sleeper's glitch meter to a greater or lesser extent. In turn, this means that there is a high chance that a normal die will turn into a glitch, which has an inherent 80-20 chance of producing either a negative or a positive result, and skill points do not change these odds in any way.
Getting a bad die seems like a punishment at first, but I think it's one of the smartest systems Martin has added to the game. The fact that glitch dice aren't affected by skills means they also ignore negative modifiers, which made them great for completing tasks that my Sleeper wasn't good at, and I really felt like I was pushing my luck. It's nice that players can even get an achievement, a nice nod to Cowboy Bebop called “Whatever happens, happens” when they get a positive result with the wrong die.
I've never been comfortable playing Citizen Sleeper 2 just like I did with its predecessor. The game's constant surprises meant that I often had to push the Sleeper's body to its limits in order to complete some of the more difficult scenarios. Thus, Citizen Sleeper 2 combines storytelling and gaming ambitions much more successfully.
I also found this story profound and important at a time when the world doesn't seem to be moving in the right direction. Characters Citizen Sleeper 2 surrounded by endless difficulties, but still find a way to move forward.
“Is it pointless to continue to strive for human, meaningful relationships and to build a life when we know that there are structures beyond us that can crush us at any moment?” – Martin asks me. “Or is it that even though these structures are so big and powerful, we still live and work with the feeling that we can build something and have meaningful relationships because our reality is so personal, real and direct?”
Like any good grandmaster, Martin is not interested in giving anyone the answer to this question, but hopes that Citizen Sleeper 2 can lead them to their own.
Citizen Sleeper 2 will arrive on January 31 Nintendo Switch, Xbox series X/S, PlayStation 5 And PC.
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