In this video game’s future, you are a Sleeper, a sentient android, a husk created and controlled for labor. Citizen Sleeper II: Starward Vector, created by Gareth Damian Martin’s video game development studio Jump Over the Age, wants the robota, the Sleeper, you, to escape the drudgery and exploitation of certain forms of labor. Keep in mind that robota, the Czech word from which robot originates, translates to “mechanical body forced to labor”. It is an imagined world with echoes of our own.
In Citizen Sleeper II, you are fleeing the hellish forced productivity of the first game in the series, Citizen Sleeper. So traumatic were the events that Sleeper suffers from dissociative amnesia. Now, you find yourself in the clutches of Laine, an underworld boss in the city of Darkside. At the beginning of the game, you are rescued by a young man, Serafin, your first crew member. Escaping and staying free requires you to constantly move as the sinister Laine, who has a grip on the Sleeper’s mind, pursues not far behind. The tension never lessens.
Citizen Sleeper II is about decisions; few are as impactful as its first, picking a class (the raison d’être of your character). Your choices are between Machinist, Operator, or Extractor. Each dictates your proficiencies and how successful you will be at particular tasks. Escaping is its own sort of work, after all, and you need to prepare. You accept contracts to upgrade your capacities and gain resources and key items needed for space travel.
Depending on your choices and outcomes, you might gain allies who will join your spacefaring crew, each with their own motivations and capabilities, and they can contribute to your quest. French illustrator Guillaume Singelin’s character art embeds a particular mix of bande dessinée space psychedelia as well as unique interpretations of low-tech sci-fi to each character. Each has its distinct illustrations. Singelin offers a glimpse into not only who they are but their soul. They embed Martin’s steampunk world, the vast Starward Belt, with much of its humanity.
As you explore the Starward Belt you will encounter abandoned space stations and satellites, mines inside asteroids, and even greenhouses in the emptiness of space. Citizen Sleeper II also improves on its predecessor’s sleek user interface. Important information is arranged neatly and clearly on the screen, making reading this text-heavy video game gratifying.
The gameplay loop is demarcated as a ‘cycle’, essentially a turn in tabletop games parlance. Citizen Sleeper II is, after all, a virtual tabletop role-playing game whose repetitive gameplay fits both its broader narrative ambitions and ludic lineage. The repetition parallels the drudgery of living paycheck to paycheck. You must scavenge for resources and take on odd and often dangerous jobs to keep moving.
There is a heavy push-your-luck element to all this, as dice play a big part in the gameplay. The oppressive action space dishes out bad outcomes, all sinister, and may impede your ability to move. You feel like you’ve been released from confinement when you have a positive result (a breakthrough!).
Play Is Hard Work
Citizen Sleeper II has profound things to say about the nature of labor. Martin, with the assistance of writer Reid McCarter, created a world full of characters with ambitions and goals. Shirō Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell series, specifically its themes of sentient artificial intelligent life, is an easy comparison and possible influence on this video game’s story. Sleeper is very much like Masamune’s protagonist, Major Motoko Kusanagi, as she struggles to expand past the limits of intelligence and the existence of robota like herself.
However, unlike most popular media, Citizen Sleeper II eschews clichés and familiar narratives where individuals persevere over adversity while not challenging the cruel structures that make life unbearable. With the story of Citizen Sleeper II, Martin dares to dream big and expands on the horizon of possibilities in sci-fi.
Throughout this video game, the well-rounded cast of characters is enlivened by Martin’s excellent writing and world-building. Each grows during the adventure. Some start unlikable, while others you first view with distrust. You will get to know them for better or worse. You will end up liking some of these characters. You will hate others even more than when you first met them.
Citizen Sleeper II is scarcity the game. It’s not Malthusian as it doesn’t share the dead man’s contempt for human life. On the contrary, Martin looks at those who have few resources and are trying to make do with compassion. Martin sees solidarity – unionization in its most literal form – as a means of overcoming the adversity and tyranny of an exploitative society. Serafin is Martin’s stand-in when he says, “Get on the inside. Organize, undermine. That I can get on board with.”
All that said, Citizen Sleeper II’s message is muddled by its complexity, or rather the inscrutability inherent within the esoteric nature of complex tabletop RPGs. This game style is inaccessible to those who can’t concentrate for long periods and demands a lot from its players as they are tasked with doing much of the heavy lifting in invoking the game worlds and character agency. Thus, unfortunately, Citizen Sleeper II speaks specifically to the choir in its congregation, the bookish lefty gamer.
Citizen Sleeper II also demands that you are okay with having little agency. The reliance on chance, or probability, when making decisions makes this a stressful experience. Sleeper even accumulates stress from failing specific actions. The more stress you have, the worse things get. So, managing bad outcomes is crucial to success.
Your decisions stick, and their outcomes, usually dreadful at higher difficulties, shape the game’s world by altering Sleeper as a character and affecting your crew and resources. I’ve never played a game so punishing and preoccupied with causing dread. For much of the game, you are playing for scraps. Serafin says it best: “We have some freedom… Freedom to go broke, starve, and get into even more trouble.” When I read these words at the beginning of the game, I didn’t realize that they were foretelling.
Work Is Stressful
Citizen Sleeper II, as a video game, polarizes when the burden of agency is heavy. The player gets just enough choice to want to keep going. Grinding past challenges is not an option unless you play in the most forgiving difficulty setting. One might be dragged through the story by adverse outcomes on higher difficulty levels due to the severely limited options.
Fortunately, regardless of experience within this video game, Amos Roddy‘s throbbing soundtrack provides some uplift. It utilizes ambient music and, when needed, pulsating synths and drums to ratchet tension. Along with the visual design, excellent writing and music make the world of Citizen Sleeper II compelling and, at times, even beautiful, repression and all.
I’ve written about many narrative games (Saltsea Chronicles, 1000xResist, Phoenix Springs). Yet, Citizen Sleeper II poses a peculiar challenge to my taste and patience. The more I played, the more I felt I was suffocating. After a disastrous attempt searching for survivors inside an asteroid while on a contract mission, Sleeper’s stress levels became so high that I could do little except pass from cycle to cycle (essentially continuously passing my turn).
I desperately tried to gather resources to flee to the next satellite or colony before Laine reached my location. I kept pushing my luck, failing every damn time. The consequences of failure in Citizen Sleeper II are severe. Yet, narratively, this is the point of the video game. Martin instills a foreboding and lingering sense of desperation in the player. The game thrives on creating this feeling. No wonder stress is a crucial mechanic that the player must contest.
While stars flickered in the distance, I gritted my teeth while trying to roll to see if Sleeper could open a door. I failed. Sleeper became so stressed that they lost all their ability to act. I could not attempt any further tasks. I, in real life, became so stressed that I bit my bottom lip and drew blood. The metallic taste lingered. A tinge of pain, along with Roddy’s music, is the perfect accompaniment to the game.
Though Citizen Sleeper II: Starward Vector is a challenging game, it seeks to inspire by showing the brutality of labor in a capitalist society. Part of its appeal comes from enjoying the perverse pleasure of getting whipped by it hard. It is overwhelming at times. Getting good at this video game does not guarantee success. One needs to endure calamity, the cost of which lingers like a wound. If you think you can cope with the misfortune you will undergo while playing this video game, try your luck. Like life, it’s a roll of the dice.