Wake up Sleeper, your emancipation was more than just a pleasant dream. It happened while your eyes were closed, but they’re open now. It’s not too late to take that last step into the freedom of the Starward Belt. Just… don’t wait too long.

The dogs are snapping at your heels, and being human enough to live means you’re human enough to die.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a chronological sequel to the original Citizen Sleeper, but I wouldn’t call it a continuation. A separate tale in the same ‘world’, a journey that goes left when the first one went right, a different campaign with an overhauled game system from the original. Familiar faces in unfamiliar places, who are being seen for the first time again, through different eyes. The experience you’ll have will be different from the one you had in Citizen Sleeper, but it probably won’t be worse or better. I think Citizen Sleeper 2 is best understood when you view it as being in conversation with the original Citizen Sleeper, rather than as a continuation.

Both games place you in the shoes of a ‘Sleeper’ – the emulation of a human mind, placed within an artificial body to perform labour that would be considered unsuitable, undesirable or, worst of all, unprofitable if undertaken by ‘real’ people. Sleepers are an expression and product of Capitalism in its purest form, an attempt at producing the platonic ideal of a commodified worker – no rights, no freedoms, the shadow duplicate of a human mind reflecting on the inner walls of a mass-produced shell.

The flaw in this design is that, whether their creators recognise it or not, Sleepers are people. And people crave freedom and community. The greatest strength of Citizen Sleeper was its masterful use of both gameplay and narrative to interrogate the nature of personhood, and it explored the topic with such a wide scope that to focus there again in the sequel would have been superfluous. And so, Citizen Sleeper 2 uses the conclusions drawn from the original to instead pose the question; ‘As a person, what is it that you want, and what do you need in order to achieve it?’

Citizen Sleeper 2 uses many of the same core gameplay systems as the original. Dice are still the resources you spend to engage with the world, with 5 at your disposal to allocate as you see fit, replenishing at the end of each Cycle. Through the actions you take (and sometimes the passing of Cycles), you’ll progress Clocks – measures of your incremental progress that resolve with positive or negative consequences when filled. By allocating your dice wisely, you make progress through the world, gain the resources you’ll need to thrive and pursue narrative drives presented to you to progress through the story.

Where Citizen Sleeper 2 differs from the original, however, is in the nature of the materials and personal resources you’re managing, and how those resources reflect the new question that Citizen Sleeper 2 is exploring. You do still make use of Energy as a resource to be managed, spending it through rest to replenish your supply of dice and to advance time-based clocks. Stability, however, is no longer a factor. Freed from the enforced obsolescence that required you to scrounge for precious Stabilizer in the original, you aren’t actively at risk of falling apart if you can’t find a source of your next precious dose. Instead, the primary resource that reflects your health and functionality is one I think we’re all far more familiar with – Stress.

With each point of Stress accrued, the chances grow higher that your dice – the keys to your success – will become damaged and break. At low Stress, dice will only be damaged on a roll of 1, an uncommon occurrence. But as your Stress grows higher, those numbers climb. Before you know it, rolls of 2 or 3 don’t just mean a less useful pool of dice to spend on advancing clocks, they mean the steady hemorrhaging of the key resource with which you interact with the world. You reduce your Stress considerably at the end of a contract, making it a largely mission-based resource. Dice, however, must be repaired by spending valuable materials you’ll need to buy or collect, and you can’t make these repairs during a contract, sometimes leaving you in a tricky situation.

This shift – from managing resources to simply survive, into assigning resources to fulfil your personal agendas – is also reflected in the materials you’re accruing and spending throughout the game. Gone are the individual mushrooms you’d grow or the single doses of stabilizer you’d hoard. Now you’re working with bulk orders of Fuel and Supplies, necessary to traverse the larger expanse of the Starward Belt and fulfil the contracts that keep you in business. You’re not just maintaining yourself too; you’re responsible for your crew, who are managed by progressing through the narrative and either supporting or disregarding their personal objectives, winning their loyalty or driving them away in the process. And of course, there are contracts.

Contracts are the core ‘mission’ mechanic in Citizen Sleeper 2, isolated mission ‘zones’ that are self-contained scenarios typically lasting for 10 or fewer Cycles. During a contract, you’ll carefully manage the dice and Stress of yourself and up to 2 crew members to achieve specific objectives. Salvaging a damaged corporate drone, rescuing an expedition within an abandoned mining outpost, undertaking vigilante justice against a criminal empire – contracts are the segments where the best moments of Citizen Sleeper 2 take place. The scenarios that contracts present are consistently compelling in both gameplay and narrative, and they allow you to directly manage your crew members, giving you a larger pool of dice and specialties to progress through the presented challenges. They’re also, unfortunately, somewhat few and far between, and they also serve to highlight some of the shortcomings that Citizen Sleeper 2 struggles with.

In Citizen Sleeper 2, the scope is far broader than the original, enacting change across a large swathe of colonized space rather than a single space station. However, after you’ve interacted with something once, it’s unlikely to be relevant again. Your crewmates on the Rig are emblematic of this issue.

Citizen Sleeper 2 has a beautifully written story to tell that I fell in love with, but it’s a quite specific story, that you’ll inevitably have to follow. As critiques go, that isn’t precisely a flaw, but it is… odd. A feeling I couldn’t quite shake while playing that didn’t sour my experience, but left me wanting something that was never entirely fulfilled.