Some thoughts on Citizen Sleeper 2
Wake up, Sleeper
The first Citizen Sleeper game was quite possibly my favourite game of the year in which I played it, back in 2023. I have the Lost in Cult art book. I’ve often thought that if I ever put my mind to making a video game, Citizen Sleeper is the model I’d shamelessly copy. It’s safe to say that I was excited and on board about the sequel.
Both Citizen Sleeper games are text-focused visual novels cleverly interwoven with roleplaying elements of chance and character advancement. It’s not purely a text experience, with the world presented in a stripped-down, minimalist 3D. You navigate around the locations — a space station in the first game, multiple asteroids and cobbled-together zero-g settlements in the sequel — visiting people and places and making decisions about where to put your time and effort.
That effort is represented by five d6 die, rolled at the start of each in-game cycle/day. Low dice make it difficult or dangerous to accomplish tasks, while high dice make it easy. Your chosen character and the way you develop them influences what they’re good at, and each character type has a missing skill. As a result, there are opportunities for multiple playthroughs depending on where you focus your attributes.
As well as the dice, there are also ‘clocks’. Each cycle you roll a new set of dice, as well as taking care of concerns such as where you’re getting your food and fuel. At the end of each cycle you have a rest, then begin again. Ending a cycle also advances various clocks in the world: timers ticking down to specific events. Sometimes you’ll be waiting for a crew member to finish running an experiment. Other times, an enemy will be tracing your position and you have to leave before they arrive.
If this is all sounding very mechanical and artificial, it’s not at all how the game feels to play. That’s the real genius here, which is that all of these systems combine to create something quite naturalistic. The clocks and dice recede into the background, and instead you simply feel the pressure of time marching on, and a good set of dice feels like you hopped out of bed after a good night’s sleep. Roll a bad set of dice and you woke up with a headache and feeling depressed.
There are additional twists: dice can break and glitch, instead of health you have an increasing level of stress. Resources are always scarce. The Citizen Sleeper games are as far from a power fantasy as you can get, with you playing a downtrodden, hunted and broke artificial human (a ‘sleeper’). Most of the game involves scrounging for scraps and never feeling like you have a secure foothold.
Going back to the mechanical structure, and how it interacts cleverly with the narrative, I’m most reminded of Signs of the Sojourner.
The systems are very different, with Signs of the Sojourner being a deck building card game and Citizen Sleeper built around dice. Connecting the two approaches is that they’re both using these established game elements as metaphors for character and social interaction.
To explain:
Signs of the Sojourner is all about communication and forming connections with people as you travel about the world. Some cards are compatible, some not. If you encounter someone with a wildly different deck of cards, you’ll have trouble understanding one another. The genius trick is that while having these card-based conversations you exchange cards; as a result, your own deck shifts towards being more compatible with that person. Implied here is that by talking with each other, you are exchanging ideas and points of view and context. Through conversation, you’re better able to communicate the next time you meet them. The game represents changing opinions and social dynamics, all through cards.
Hard to describe, but endlessly clever.
Citizen Sleeper uses dice to explore stress and scarcity. Glitching and broken dice represent injury and deteriorating mental health. The random dice you roll at the beginning of a cycle directly affect what you can do, and how ambitious you can be. It’s about coping with adversity. As the game progresses and you complete tasks, points can be used to upgrade your character’s skills — just like in any other RPG. In Citizen Sleeper this isn’t to make you more powerful or give you new combat skills. It’s more about competency and confidence: better able to cope with the demands of the day, even if you wake up and roll a bad set of dice.
It makes me think of how I am aged 44 compared to 22 or younger. Back in my student days, if I woke up feeling tired and like I couldn’t be bothered with the day, I’d just slob about. As a middle-aged parent, that’s not an option — I still have things to do, regardless of how energised I feel in the morning! But that’s OK, because over the years I’ve developed coping techniques and improved my competency and skills.
There’s another side to the game, outside of the metaphorical skill checks and actions, and that’s the written story. Citizen Sleeper 2 is a dense game with a lot of words to read. There are occasional choices to make, and the way you approach the wider challenges will significantly shift what happens in the prose sections, but make no mistake that this is a highly authored experience.
That’s a big part of what I love about the game. Citizen Sleeper 2 is a game with a point of view and something to say. There’s nothing anonymous or distant about the story being told.
It helps that the writing is good. The whole thing would fall apart if it weren’t, but Gareth Damian Martin’s words bind the experience together. This is science fiction, full of Big Ideas, but it leans into literary stylings rather than the more common pulp adventure of video games.
Playing on a Steam Deck especially, able to play the game anywhere in the house or outside, my lingering memory of Citizen Sleeper 2 is halfway between having read a book and played a game. It’s satisfying and clever mechanically, while the written parts easily hold their own against any of the books on my shelves.
Did I mention the gorgeous art and music? I should have, as both are top tier. It’s an elegantly crafted game from top to bottom.
One day, when I finish Tales from the Triverse, I’d love to have a go at making my own (very small) game. It would be narratively-driven, of course, and Citizen Sleeper has such a compelling model. In fact, I’d love to see other writers and developers be able to play with the game’s building blocks, the dice and resource systems to tell other stories.
Highly recommended, as is the first game. I’d suggest starting with the first game, as it’s simpler and introduces the setting in a more contained fashion.
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