You’ve got a friend who played Baldur’s Gate 3? Great, good for them! Now they think videogames are cool and they want to play more of them? Oh, no! What other RPGs can you recommend that aren’t going to be a big step down from Baldur’s Gate 3? The list is pretty short. If they don’t mind doing some reading, the obvious contenders are Disco Elysium, Planescape: Torment, and, I’d argue, cyberpunk android-on-the-run life simulator Citizen Sleeper. (With Sovereign Syndicate and Pillars of Eternity as a bonus round.)
That recommendation’s going to get easier to make with Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, which its creator Gareth Damian Martin says is going to be even more of an RPG than the original was. “That means that your choices and the way that you decide to use the dice rolls and the way you react to your luck and your fate in the game is really, really important,” they say. “You have to deal with bad luck all the time, with failure, with stress and all of these things and I think that’s what makes the game really exciting and engaging.”
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector was voted the #21 most anticipated game of next year in today’s PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted showcase, and Martin talked a bit about aspirations for the sequel in an interview with PC Gamer.
Citizen Sleeper borrows mechanics from tabletop RPGs like Blades in the Dark—which, in a nice feedback circuit, owes a debt to videogames Fallen London and Dishonored—requiring that you roll a pool of dice each day and then spend them on various tasks. Some of these tasks are simple one-and-done deals like asking a local at the Bright Market for directions, while others like spaceship repair work need to be chipped away at over the course of a series of rolls. The dice rolling adds some friction between story beats, but only a touch.
“I think the thing that I’m trying to do differently with Citizen Sleeper 2 is really emphasize the mechanical aspects of the roleplaying,” Martin says. “I think the first game did a really good job for players who are really into roleplaying, but I think for the second game I wanted to have much more mechanical elements supporting that.”
(Image credit: Fellow Traveller)
Among the new mechanical elements are stress points. You can accumulate these by using your class “push” mechanic, failing at certain tasks, or going hungry (yeah, you’re a synthetic who needs to eat, just go with it). The more stress you have the more likely you are to damage your dice, eventually breaking them and shrinking the pool. Systems like this aren’t just about adding crunch to Citizen Sleeper 2’s rules for its own sake, but finding new ways to express its themes.
“The new dice system, the new stress system, glitching your dice, breaking your dice, all of these structures,” Martin says, “they create much more gameplay around the body of the Sleeper—what it means to be an android whose body is falling apart because they’re escaping the corporation that made them.”
There’s a nice metaphorical layer there, with the systems getting more complicated to better represent your complicated artificial body. Citizen Sleeper 2 has more mechanics in it, and they’ll make you confront the fact you’re a machine. But aren’t we all?
“The Sleeper’s really struggling with this very human thing, which is this strange unknowability of our own bodies,” Martin says. “That they are both something that we are, and they’re integral to who we are as people, but they’re also something that we don’t exactly know how they work all the time, and we don’t know what they’re doing all the time. We just feel their effects.”
If struggling with the inscrutability of the human body by the analogous complexity of living with a synthetic one sounds like your idea of a good time—or your friend who really liked arguing with Shadowheart’s idea of a good time—Citizen Sleeper 2 will be available on Steam from January 31 and you can wishlist it there right now.
