Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review: sci-fi sequel ups the stress

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My first escape attempt was a disaster.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, the sequel to 2022’s indie critical darling, kicks off in a high-stakes fashion that I wasn’t prepared for. Rather than hiding out on The Eye and quietly trying to survive, I’m immediately on the run. Terrified that I’ll be caught if I stay on any one planet too long, I begin to make hasty decisions that leave me in a deficit. My energy depletes, I don’t have the chits to maintain my ship, and each of my dice shatters one by one, limiting what I can accomplish in a day. I’m left hungry, stressed, and stranded. With each passing cycle, I sink into despair. How is anyone expected to survive in such an unforgiving world?

It’s only through that first failure that I could find the hope that powers developer Jump Over the Edge’s sci-fi sequel. Citizen Sleeper 2’s steep learning curve can be frustrating, leaving players to juggle an overwhelming number of cold survival systems that often feel at odds with its warmth. Learn to master those nuances, though, and you’ll unravel a compassionate story about reclaiming and rebuilding oneself — body and all — in the face of overwhelming cruelty.

Stress and survival

Like its predecessor, Citizen Sleeper 2 is a narrative RPG that draws its inspiration from tabletop games. It once again follows a runaway Sleeper, a human whose emulated consciousness is placed into a synthetic body by the shady Essen-Arp Corporation. They are indentured servants who have been robbed of all autonomy until they can pay off their debt. This time around, our Sleeper can’t just hide out on one space station; they have to hop around the galaxy to evade the villainous Laine, who gets closer with each passing day (or cycles, as they’re called here). It’s a heart-pounding setup that finds tension in minimalism.

To reinforce that, Starward Vector doubles down on Citizen Sleeper’s comparatively light survival systems for better or worse. The core gameplay loop remains unchanged even with more locations to explore. Each day, five six-sided dice are randomly rolled. These are used to carry out actions, from working for chits to taking on odd jobs, via skill checks tied to proficiencies like intuition. It’s deceptively simple, and that’s how I initially ended up in such a hole on my first try. Players need to think carefully about where they spend each die in order to maximize what they can pull off each day — especially because a counter ticks up every day to note that Laine is closing in. Once he’s close, it’s time to move somewhere else to cool it down.

There’s a lot more to manage this time around, which can be overwhelming early on. There’s a hunger system that forces players to replenish energy to fight off starvation. The ship needs fuel to travel between planets. A stockpile of supplies is needed to take on multi-day odd jobs. There’s a stress meter that can lead to a die shattering, which then needs to be repaired with precious scraps to use it again. A “push” system increases my stress, but buffs my crewmates’ dice. It’s a lot, and those systems aren’t always easy to understand. What broke me in my first playthrough was my glitch meter, an underexplained system that can leave a die with a permanent debuff. I quickly found myself with an array of broken dice, limiting my ability to refill all my other resources and leaving me hopelessly stranded.

That friction feels functional early on, even if it makes for a tough opening. While Citizen Sleeper 2 is a work of cyberpunk media, it calls a much more grounded media touchpoint to mind: Wendy and Lucy. Kelly Reichardt’s 2008 drama tells the story of a homeless woman trying to make her way from Oregon to Alaska with her dog in hopes that she can survive in a state with a lower cost of living. The quiet story finds her in economic purgatory, as every few bucks she manages to scrape together immediately has to be spent to survive another day. She’s trapped in a cycle that feels impossible to escape. Citizen Sleeper 2 carries that same weight in its hard sci-fi, which makes perfect sense. Both are anti-capitalist works that play into tangible human anxiety.

That survival edge can feel at odds with the story’s long-term tone, though, which isn’t nearly as hopeless as its allegorical setup suggests. For all its dystopian gloom, Citizen Sleeper 2 is almost sweet in nature. Once the escape premise cools down, the story becomes more about putting together a ragtag crew of recruitable companions who lend a few extra dice on contract jobs. Where Citizen Sleeper felt isolated, Starward Vector embraces the warmth of community. The additional stress born from resource management feels like a more of a match for a bleaker strategy game like The Banished Vault or Frostpunk 2.

I only found my groove once I dialed down the difficulty and started from scratch. It was there I found a flow that better fit Citizen Sleeper 2’s broader themes, more hopeful ones centered around the desire to build a better, more manageable world. I needed that first failure to really get that, though. I had to feel the crushing weight of it all — to feel like life just gets worse and worse with no relief — in order to take a deep breath and plot out how I could live in spite of it all. Both in life and Citizen Sleeper, “reset” is not a dirty word.

A transhumanist tale

With its systems tamed, I could more clearly appreciate Citizen Sleeper 2’s optimism. Yes, it’s a searing anti-capitalist game about humans forced into corporate slavery. It all takes place on rusting space stations floating in a sea of darkness. Starward Vector doesn’t wallow in the void; instead, it’s about carving out a livable place in it.

That’s accomplished through a wider scope than its predecessor, which was confined to one claustrophobic space. Here, we get to a wider look at what disparate communities look like in one corner of space, a setup that feels spiritually linked to the island-hopping Seasalt Chronicles. Once I’m able to cut my way through asteroid belts, I begin to find hope in unexpected places. On one stray ship, I discover a successful farming community. The more cycles I dedicate to helping out with contracts, the more I’m able to benefit from the ecosystem and top off my energy and supplies. It’s the first moment where I feel like it’s possible to not just escape this world but find a home in it.

Home is not just an external place; it’s my own body, too. Building on the series’ transhumanist themes, Starward Vector puts a greater emphasis on its Sleeper’s quest to reclaim their own body — something that carries a double meaning. There’s a clear commentary on gender dysphoria as characters talk about being uncomfortable in their own synthetic skin. It’s a thoughtful analogy, though that reading is complicated by the story’s sci-fi framework. The Sleeper’s bodily transformation at the heart of it all isn’t so much a process they want so much as one thrust upon them in a dubious manner. The spirit is there, but it’s perhaps too tangled up in corporate villainy.

The smoother reading is about reclaiming one’s body from a capitalist system, an idea that feeds into the other. The Essen-Arp Corporation literally owns people’s bodies in this world, but the heightened metaphor isn’t far off from the real world. There have been several accounts of Amazon employees pushed to work long shifts with limited opportunities for bathroom breaks. Video game workers have to contend with a widespread crunch culture that can leave developers sleeping in their offices. This kind of corporate overreach modeled in Essen-Arp isn’t science fiction. Only by escaping its clutches can Starward Vector’s Sleeper begin to take back their body and make it their home again. No one else can tell them what they can and can’t do with it.

Sometimes it all feels a little too easy. Maybe it’s just the cynic in me; there are moments where all the optimism feels like Jump Over the Edge telling me what I want to hear in screenshot-friendly dialogue. When I complete a quest that ends with me meeting a stowaway kitty, I wonder if I’m being coddled a bit. A warm blanket draped over an abyss. My day-to-day life still feels monotonous by the end. I slot in my dice every cycle, clocking in and out. My chits go back into my “bills.” I work, earn chits, and use that money to eat, refuel my ship, and reduce my stress. Repeat. There is a freedom dangled in front of me that I’m skeptical exists outside the Starward Belt.

It takes a late conversation with one of my companions to set me right. Citizen Sleeper 2 isn’t about living in a perfect world free from oppressive systems, nor does it posit that such a thing is possible. Its comfort is in the belief that we can carve out a home in a world that’s built to box us out. That’s accomplished through the people we keep close, the communities we build, and what we do with our bodies. These should be the things that no one can take from us.

“I want to build something here, in spite of everything, in spite of the fact that they could take it all away,” one character tells me in a moment that almost feels like they’ve sensed my misunderstanding through my mouse. “Because that’s the point. To go on living without conceding.”

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector was tested on PC and Steam Deck.