Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review – high-stakes sci-fi adventure
You play as a sleeper – a cyborg, essentially – on the run having escaped a previous abusive owner. Citizen Sleeper 2, the sequel to 2022's acclaimed science-fiction game, expands the scope and heightens the stakes, presenting a taut, delicately written adventure, part interactive fiction, part digital boardgame. You and your fellow escaper have the use of a tiny spaceship, the Rig, which, with your pursuer always close behind, cannot linger on any asteroid or space station for long. This is rickety, dust-blown sci-fi, where the ships are chaotic tangles of wire and accumulated parts, and most of the freelance work available involves salvaging parts from wrecks launched in some earlier, more moneyed period in galactic history. Each excursion must be carefully planned, and turning the key on the Rig's engine feels like a roll of the dice which, in this game, everything is.
Each day – the equivalent of a turn in a traditional boardgame – you are presented with five dice rolls. These numbers represent a currency that can be spent on dozens of activities: taking on odd jobs, farming resources, making friends or enemies, laying traps, perhaps establishing a mushroom colony in an isolated bay of your ship. The higher the roll, the more quickly you achieve your goals, with setbacks and penalties for small numbers (and the risk of permanent damage to the dice themselves, depending on your luck and choices). Through these tasks you can gather new specialised crew members, discover new locations and, day by day, try to put distance between you and your pursuer, while undoing the damage he did to you.
The people you meet often have their own needs and wants too, which you can choose to accommodate or ignore. The game is text-heavy, yet has a tensely kinetic quality. As the stakes raise, every choice becomes more consequential, while the capriciousness of the dice remains constant, providing ongoing moments of bliss and frustration. An intricate, wonderfully balanced game, that feels both familiar, yet entirely unique.
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The Guardian
01-03-2025
- The Guardian
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review – high-stakes sci-fi adventure
You play as a sleeper – a cyborg, essentially – on the run having escaped a previous abusive owner. Citizen Sleeper 2, the sequel to 2022's acclaimed science-fiction game, expands the scope and heightens the stakes, presenting a taut, delicately written adventure, part interactive fiction, part digital boardgame. You and your fellow escaper have the use of a tiny spaceship, the Rig, which, with your pursuer always close behind, cannot linger on any asteroid or space station for long. This is rickety, dust-blown sci-fi, where the ships are chaotic tangles of wire and accumulated parts, and most of the freelance work available involves salvaging parts from wrecks launched in some earlier, more moneyed period in galactic history. Each excursion must be carefully planned, and turning the key on the Rig's engine feels like a roll of the dice which, in this game, everything is. Each day – the equivalent of a turn in a traditional boardgame – you are presented with five dice rolls. These numbers represent a currency that can be spent on dozens of activities: taking on odd jobs, farming resources, making friends or enemies, laying traps, perhaps establishing a mushroom colony in an isolated bay of your ship. The higher the roll, the more quickly you achieve your goals, with setbacks and penalties for small numbers (and the risk of permanent damage to the dice themselves, depending on your luck and choices). Through these tasks you can gather new specialised crew members, discover new locations and, day by day, try to put distance between you and your pursuer, while undoing the damage he did to you. The people you meet often have their own needs and wants too, which you can choose to accommodate or ignore. The game is text-heavy, yet has a tensely kinetic quality. As the stakes raise, every choice becomes more consequential, while the capriciousness of the dice remains constant, providing ongoing moments of bliss and frustration. An intricate, wonderfully balanced game, that feels both familiar, yet entirely unique.
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- The Guardian
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review – we're putting together a crew
It's good to be back in this far-flung future world. Like the game that preceded it, Citizen Sleeper 2 is packed with evocative portrayals of everyday life in outer space, from farmers tending zero-G crops in an asteroid greenhouse to water miners rising up against the cartel that controls them, everyone eking out a meagre existence in crumbling space stations left to rot by a long-dead mega corporation. Once again you're cast as a Sleeper, a robot with a digitised human mind shorn of the memories of the person it was copied from. In the first game you were on the run from the firm that made you, attempting to wean your robot off its reliance on a stabilising drug. In the sequel you play a different Sleeper who has successfully managed to ditch Stabilizer, but at the cost of being enslaved to a gang boss called Laine. Whereas before the action was confined to a single space station, Erlin's Eye, the second game roves much more widely across a sector of space called the Belt. Your explosive escape from Laine sees you hot-footing it from station to station, with a timer signalling how close on your tail the gang lord is. In this opening section it's a race against time to gather enough fuel and supplies for the next leg of your journey, all the while searching for a way to sever the mysterious link Laine seems to have with your body. Each destination offers a visual backdrop of wherever you happen to be visiting, whether it's a long-abandoned space border crossing or a populated asteroid, but mostly you'll be reading text descriptions of what's going on and clicking through conversations. As in the previous game you have five dice that are rolled at the start of each day (or 'cycle'), and these can be plugged into various activities at each location, with higher numbers delivering a higher chance of success. But now, the dice can break. On timed, high-stakes missions, failure accumulates stress, which in turn can damage your dice. If a die's energy reaches zero, it's broken, unable to be used until it's repaired. If all five dice break on normal difficulty, your character gains a permanent glitch: a die that always gives an 80% chance of failure. You're joined on these contracts by up to two crew members. Like in Mass Effect 2, you can gather crew for your ship, The Rig, and each comes with two dice that are attuned to their specialities. You can also use a 'push' once per cycle, increasing the number on your lowest die at the cost of raising your stress. All of this makes contracts wonderfully tense and involving, as you decide how far to push your luck at the risk of outright failure. And failure stalks Citizen Sleeper 2: whereas many games promise power fantasies, here each day is a valiant struggle (at least at first). Some missions are locked off if you're don't get to them in time. It's a game that encourages repeat plays, to see how things might have turned out differently. Citizen Sleeper 2 is around twice as big as the first game, with many more locations to visit. But this does mean it feels a little stretched thin compared with the previous title. Rather than getting to know one place intimately, we instead have a scattering of space stations with a handful of activities in each. The crew also feel underused: it's a shame there isn't a way to upgrade their abilities or integrate them more into gameplay. Yet the characters are also the game's greatest strength, and throughout they are expertly drawn, both literally (with comic book artist Guillaume Singelin once again providing some gorgeous portraits) and in terms of their compelling and heartfelt backstories. Despite its bleakness, the world of Citizen Sleeper 2 is full of compassion, and it's a joy to return to the universe Gareth Damian Martin has created. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is out on 31 January
The Guardian
27-12-2024
- The Guardian
Missing You to The Rig: the seven best shows to stream this week
DI Kat Donovan (Rosalind Eleazar) isn't a woman who makes life easy for herself. Her dad's murderer is about to die, so she's decided to go and visit him on his deathbed. Her ex – who disappeared when she was grieving, 11 years earlier – has matched with her on a dating app and rather than running a mile, she's swiped right. This thriller, adapted from a novel by Harlan Coben, relies heavily on such contrivances to build its narrative. It's equal parts a twisty murder mystery and a study in trauma – as such, takes itself incredibly seriously. But the fine ensemble cast, which also includes Ashley Walters, Lenny Henry and a cartoonishly villainous Marc Warren, keep things from New Year's Day Back to the North Sea, where humanity's attempts to wean itself off oil fuel this pungently overripe but still enjoyable drama starring Martin Compston and Rochenda Sandall. The remains of the crew are reeling from the tsunami and Mark Addy's villainous company man Coake isn't helping: he's whisked the riggers off to the Arctic Circle where they are presented with an offer. Tickets home, £200k and your signature on an iron-clad non-disclosure agreement. Will they sign? And in the meantime, has mother earth finished her rumblings? The Rig is admirably unafraid of going dramatically big as we find out. PHPrime Video, from Thursday 2 January This platform has made its name as a reliable purveyor of cosy crime dramas. It brings the second series of this gentle but accomplished Australian murder mystery in which widowed former nurse Joan (Greta Scacchi) and retired cop Jack (Bryan Brown) travel the outback. They're looking for answers regarding the death of Joan's husband – but as they engage with the sometimes eccentric communities they encounter, other peculiar situations draw them in. It's bright and breezy but the characters are sturdily constructed and there's an undercurrent of melancholy too. PHAcorn TV, from Monday 30 December Swedish EDM producer Avicii (real name Tim Bergling) saw his career go stratospheric as a result of his 2011 single, Levels, but he died by suicide in 2018. This intimate documentary explores his life story through interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. It concentrates more on his vertiginous rise than his death – but with Bergling himself providing the narration from past recordings, there's a haunting sense of the apparently shy and self-contained man behind the public image. Netflix are also launching a concert film of Avicii's final show, from Ibiza's Ushuaïa. PH Netflix, from New Year's Eve Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion With this performance, Floridian standup Buteau becomes the first female comic to film a special at New York's Radio City Music Hall. But, as she puts it: 'I'd better not be the fucking last!' It's a raucous and life-affirming hour of comedy in which Buteau takes stock of fame, motherhood and marriage, and ponders the implications of her success. Not least among which is being eagerly followed by Lenny Kravitz on Instagram and being able to tease her husband about his dangerous new love rival. PHNetflix, from New Year's Eve All the uber-camp of the festive season is thrown at this latest expansion of the Drag Race universe in which six veterans of the franchise spend the holiday season together in a snowy Canadian winter resort. The idea is that they'll put on a production of some sort for the community at the end of the week, but that feels like a pretext for partying, rivalries and industrial quantities of passive aggressive shade-throwing. The featured queens include Jada Shada Hudson, Kerri Colby, Kandy Muse and our very own Lawrence Chaney. PHWow TV, from New Year's Eve Everyone knows the drill by now: this series from the creators of hate-watch Selling Sunset follows a group of aggressively crass estate agents from the Douglas Elliman organisation as they sell garish properties in the clouds above New York City to unfeasibly rich and demanding punters. Alongside all the property porn, there's a whole world of performatively fractious interpersonal relationships as the idea that the agents are a collaborative, mutually supportive team is optimistically posited but quickly crumbles like a stale mince pie. PHNetflix, from Friday 3 January
