Latest news with #CitizenSleeper2
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- 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.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
I'm writing about this cute cat plush so you play one of 2025's best games
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is one of my favorite games of the year, so you'll forgive me if I spend the next 300 words or so writing about a limited-edition plush the game's creator, Gareth Damian Martin, is producing with the help of crowdfunding platform Makeship. Starting today, you can pledge $30 to support Martin's campaign, and if enough other people do as well, everyone will get a cute cat plush sometime later this year. The toy was designed by French illustrator Guillaume Singelin, who also did the character designs for the game. Right now, the campaign is sitting at 45 percent funded with 90 toys sold, and the better part of 22 days to go. And I mean look at the plush, isn't it one of the cutest things you've seen? For the uninitiated, the Stray, not to be confused with another cyberpunk cat, is one of the characters Citizen Sleeper 2's protagonist can encounter during their journey. As far as I'm aware, they only appear in one scene throughout the entire runtime of the game (how very cat-like of them, I know), but it's a moment that's emblematic of so many of Citizen Sleeper 2's strengths. "This cat, the one on your ship, was born here. That much is obvious," writes Martin in the scene. "It is a creature of zero-gravity, a being that orbits and glides, not one that leaps and stalks." Without spoiling anything, what follows is a touching and thoughtful meditation on memory, and how we can choose whether our memories define us. If you haven't played Citizen Sleeper 2 yet, consider this a recommendation. It is easily worth your time and more. You can play the game on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. As for the Stray, they're expected to start shipping on June 12, 2025.
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- 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
New York Times
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Intergalactic Shantytowns Where Dice Dictate Your Future
The dice roll is the fundamental engine of numerous games. In a board game, it might determine what type of resources you receive or how far you can move. In tabletop role-playing games, it might determine whether an action is successful. When you swing your sword at an ogre, does it land a fatal blow? Or does your blade accidentally glance off a nearby statue and clatter uselessly to the ground? The dice decide. Although video games often use similar systems to decide the outcome of a player's actions, the dice roll itself — the machinery of chance — is typically concealed. 'The idea with video games is they're supposed to be this warm bath of immersion that you disappear into,' said Gareth Damian Martin, whose new game Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector subverts convention by placing the dice center stage. The dice in Citizen Sleeper 2, which releases for PCs and consoles on Friday, can be spent on actions within a cyberpunk future where mercenaries, scavengers and outcasts eke out a hardscrabble living on the margins of a galaxy ruled by rival corporations. The higher the number of an assigned die, the greater the chance that the player will successfully work shifts in an intergalactic kelp bar, sell scrap engine components down at the shipyards or overthrow a corporation as part of a labor revolution. 'The process of abstracting things to dice gives an incredible flexibility to storytelling,' said Damian Martin, who uses they/them pronouns. 'The game inherently supports you and creates drama from any situation.' Damian Martin feeling that it was time for role-playing games to evolve, realized that pulling back the curtain and revealing how the games work would not break the immersion. 'Video games have always had this slightly impoverished relationship with Dungeons & Dragons,' they said, 'which means we've been recreating the same game system in R.P.G.s for decades.' This system remains popular: Baldur's Gate 3, which also centers dice rolls and recreates Dungeons & Dragons rather faithfully, is one of the most lauded video games of recent years. Damian Martin did not want to bring a fantasy theme or a complex rule book from the tabletop world to video games but rather the core idea that rules and mechanics can be an expressive tool for creating narrative and emotion. Citizen Sleeper 2 casts the player as an emulated consciousness inside a synthetic body, created for the purposes of indentured labor. The game opens with you breaking free from the clutches of an icy gang boss and embarking upon a life on the run across the star system. If your dice roll fails, you are not confronted with a 'Game Over' screen or forced to start again. Instead, your story branches off in a different direction, the narrator rolling with the punch and recalibrating your course. 'Citizen Sleeper has the bravery to make things not work out sometimes,' said Cameron Kunzelman, a games academic and critic. While similar in format to the first Citizen Sleeper, a surprise success that was released in 2022, the sequel adds more complex gameplay mechanics. There are dice that accumulate stress and can break based on narrative events, as well as new contract missions — high-stakes operations that can (and often do) go spectacularly wrong. Yet the game retains the engaging sci-fi storytelling, stylish prose and complex themes of the original. It asks the player to make choices that are not simple questions of good and evil: Who do you trust? Whose needs take priority? Which sacrifice can you live with? Despite the brutal demands of simply surviving in these intergalactic shantytowns, players can still find salvation in community and offer small gestures of kindness to characters they meet along the way. Beyond the flexible rules of tabletop role-playing games, Damian Martin is inspired by the games's potential for collaborative storytelling. A group of people can build a narrative together, they said, while using dice to add surprise and provocation 'like an improv comedian asking the crowd for suggestions.' Damian Martin said that the market scenes were always the part of 'Star Wars' that interested them most, and that they would spend hours wondering who those street-food vendors were, living on far-flung planets. 'In a tabletop game, you can tell a story with friends where all the characters are stall owners in a 'Star Wars' market,' they said. 'You can have Darth Vader turn up as a customer; you could even poison him and that's how he dies. You don't have to wait for permission to do this stuff.' Because Citizen Sleeper 2 is a video game written by Damian Martin alone, it cannot invite that degree of narrative collaboration. The video game after that will be a new intellectual property, but Damian Martin said they hoped to turn the entire Citizen Sleeper franchise into a tabletop R.P.G. eventually, allowing the game's fans to tell their own stories within the universe. 'I've finished my monologue,' Damian Martin said. 'Now you can say something.'
