Latest news with #CitizenSleeper2:StarwardVector
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.
New York Times
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
3 Video Games You May Have Missed in January
January traditionally lacks major video game releases, allowing players to catch up on game-of-the-year contenders and giving smaller games a window to stand out. Dice rolls are put center stage in Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, about a cyberpunk future where mercenaries, scavengers and outcasts eke out a hardscrabble living. Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist is an inventive Metroidvania where you battle a cigarette-puffing human-rhinoceros hybrid and a purple-robed robotic sorcerer. And if you are pining for Grand Theft Auto VI, check out the documentary 'Grand Theft Hamlet,' about two out-of-work actors staging Shakespeare during a pandemic lockdown. Here are three other games you may have missed this month: The Roottrees Are Dead The joy of playing The Roottrees Are Dead, the remaster of a 2023 browser game about identifying the numerous members of the fictional Roottree family, goes beyond its delicious twists and shocking reveals. The more I play the game, the more I scour internet articles and newspaper clippings, the more I flip through water-damaged photographs and magazine cover stories, the more I come to realize that The Roottrees Are Dead isn't invested solely in the salacious. Its drama is intimate, and it appears in the little leaps of knowledge you make as you carefully examine the corkboard-pinned family tree, identifying wayward aunts and uncles and having your educated guesses satisfyingly confirmed. It's a game about knowing, about being allowed to know — not just a family's secrets and shame, but its truth. It's no mistake that the game is set in 1998, during the early heyday of the World Wide Web. Part of the compelling fantasy is simply being able to look something up online and get a reliable answer back. Just as Guitar Hero makes me feel like a rock star, and Forza a champion racer, The Roottrees Are Dead makes me feel like a competent sleuth. It does this by taking the complexity out of its online investigation while leaving enough to justify copious notes and the rechecking of evidence. It successfully crafts a self-contained, graspable universe, one that rewards my close attention with a charming and richly layered narrative. Skate City: New York When New York City becomes a video game character, it makes a resident's experience far more enchanting. So when the Toronto studio Snowman told me Skate City: New York was the result of copious on-the-ground research into the glorious parks and monuments here, I was intrigued. The mobile game begins with a realistic video of the Statue of Liberty. But when I passed Lorenzo Pace's 'Triumph of the Human Spirit' in Lower Manhattan, it wasn't identified. Oddly, boroughs are named only after unlocking modes for free skating. There, you can change the camera angle from a flat landscape view to just behind you. From this perspective, closely passing skaters and tourists is a much more personal way to enjoy the mildly difficult feats of trickery and balance. The controls — quadrants on your iPhone screen — felt startlingly easy to use, so I pulled off kick flips, nollies and pop shove-its, tricks forgotten since I enjoyed the Tony Hawk series. Chill music played appealingly during a level in Central Park where I tried to evade a security guard. When I failed to jump over a barrier near the lake, both of us fell in, legs and arms akimbo. The security guard grunted. I laughed with punky exuberance. Other challenges in Skate City: New York include crafty wallrides and shooing away white pigeons. Classic 'I ♥ NY' and graffiti-style Brooklyn decks completed the Big Apple vibe. Heroes of Hammerwatch II Heroes of Hammerwatch II is easy to pick up but impossible to put down, taking the popular rogue-lite structure — every time you die, you must start from the beginning but with upgrades to your character — and injecting it into the model of a classic action role-playing game. For more than 17 hours, I have been crawling through a dungeon, fighting bosses, grabbing loot and trying to save the world. Because progressing in each class provides a bonus to all your other characters (e.g. the paladin increases armor levels), you're encouraged to experiment. The seven classes are well-balanced, but, since I prefer offense-is-defense strategies, I like the warrior best. The gameplay, item and skill systems are uncomplicated, but it seems like something new is revealed after almost every good run. A sparse story is characteristic of many rogue-lites and not necessarily a demerit; the retro art and soundtrack have a lot of that late-'90s panache people get nostalgic for. Heroes of Hammerwatch II is elevated by a smooth and approachable co-op experience for up to four players. It feels easier to make progress with friends. If someone dies, resurrect the character and forge further into the dungeon.
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.'
