Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector Review
The board game to video game pipeline is two-way these days. Hell, it’s a fiber-optic thoroughfare, an always-on send/receive server called ‘games’ where there is little distinction between board and video. The best board game and the best video game I played last year were both called Slay the Spire, although I’d been playing one of them for years before the other.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, a great rendition of a board game in the video game format, a visual novel with branching narratives hinging not only on the choices a player makes, but on whether they’re fortunate enough to make those choices. It’s reminiscent of games like Gloomhaven and King’s Dilemma and Disco Elysium and NORCO, games with strong emergent storytelling opportunities bolstered by great narratives.
As a gameplay experience, it’s limited. Lacking even the top-down traversal of a Disco Elysium, CS2 is content with a game board and a handful of points of interest that expand and subtract as you interact with them. It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder why the game isn’t simply a board game. It’s easy to imagine—it might be unwieldy, but a deck of cards, some dice and a board could theoretically replicate the Citizen Sleeper experience faithfully.
It doesn’t take long to understand the mistake in this thinking.
It’s not just because the game has far more text than any board game I’ve ever seen—although it does at that. That’s just how visual novels work, really—that’s the novel part in action. But if this game had a physical representation, instead of card decks you would have Fighting Fantasy Books (plural). When you’re sitting in front of a PC, or holding a Steam Deck in your hands, this is fine. The low-fi cyber-synth-r-n-b beats and the midnight blue-black background of each new space station location you visit create an atmosphere that is very conducive to absorbing text. If you were instead hunched over a table trying to manage a set of tokens, dice and trackers, the book might be less interesting a read.
It’s not the sheer number of locations, either. The first game trapped you on The Eye, a single station, but CS2 takes you station hopping across the belt. In physical board game terms, this would require many more ‘boards’. In digital terms, Citizen Sleeper 2’s spread out geography alters how the game itself plays. In the first game each cycle was an intricate balancing act of dealing with needs and wants. Here, thanks to the distances involves between stations, you deal with your needs almost exclusively—any wants are mere elements of opportunity.
There’s an irony in the idea that expanding the breadth of the game has significantly narrowed its gameplay.
It’s not the dice, not exactly. Not the glitch dice which act like D10s, or the extra dice needed when rolling with a crew. It’s not even the D4 system used to determine whether spending a dice has a positive, neutral or negative outcome.
But the D4 system might have something happening to it. I wondered, more than once, if Citizen Sleeper 2 had its thumb on the scales. Whether there was a ghost in the machine impacting the ‘randomness’ of the results I was facing. One too many times, when the chips were down, did I miraculously scrape through, like the protagonist in a Matthew Reilly novel saving the day at the last second.
You couldn’t do that in a board game. Well you could, but you’d be cheating. That’s what video games can do that board games can’t—they can cheat and make it look legitimate. And bear in mind that I don’t even know that Citizen Sleeper 2 is cheating. But it would fit with the other trend I noticed in the game.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is too nice.
Don’t get me wrong, there are stakes, or at least you’re told there are. High stakes, actually, a dogged pursuit across the stars, blinding implosions, terrifying implications and all. Huge corporations vie for control of space while small bands of optimists hope to disrupt them.
But everyone you meet errs towards being good. I found out by accident, telling a particularly untrustworthy man I trusted him by fat fingering the response. I lived with it, and lo-and-behold he was trustworthy. Even the dangerous stowaway I picked up in the dark tunnels of some mining station turned out to be a lovable fluffy cat.
And when you fail at dice rolls, that’s not always an actual failure. Burdened as I was on one particular contract to be saddled with two dead weight crew members, I realised to some dismay that I was about to watch another person die. That my actions (and my crew mate’s inactions) had lead to a staggering loss of life, because I was out of dice to roll, and the ticking clock of inevitable failure was about to strike midnight.
And then we won anyway.
I was overwhelmed at every turn by the feeling that Citizen Sleeper 2 had no interest in letting me fail if I at least tried to succeed. The text tells me the stakes are high, and then it lets me cuddle a cat for half a cycle. The dice tell me I’m about to fail, and then it lets me win anyway. It’s Cozy Scifi cosplaying as a high stakes cyberpunk space opera.
Which is bizarre, because it is generally a strong enough story without it. If Citizen Sleeper 2 was a more traditional visual novel, it would be better able to tell the story it wants. Instead of the faux stakes, it might just be a cozy cyberpunk tale with chill vibes and nice art. By wresting control from the player the way most visual novels do, they might have avoided Citizen Sleeper 2’s greatest error.
Because Citizen Sleeper 2 orphans more words than a new tyrant taking control of the Kingdom of Wisdom. I lament the story branches I’ll never know of Citizen Sleeper 2. The choices I didn’t make are one thing—I know I am responsible for this. But Citizen Sleeper 2 claims the blame for the pages upon pages of text I’ll never read because I failed a dice roll here or lacked supplies there.
More than that, it’s fully to blame for the times I went out on a mission and picked—at random—two crew members who could do little to nothing to help me achieve my goals. Why is there no indication as to what skills I might require on an away mission? Why is this information obfuscated? If I need an engineer, why wouldn’t the game tell me that, instead of letting me pick characters who are uniquely ill-suited to the task at hand?
And to what end? If Citizen Sleeper 2 is a cozy cyberpunk, if its stakes are false and its randomness possibly skewed, why write those pages and rob me of them? Why tell those stories to nobody at all? Why operate under the illusion of control to tell a story about a person who struggles to come to terms with whether they have control over their own body?
Citizen Sleeper was one of my favourite games of 2022. But the best sequels—with the exception of Paddington 2—don’t do the same but more. To quote an excellent book I re-read recently, “The best sequels learn from the 1st but do their own thing. Aliens wasn’t a carbon copy of Alien. It went its own way and it was better for it.” They change it up because audiences know what’s coming. There’s no surprise to be had, because we’ve seen this illusion already. It’s more elaborate now, more intricate, with seemingly more moving parts, but it’s the same trick.
And for me, thanks to a handful of design decisions, whether real or imagined, Citizen Sleeper 2 not only does the same trick—the new intricacies and elaborations let us see behind the curtain to know the magic isn’t real.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S and X, Nintendo Switch and PC. Here is a Steam link.
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