Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review: Until the wheels fall off

A sci-fi adventure that combines TTRPG gameplay elements with intense, real world distress.

To play Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, you simply roll a set of dice. Roll the dice, assign the dice, repeat. It’s almost like playing Yahtzee. But instead of gathering with friends or family around the table and tallying points, Citizen Sleeper 2 uses its simple mechanics to acutely reflect on what it feels like to live. Not the wet parts, the systems. The work we must do to find and maintain access to living. The daily burden of waking up, making choices, trading your time and energy for numbers that govern your quality of life. The lack of control over those numbers. The feeling of your mind and body breaking down as you chase them until you can’t anymore. And the sense of self you build carrying all that weight.

Take the monster battles and loot out of a tabletop RPG and replace them with existential anxiety, and that’s what you get with Citizen Sleeper 2. In this run-down sci-fi world you play as a Sleeper, someone who has given up their body as collateral for a loan. In exchange, a corporation beams your consciousness into a robot, sans memories, to work off what you owe. Most Sleepers are tethered to their owners by drug dependency, but you’ve broken the chains and only need food and sleep like anyone else. But something else is wrong. And you’re on the run from someone who might be worse than the corp.

Rolling the dice

Everything is a struggle to survive. At the beginning you're faced with a deluge of systems and a complicated UI that scatters your senses. You race against time to complete objectives, manage resources to stay fed and maintain your ship, fight stress to stay sharp and effective, work to make money. Make connections and friends to find work. Repair your body as the work wears it down. Work to keep working, to keep living. To start living, in a way. On the other side of that struggle could be something more, but there’s no way to know if you give up. You only have so much control, but as long as you can keep rolling dice, you can keep trying

The dice are both a simple, core gameplay mechanic and a tremendous source of stress. Every day (or “cycle”) you roll the dice. You plug the dice into tasks, which combine with skills you have (such as intuition or endurance) to determine the outcomes. The stress comes from a constant sense of risk, especially when you have to use a low roll, or perform a task outside of your chosen expertise. A negative outcome can be as simple as using extra energy, or as bad as damage to the dice themselves. The dice will wear down, glitch, crack, and eventually break. It’s not a matter of if, it’s when. There will be moments where you’re hungry, broke, out of fuel, and out of parts to fix your dice. All you can do is go to sleep and hope the next day goes a little better.

Art imitates life, for better and worse

Playing Citizen Sleeper 2 felt like work. Not like a “chore” in video game terms, but like how it feels to work an actual job in real life. It made me think of the time I worked at Walmart, a low point in my life for many reasons. Nursing my own wounds from being laid off, the life I knew yanked out from under me, I walked into the only place that offered me work in the time I had to look and saw pain every day. New faces, replacing ones I’d see once or twice and never again. Folks limping or wearing medical devices for issues compounded by the long hours on hard floors. Encounters with people not bothering to hide they see you as subhuman. Kool-Aid drinking, empathy-deficient managers. Long walks home and not enough time to live my own life and get enough rest to recover.

I thought about now, too. Writing, traveling, getting published, another layoff! Carpal tunnel. Grinding my hopes and dreams back to life as a freelancer. I like the work I do a lot more; it’s more fulfilling. But man, do I ever feel the miles I’ve put on. I’m tired, medicated, anxious, tired, creaky, older. Did I mention I'm tired yet? It’d be amazing to not have to work, to just disappear from everything and go be a hermit somewhere subsisting on Sapporo and River City Ransom. But rent only goes up every year. My and my family’s needs grow more complex. Gotta keep chasing work, keep those numbers coming, feed the machine until the wheels fall off. It sounds miserable when put this way, and it can be. But it’s not all bad.

The tipping point

Just as Citizen Sleeper 2 was getting so stressful I started wondering if I was playing the game wrong, there was a little give. Just enough to notice. Money was coming in a little easier. I could stay fed and repaired, and found more space to stop and think. The people I met and stories they opened started to develop more, and the less I worried about dying the more I could pay attention. The pressure was still on, but between scrambling away from certain death and building a crew, Citizen Sleeper 2 moved from surviving for the sake of it to something like building a life. It all came together for me while I was out in space, on a contract to help repair a ship just as beat down as the one I’ve been pushing past its limits.

The ship is a disaster, barely able to accommodate its single occupant. But while working through its frustrating quirks and messy patchwork, the Sleeper comes to a realization:

"And yet, despite all this, it is an object you feel close to. That you feel a kinship with. Because, in the end, you, too, are an accumulation of broken parts, long outliving their operational limits. You, too, are a machine that has become a story, and a story that has grown beyond the ability of others to understand it."

This moment, these words I read over and over, made it all worthwhile. It was like the game knew I had been struggling, fighting frustration, resisting the urge to dismiss the time I put in as a waste. Validation disguised as a moment of reflection was baked in, a quiet reward hidden in a spot where it was least expected. It made me think about myself again, but in a different light. It’s rough out there, but through it all there’s a story being told, written in mind and body with hardship and experiences as the ink and paper. A felt sense that's deeply personal and impossible to fully share.

We’ve probably made life measurably worse for ourselves by building systems that feed on labor and thrive on diminishing returns. But while playing by the rules and struggling to get by is painful, there is still something innately precious about living and building what you can with the hand you’re dealt. That’s what I felt Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector was trying to communicate over the time I spent with it. It’s a conversation about selfness as much as it is a cool sci-fi video game about machines and dice. It challenges you with harsh conditions and constant dread while telling you a story about what work does to a body, practically forcing you to reflect on your own history. It doesn’t reward you with hope or simple optimism, but it does offer validation. In this case, that might be better.

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is available on January 31, 2025 for the PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5. A Nintendo Switch code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Review for
Citizen Sleeper 2
9
Pros

• A distressingly real story about work and self, dressed up with cool sci-fi stuff
• Lots of freedom and multiple outcomes
• Rewarding in unusual ways, for a video game

Cons

• Overwhelming UI and systems
• Early game difficulty is almost distracting