Citizen Sleeper 2 interview: Using stress to take the story further into the stars

How to find new life in space again

Citizen Sleeper was one of the biggest surprises of last year for me. It was a stellar combination of virtual and tabletop mechanics in a gorgeous, distant space setting that drew me in and quickly became a favorite. So when Citizen Sleeper 2 appeared out of the blue, you can imagine how eager I was to hear more about it.

The first game follows a rogue, copied consciousness on the run, trying to avoid the hunters of their corporate overlords while attending to a steadily deteriorating body. It’s a battle against planned obsolescence, in a cold station on the fringes of space. A place where a “Sleeper” like you could find a home, or at least a crossroads towards a new one. But following a series of DLC updates, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector heads in a new direction. We talked to creator Gareth Damian Martin, of Jump Over The Age, to see just what that direction looks like.

Pushing your luck

To start, you’re still a Sleeper. The corporate-owned android body is still your home. But, as seen in the trailer above, your relationship with a critical chemical compound called “Stabilizer,” necessary for survival in the first game, has changed. In Citizen Sleeper 2, an attempt to free yourself from dependence on Stabilizer has left your body malfunctioning. So you steal a ship and head on the run, with a body on the fritz and a price on your head.

As Martin puts it, you no longer have a declining body, but a malfunctioning one. “The distinction being that it’s no longer predictable,” they said. “It’s no longer like, ‘Well I know tomorrow, I’m going to be a little worse off.’ It’s much more of a push-your-luck situation, where the more that you push your body, the more likely it is that you’re going to suffer a malfunction, but it’s not a guarantee.”

Image via Jump Over The Age

This idea of pushing luck is an interesting one. It’s something you can see in tabletop games like Blades in the Dark—an

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