There was a moment playing Citizen Sleeper 2 where I started to question the purpose of a game review. After all, the primary question of a review is ‘Should you play this game?’ Yet the underlying subtext remains: ‘Should you buy this game?’ It’s a question that points to the inherent capitalism of the games industry – and of course, game creators deserve to be paid for their work.
But it seems an odd framework with which to approach Citizen Sleeper 2, when it works so hard to break down systems of late-stage capitalism. When art critics write about a Rembrandt, they don’t ask if you should buy this art – not that many of us could afford it. Instead, they ask what this work says about the world and if you should see it. Critics recognise art can have a profound effect on the viewer, whether or not they have a stake in its ownership.
Enter Citizen Sleeper 2, an indie cyberpunk game set in space, asking big questions about whether a cybernetic consciousness can be considered human.
What’s a sleeper, you ask?
Citizen Sleeper 2 is the sequel to the 2022 game of the same name, written by Gareth Damian Martin with art by Guillaume Singelin. In both, the player takes on the role of a sleeper. A sleeper is a human consciousness uploaded to an artificial body with no memory of the person they were before, sold into indentured servitude to a corporation.
The first game was a heady balancing act of managing your resources, keeping your body together with stabilizer, while trying to escape corporate control. The sequel deals with similar territory, although rest assured, you don’t need to play the first game to understand the second.
This time, you’ve managed to reboot your body to detox from the need for drugs. But you won’t get out that easy. This sleeper is pursued by the dogged criminal Laine, who wants his property back.
While the first game limited your location to a sprawling space station, the sequel’s narrative funnels the player through an epic tale of survival across the asteroid belt. It exchanges some of the pacing issues of the first game in favour of a more linear story. Any frustration you might have following the story from port to port is offset by the increasing tension caused by the time-limited narrative and mechanics.
Sleepers, and many of the NPCs, are victims of an interstellar corporate war. You’re not the glamourous leader of band of rebels nor the tool of these corporations sent to enforce law and order. You don’t collect shiny armour with the fervent goal of protection; you try to reduce your stress in an increasingly stressful environment, something that’s often impossible as die crack and break.
The body electric
Mild spoiler alert
The sleeper is a survivor. Tossed and turned in the intergalactic backwash of wars and threatened conflict. Yet the game remains idealistic about the individual’s role in deconstructing power. Along the way, you encounter refugees who long to make a difference by constructing collaborative systems, and laborers trying to create safer working environments.
There’s a focus on the macro in this game; rather than following the corporations of Essen-Arp and SenetStat, many of the quests focus on the NPCs affected by these corporations. One of the most beautifully written encounters is repairing an old space salvager’s rig, broken down in the asteroid belt.
Martin builds on a description of the unwieldy ship to create a metaphor for the sleeper’s body. Damned if a tear didn’t well in my eye as I read:
“… 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.”
Broken bodies are a heavy theme throughout the game. You spend much of the story trying to come to terms with the changes in your body. You can resist these or embrace them, and these choices sit in that beautiful liminal space between player and game. How many of us have had our bodies fail us? How many of us have been at the beck and call of doctors (or in this case, artificers), to understand why our bodies are failing?
This thoughtful examination of the body is reflected in your ship’s crew. Serafin is injured and spends much of the game crouched over a medical pack. When you encounter another sleeper, you can resist their friendship or reach out in solidarity for the bodies you inhabit. And after speaking to Bliss about their long journey to feeling comfortable in their own body, the game gifts the player with this astonishing piece of writing:
“…you think of your relationship to your own body, this frame that you were forced into that has never quite felt like your own. You realize that this feeling is not unique to you. No one gets to choose their body. Everyone has to contend with the entropy of their flesh.”
Cyberpunk has always dealt with bodily autonomy; Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon posits a world where bodies are mortgaged, sold and owned by capitalist corporations. But here, Citizen Sleeper 2 goes one further. You are a player engaging with a computer, playing a sleeper. You purchased this game, you purchased this body. By making choices within the game, your story becomes entwined with that of the sleeper. It is not you, but you are them.
At the same time, you are engaging with an interface in the real world; the keyboard, the mouse, technological extensions of the human body. You are rolling virtual die, a typically tactile technology, the comforting sound of dice rolls a universal experience of the tabletop gamer. If you let it, this symbiosis of person and machine, gamer and game, amplifies the experience of the sleeper’s story.
Early in the game, it explains:
“Sleeper. A familiar name. A mind copied, emulated. A body built, implanted. One person, sleeping, until their debt is worked away. Their double being made to work, to be consumed, and eventually to be destroyed. A proxy. An emulation. A Sleeper. That is what you are.”
Except that you, the player, are the double. The sleeper is an emulation of your actions. Later, when a stowaway sparks the memories of the original human mind the sleeper comes from, Martin writes:
“This doubling is what defines you. You are multiple, branched, diverse. You make no apologies for this, and you know that you will only accumulate more selves, more variants, as you persist.”
It’s both a nod to the sleeper’s situation, and the player themselves. We double the characters we inhabit on the screen. They may reflect us, they may be a character we’ve created, they may be a thought experiment to make choices we would never make in real life. No two playthroughs of Citizen Sleeper 2 will be the same. Each iteration of the sleeper’s character will be different. This is the beauty of games as art: the infinite choices within a shared experience. Part of the joy of games is in comparing this divergence.
There’s a risk that in acknowledging the player as they exist in the real world, that the verisimilitude of the game world is broken. Here, it’s used in profound ways; never heavy-handed, built effortlessly into the mechanics if you would like to see it.
Risk vs reward: game mechanics
The mechanics are central to the experience of the narrative. You roll die and allocate them to determine outcomes, its risk management mechanics increasing pressure as the game progresses. It feels like a great indie tabletop roleplaying game, where the mechanics create the very sensation of being a sleeper in the player.
Each risk you take on a mission has the chance to add to your stress meter. The more stress you have, the more likely your die will crack and break. The less die, the more likely you are to roll badly which is why investing in push skills for your character becomes invaluable in the late game. Glitches from Laine’s interference limit your access to die; sure, you can use a glitched die, but the 20/80 failure ratio is sometimes not a risk worth taking. And if you lose all your die, you die. At the hardest setting, it’s game over.
I played the game on risky mode, and early on was mistaken into thinking the game was too easy. By the end game, I was using the death mechanics just to get my die back.
You spend much of the game managing your resources, weighing up how much fuel to buy, whether you can spare a good dice roll to set up a system of supplies, whether the cost of a single supply is worth feeding the ship’s stowaway. And sometimes the dollars and dice don’t add up, and your hand is forced to fail. For anyone who’s been broke, you know how hard it is to do good when you’re on your last dollar.
The importance of failure states
As gamers, we tend to avoid failure states. From our childhood, we’re conditioned to win games. We pile shame on save scummers, all the while quietly reloading our own games when we don’t like the outcomes. We take our failures as personal affronts to our skill. We lambast low-skill players as n00bs, while hyping our own successes, ignoring that we had to start somewhere, that games aren’t always played as competitions, that games are becoming something else entirely – stories, artworks, experiences.
Citizen Sleeper 2 handles this differently. In my first mission, I took a risk on a dice roll, and escalated the crisis events past the point of failure. My hubris as an experienced gamer shattered as I slunk back to Hexport. As a player, I felt deeply uncomfortable with my failure; a part of me resisted this so early in the game. What did this mean for the rest of the game, if I couldn’t even succeed on the first mission?
And yet, the story continues from these failure states. Without the money from this mission, instead of being able to pay for a vital ship part, I had to steal it, feeling much like Jean Valjean and his candlesticks. The sleeper’s state of desperation as they try to escape Laine and their technological masters means you won’t always succeed. And that’s a good thing.
There’s no reloading. Your choices, and your failures, are saved, and the story continues. This adds deep weight to the choices and die rolls; there were moments on missions where my stress levels were high, down to one nearly broken die, starving, and trying desperately to survive the mission, let alone complete its objectives.
A hopeful future?
There are few games that have caused me to think this deeply about my relationship to games. But Citizen Sleeper 2 has raised profound questions in me; questions I don’t have all the answers to. How my broken body finds expression in machines. How games are a form of literature that deserves deep analysis. About the impact of unchecked capitalism on our world and the stars above.
Yet there’s this ubiquitous sense of hope about Citizen Sleeper 2. Close to the end, companion Serafin insists the sleeper remembers their humanity. It was then, I realised the importance of failure states. The point is not that I failed, but that I tried to do good despite my capacity for failure. That we often equate brokenness with failure, but it’s a false dichotomy.
I succeeded with broken dice. With the glitches in my system. Starving. Stressed. And yet, I persevered. A reflection of my own life, that I can still come to write of art, despite my own body’s failures along the way.
When my sleeper’s journey came to an end, I was left with an overwhelming sense of hope. Hope is a fragile thing in times of political turmoil. It can shatter as easily as a die under stress.
But the beauty of this game is that each encounter is a vignette into humanity’s potential for good.
At the start of this review, I asked the questions that art critics demand of the work they see. These questions still apply, because games have always been art. Perhaps we’re finally entering an age where we believe it.
So, should you play Citizen Sleeper 2? Yes – for in our failure states, art can still bring hope.
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