Video Game / Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

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Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a narrative-driven Cyberpunk Adventure RPG developed by Jump Over The Age^note a solo developer by the name of Gareth Damien Martin, with artwork by Guillaume Singelin and music by Amos Roddy, and the sequel to Citizen Sleeper. It is distributed by Fellow Traveller, and released on January 31st 2025, available for Nintendo Switch, as well as Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh via Steam, GOG.com, and Humble Bundle.

You are a Sleeper, named after the people who have sold themselves to corporate slavery to have their mind copied and emulated into a synthetic body and perform soul crushing work until that debt is paid. You managed to escape Essen-Arp by selling yourself to another, Laine, leader of the Utsubo crime syndicate on the Nightside colony. He provides the Stabilizer needed to keep your synthetic body functional and removed the tracker, all in exchange for loyal service. You plotted to escape the dependence on Stabilizer and this cruel new master with the help of another indentured slave, Serafin, by performing a system reboot— only for Laine to interrupt it, forcing you both to escape, freeing you from the dependence on Stablizer but losing most of your memories.

Laine is not so easily deterred, considering you his property and a part of some larger plot, he pursues you unceassingly throughout "the Belt", a chaotic and lawless portion of the Hellion system. Whether you can rebuild your life, find freedom from Laine, remains to be seen.

Leading up to the release of this game are the Helion Dispatches, a monthly serialised story about a pirate radio station tracking corporate activity in the Helion system, and is posted on the official Jump Over The Age Substack.

Tropes found in "Citizen Sleeper 2" include:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Subverted and played straight. The subversions are two Solheim protocols encountered are a bit nutty from decades of isolation, but one is entirely benevolent and the other non-malicious. The played straight example is the Conway probe's protocol, which destroyed Hexport. It was captured, it's purge and self destruct functions disabled so it could be dissected alive and scraped for data. It however managed to escape into the station and, in an effort to follow it's directives (or perhaps avoid the pain it had been inflicted with) made it "fail", causing widespread system failures. The station was destroyed by an outside party, but even had it not, the probe's actions would have eventually caused it to collapse.
• All Take and No Give: Laine, who sees what he did for the Sleeper as being incredibly generous and the Sleeper's desire for freedom from their mistreatment as a betrayal.
• Artifact of Attraction: Yu-Jin's questline involves locating the Aphelion Path, a ship with a Fraction Drive, that is to say with interplanetary travel. Since no one in the Belt has a ship with a Fraction Drive outside the major corporations, owning one would enable people to leave the war torn area and become fabulously wealthy. Problem is, it's the kind of thing people have been killing each other over for years, and promises to continue to do so.
• Attack Drone: One of Conway Extraction's specialties.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: In the finale against Laine, through cyberspace. Overseer stabs the data packet proving his complicity with SenetStat.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: The Lotic Syndicate. Originally a workers union made up of several different groups who had joined to supply water to the Belt. Their leadership has grown distant from rank and file workers, engaging in contract slavery and monopolistic practices.
• Bittersweet Ending: After triumphing over Laine, the Sleeper can continue living their life, but their body starts to lose function (represented by dice breaking more often). The story must ultimately end with them opting to reboot, with the question of whether or not their personality survives the process remaining unanswered.
• Bookends: The game starts with the Sleeper waking up from an incomplete reboot which caused their amnesia. It ends with them undergoing one again, however because of the game's events there's still a good chance it either fails and they die, or go amnesiac again. Essentially it begins with their rebirth and might end with one— or one last transformation in one form or another.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Bliss, Ankhita, Tala, and Aki all return from the previous game. Castor makes a cameo in the epilogue.
  • You find out that Sleeper and Flint were part of the same Sleeper-Essen-Arp-mine-prison-break as the previous Sleeper. assuming Essen-Arp doesn't just have a terrible track record of Sleepers staging prison breaks from their mines.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Once again, a central theme. Most explicit in the collapse of Solheim, described as a parasite that charged anyone who came to the Hellion system while providing only some services and charging handsomely, while producing nothing. After a few industrial accidents, it collapsed from a loss of investor confidence.
• Character Class System: There are three base classes, Machinist, Operator and Extractor.
  • Extractors did hard laborer and are The Heart. Their Push ability lets them re-roll other crew members dice to potentially get them higher. Their weakness is they are extremely practical, and unused to dealing with the unexpected, they can't raise their Intuit skill.
  • Operators, as in Drone Operators, are The Cracker, and worked with systems and mapping. Their Push ability lets them re-roll some of their own dice, potentially increasing the result. Their weakness is they are built frail, and can't increase their Endure skill.
  • Machinists typically work alone, and can hyper focus on their work. Their Push ability can increase the number of pips on the lowest die, and on a Positive outcome reduce their Stress. Their weakness is they have trouble dealing with others socially, and can't increase Engage.
• Cool Old Lady: Alma, her rig is so old and custom repaired that it's engine is almost a Rube Goldberg device in its absurd complexity. She's taciturn, and attached to the asteroid she lived on. Her contract reminds the Sleeper and Bliss that there's beauty in repairing and maintaining machines— and things you love.
• Cooldown Hug: You can give one to Yu Jin at the end of the Aphelion Path quest. If you don't, or fail, he will charge forward intent on fighting off a ship full of Ember's Song militia and probably die.
• Corporate Conspiracy: SenetStat's collusion with Laine to take over the belt.
• Courier: Kadet the Spindlejack with her hover bike, and to an extent the player with some delivery missions.
• The Cracker: Juni, who specializes in hacking into computer systems.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Sleeper can overhear that Erlin's Eye has managed to fend off SenetStat and the Flux, making the "Save the Eye" DLC ending from the last game the canon ending.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Laine's obsession with owning Sleeper and controlling their body has all of the undertones of both an abusive partner and a sexually abusive-and-exploitative employer/workplace superior.
• Early Game Hell: It takes Cryo (money) to buy fuel and supplies, buy contracts, and eat meals. All the while, Negative outcomes in Rolls (say, to work for the Cryo needed to pay the former) can be adding Stress to your character, which slowly damages and then breaks dice. The more dice break, the less actions you can take (such as working a job, or completing contracts). Add to the fact that you need Scrap or Rare components to repair broken dice, and that there is always a six day timer counting down after which you absolutely need to leave a location or Laine finds you, and early game can be hell.
  • Conversely, if you know what you're doing even in the hard difficulty you may end the game with hundreds or thousands in unused Cryo.
• Entitled to Have You: A non-romantic example with Laine, who considers the Sleeper to be ungrateful for trying to get out from under his thumb, which is taken to its natural extreme when its revealed Laine feels entitled to take over the Sleeper's body and autonomy by erasing their personality and making them part of him.
• Everyone Calls Them Barkeep: The player is invariably called "Sleeper". Averted with Flint, another sleeper who has been named that at Marko's insistence.
• Ghost Ship: Several, and exploring or salvaging them forms a large number of Contract missions.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: A downplayed version, the Warden protocol is heavily suggested to have become at least somewhat self-aware and sapient during the decade it's been isolated on the asteroid monitoring the facility. When told that they will be left alone after the Sleeper's crew leaves, this time indefinetly, she goes against her programming and shuts down everything rather than be awake for several decades more. There is a happy ending to this story, Juni made a copy of the Warden during the mission, and has installed it in Nightside to serve as an Archivist.
• Grand Theft Me: The Sleeper worries that the Overseer protocol is trying to do this to them. Happily, they don't, but this is in fact Laine's overall plot agains the Sleeper.
• Greater-Scope Villain: As revealed at the end of the previous game's DLC and elaborated upon here, SenetStat is a MegaCorp trying to take over the entire star system and they are happy to destroy entire planets and space stations to do so. They are partnering with Laine to take over the Belt and probably had a hand in the destruction of Hexport.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: The Overseer protocol hidden in the Shipmind. It was alone for so long it learned to "divide" or clone itself, and the copies talked and grew. As power failed the copies were re-absorbed to save resources until only three iterations exist.
  • Implied to be the case with Warden protocol, decades of isolation and a wakeful state watching over an empty facility has given her time to learn, and grow oddly depressed from the isolation. She's oddly warm to Juni, and thanks her for the honest response that when they leave she's not coming back. Warden chooses to shut down the entire facility instead of staying in hibernation as ordered, implying she'd rather not spend even more decades alone.
• Hover Bike: Spindlejacks ride on them, double as Cool Bikes given the Sleeper wants to buy one, and wonders how to justify the purchase to Serafin.
• I Cannot Self-Terminate: Averted, and how. The probe being dissected in Hexport had protocols for it to purge its data and self destruct, but hacking kept it from doing either. It managed to escape confinement and thoroughly sabotage the station to the point it would have destroyed itself, had another actor not come in to cover their tracks.
• Loss of Identity: The Sleeper sometimes dwells on their double loss, first from being a sleeper with an emulated mind with scrubbed memories, and later from the incomplete reboot erasing most of their memories.
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic: The Operator class' Push ability allows for rerolling the lowest dice.
• Master of All: Averted when compared to the first game. The class system now completely blocks out one of five skills, depending on which you chose.
• MegaCorp: Several.
  • Conway Extractions: A megacorp fighting to take control of the system, fighting SenetStat. Known to use extremely sophisticated and deadly Attack Drones.
  • EssenArp: Responsible for creating sleepers via Brain Uploading. Prone to sending bounty hunters after escapees.
  • SenetStat: A megacorp attempting to take control of the system, secretly working with Laine to do so.
  • Solheim: The original owners and developers of the megastructures in the Helion system. Collapsed financially and left the wreck behind.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: Two pairs of potential crew members are mutually exclusive:
  • At the conclusion of the Flotsam quest, you can choose whether Nia can join your crew permanently. If you refuse, Femi will join instead.
  • On the Aphelion’s End quest, if you leave Yu-Jin behind, Luis will join your crew in his place.
• My Skull Runneth Over: How Overseer kills Laine before he can delete the Sleeper. Overseer creates a "spear of light" containing the information on the USB detailing Laine's cooperation with SenetStat. For extra points, he does this using the Sleeper's connection to Laine, without harming the Sleeper except for an extended sleep. Poetically, this means Laine was Hoist by His Own Petard twice over.
• Non-Heteronormative Society: Despite the rampant injustices and inequalities all across the belt, no one bats an eye at non-binary or trans people. At most, they are surprised about the Sleeper being synthetic and it being rare to even meet a sleeper outside of EssenArp control.
• The Not-Love Interest: Serafin is Sleeper's ride-or-die friend, sticking with them through everything and putting their life on the line repeatedly for Sleeper. But he never shows any overt romantic interest in Sleeper and eventually pursues a relationship with Cadence, a human woman.
• Phlebotinum Dependence: Averted for the player character Sleeper, but played straight with Flint, another sleeper met later who needs Stabilizer and looks very rough from having next to none.
• Pursued Protagonist: The majority of the game is spent trying to stay ahead of Laine, who is chasing you, represented by a six cycle clock. It fills up whenever you are in a settlement, but cools off by 3 every time you travel, including for Contracts.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Paired with Glowing Eyes of Doom. Sleepers who have been damaged and are operating in extreme conditions may have their eye lights turn red, leading to creepy encounters. Such as Sleeper running into Flint for the first time in an asteroid cave. With half his torso torn open due to an attack, no spacesuit helmet, and the red glowing eyes, his lurking around Marko to protect him comes off as a zombie or other monster coming out of the shadows.
• The Reliable One: Serafin, who stays with the Sleeper through thick and thin, flies the Rig like a pro, and saves them in several situations.
• The Sociopath: Laine, who at one point breaks the Sleepers finger, while possessing them, so he felt it too.
• The Smart Guy: Juni, who is amazingly proficient in computer systems and hacking into old and new systems alike. To the point she is unique among recruitable crew for giving a +1 to her "Interface" (hacking) rolls, whereas other crew merely have no penalties in either of their two focus skills.
• Single-Minded Twins: The Overseer copies, having been one program once, and desiring to be recompiled back into one again.
• Sinister Surveillance: Solheim built several concealed spy stations across the Helion system purely to spy on workers and settlers.
• Trans Tribulations: Heavily implied to be the reason Bliss came to Erlin's Eye and then left. They are in a self described process of self-discovery and becoming, much like the Sleeper.
• Used Future: Turns out it's not just Erlin's Eye, every space station in the system is falling apart, missing windows, or been built on top of and repurposed.
• Worthy Opponent: Petr may come to consider the Sleeper as one, if you don't lie during the standoff for the Aphellion's Fraction Drive to deny his salvage claim, and pull Yu Jin back from a suicidal charge, he will later forward the schematics for the Fraction Drive, allowing the Sleeper to build their own ship.
• Video Game Caring Potential: One sequence of events can lead to a cat stowing away onto the Rig, and you can decide to starve it out to catch and remove it, or feed it and domesticate it. The latter option will cost you at least four Supplies (15 cryo a piece), and you periodically are meant to feed it with a Supply box every few cycles. There is absolutely no gameplay upside to this, but it feels nice and nets you the achievement "Interspecies Solidarity".
• Your Days Are Numbered: The Sleeper protagonist, at the end of the game, starts to break down, and the only alternative to completely breaking down is a reboot that could cause a Death of Personality.