On the run with CITIZEN SLEEPER 2

Get out of here SLEEPER

Hi all, it’s Monday because this weekend it was my daughter’s first birthday (!) and I had to (and currently still have to) deal with visiting family. Better late than never.

I’m currently playing Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and am having the time of my life. In the Hit Points community, I’ve accidentally become the CS stan (yes I will be using Counter Strike’s acronym here, stop looking at me that way) to the point where I am one post away from assigning “you should play the first game’s DLC” to a keyboard shortcut (you should play the first game’s DLC tho). I wasn’t expecting myself to become as glued to this series as I have, considering how unnatural a lot of the dialogue sounds (people speak with contractions, Gareth Damien Martin!!!). But the first game has stuck so strongly with me thanks to its meaningful focus on believable characters, strong storytelling chops, and gameplay that truly requires you to engage with it to avoid failure. Citizen Sleeper 2 is all of this dialed up even further, and on top of that has a brilliantly simple mechanic to reinforce its narrative, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

CS1 is a tough act to follow – it’s a game about carving out a comfortable life for yourself as an escaped Severed Sleeper unit, a robot duplicate of a human being created with the intent of working off the human’s debt. Now that you’ve escaped the Lumon Essen-Arp Corporation, Adam Scott you must figure out how to not only survive as a wanted fugitive, but to make connections with other people living on the fringes of society. If you play your dice right, you might even become a part of the community and live with your found family. The game is a a huge success because it does such a wonderful job of blending comfort and healing with horrific anxiety. To get to the end of the promised rainbow of connecting with others, you have to live through the gameplay system that is composed of controlled randomness dictated by dice, and some days you just roll poorly. There have been more than a few in-game days where I just literally went back to bed, harrowed by the fact that my body is breaking down and I do not have much time to find money and feed myself some robot-food. The game’s storytelling arcs are so satisfying that many people I chatted with have said that they didn’t bother with the game’s DLC (you should play the DLC) because they didn’t see a reason to change their happy ending. The game’s story is so good that people stopped playing. That is an accomplishment, folks. So the developer sidestepped all of this for the sequel and just made a different game.

In Citizen Sleeper 2, you play a completely new Sleeper unit, allowing your nice little boy (boy is a non-binary term in this sentence) from the first game to continue sailing into the sunset just the way you wanted them to. The sequel then takes the first game’s “carve a nice life for yourself” bit and kicks it off a cliff, because now you are on the run, and the game means it. Instead of taking place on one space station, you’re now able to fly between several, each of which is just as dense and interesting and full of characters as Erlin’s Eye, so of course you think “I’ll just settle down here for a bit and suspend the whole ‘we’re on the run’ story element until I feel like engaging with it.” This isn’t your first videogame rodeo. You’ve played many a game where the story was about you escaping someone, and the gameplay was about you doing whatever you wanted whenever the story took a break. So here you thought you would do the same thing. Well, you thought wrong.

Whenever you wake up for the day, instead of hearing a rooster and that theme from Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, you’re greeted with a little timer that tells you that Mister Milchek the big villain is even closer to finding you, and if you don’t skip town, he will. But whenever you do said town-skipping, the counter gets reduced. You have delayed the inevitable! That’s right, you have to actually act like the story is happening. Ugh, what a dream. The game as a whole is excellent, continuing to showcase even more great storytelling about surviving on the fringes of a failed capitalist society, the additional mechanics besides the on-the-run one are very fun to interact with, such as your teammates getting dice rolls now as well (I laugh every time I picture the whole team waking up and just going back to bed). But finding a way to marry the story and gameplay even more? That’s what we’re here for. Otherwise you could just play a game on your phone while watching a movie – you know, Netflix’s business model.

You should play the DLC Citizen Sleeper 2.

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Be Nice

Dead Space – A survival horror third-person shooter originally released in 2008 and remade in 2023, you play a mechanic (the job, not the videogame attribute that I just talked about above) on a spaceship devastated by a plague of not-zombies.

Why it didn’t work for me: The game’s story is bad. Like, really bad. I’ve been told that it’s even worse in the remake, which is what I played, due to an unnecessarily extended map route which forces you to backtrack repeatedly. But even without that, the writing is just not there - the characters vacillate between different tropes with no real payoff, and the big reveal at the end thoughtlessly uses suicide as a plot point. The overall idea of what the reveal implies is interesting, but the story is told in a manner that doesn’t take advantage of this at all. A real “story doesn’t matter in games, why bother” type of game.

Why it might work for you: Look, sometimes in games the story doesn’t matter. We don’t watch every kung fu movie for the writing, and Dead Space’s gameplay rules. The movement has real weight, the weapons are all usable if you invest in them, and the gameplay conceit that anything but the head is the vulnerable part of zombies leads to a lot of tense interactions. The atmosphere is very effective, which was my one issue with the unimpeachable Resident Evil 4. Get this game on sale (or subscribe to EA’s terrible GamePass for a month), skip the cutscenes, and shred some not-zombies.

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Oh, Good

Indika - Released last year, you play a nun in alternate-history Russia with the devil at her side. It seems really interesting, and a lot of reviewers raved about it. It seems extremely my shit.

I was going to put Monster Hunter Wilds in the Oh, Good spot since it comes out this week, but reviews are not being kind so my hype has really been tamped down. Meanwhile, my bank account rejoices. See you all soon.