“…simple, yet challenging”
Citizen Sleeper 2 is a dice base narrative sci-fi RPG from developer Jump Over The Age. Set in the Helion system, you play as a sleeper, a human mind transferred into an android body to work off their debt.
You begin the story by waking with little memory of your past. Along with your friend Serafin, you have tried to escape the clutches of your criminal gang boss Laine. To do so Serafin has attempted to reboot you to break your dependence on a drug called Stabilizer that Laine was giving you, but Laine found you and interrupted the process which has caused your memory loss. Now you remember your skills but not your friend or your previous life working under Laine’s control. You manage to escape to the space station Hexport with Serafin in the very ship you used to work out of, The Rig, and from there the game truly begins.
There are three classes to choose from, Operator, Extractor and Machinist. Each have different levels in the five available skills, Engineer, Interface, Intuit, Engage and Endure, one of which they will have no proficiency with at all. Each class also comes with a different Push ability, which you can use once per cycle to alter the value of one dice, though using it will add a point of stress to your stress bar, which I will talk about shortly. Your skills and Push ability can be upgraded as you progress with upgrade points which you earn by completing missions.
Once you arrive on Hexport you find that you need to make some repairs to the Rig to be able to travel any further in your quest to escape. The first thing you need are fuel lines and Serafin asks you to go out and look around for anyone selling some and to look for jobs. You travel between the different sections of the port by clicking on the relevant icons, and each area will have several actions you can take.
With the exception of shopping area’s, each area has a central box at the bottom of the screen with an empty dial and a line linking it to at least two actions you can take. These actions will have symbols beside it of whichever skills are needed to make these easier to perform. Once you have selected an action to perform, you have to choose a dice to use for it. If you are proficient in the skill needed it will increase the dice value (unless you picked a 6) before you roll, if you are not then it may decrease it, and your chances of success are also shown.
Successful actions will fill the central dial, and once full it will unlock another area to explore or the next stage of a mission.
If you fail however you will accrue stress. Stress is an important feature to manage, you and your companions have stress bars and the contracts that you can take on will have stress levels as well. For you, as your stress bar fills it adds chances that your dice will be damaged on certain rolls, if they take three points of damage they will break and become unusable until fixed. You can fix them in the Rig’s workshop, but you will have to unlock it first. Your companions stress bars are much smaller, and they will abandon you when doing contracts if their bar completely fills. For the contracts, if the stress meter completely fills then you will fail and cannot retry it, losing the much needed rewards.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is more challenging than it first appears, as stress is not the only thing you need to manage. You have five dice and your companions each have two, once you have used them you generate more by going back to the Rig and ending the current cycle. When you do this, one of your supplies will be used, if you run out of supplies on a contract you will begin to starve and each new cycle will add stress to you and your companions. To get contracts you will need to buy them with cryo, and to travel to their locations you will need to buy fuel for your ship.
There are multiple ways of earning cryo. In Hexport there are a few small jobs you can repeat on the station that will give you a few cryo at a time, but the greatest payout’s will always come from completing contracts.
I found it was quite easy to get into a bad situation early in the game if you are not careful with your supplies and choices, as you cannot leave the area once you start a contract until it is completed, no matter the outcome. The game forces you to think about each move you make, which certainly helps to minimise mistakes, but being a dice based game even the most well prepared player can suffer the wrath of the Dice Gods.
If things go really badly, you can actually die if you are playing the risky (normal) or dangerous (hard) difficulties. On risky difficulty when you are returned you will gain a permanent penalty in the form of one of your dice becoming a glitched dice, these carry an 80% failure probability when used and they cannot be repaired. If you play on dangerous difficulty, death is permanent. Safe difficulty disables death and is focused more on the story.
The narrative sections of the game are frequent and can seem rather long, but the story is well written and grips you after a while, you get to make small dialogue choices too which makes your character feel more like your own.
The tutorials are also very well written and pop up when needed, though if you need to refresh your memory at any point or accidentally skip one and don’t know what you are doing, you can read them again from the guide tab in the pause menu.
A review code for the Nintendo Switch was provided by Jump Over The Age.
