Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector officially unveiled
UPDATE: New details emerge, with crisis as central theme.
UPDATE 12/6/23: Further story and gameplay details on Citizen Sleeper 2 have emerged, including its central theme of crisis.
In an interview with RPS, developer Gareth Damian Martin cited the pandemic and invasion of Ukraine as having a "big impact" on their understanding of crises, which has influenced the game's plot.
"It's always interesting to me how these things feel closer to some people and not close to other people," they said. "How you can have people who are all having the same experience, but actually how they perceive what a crisis is and how a crisis manifests [is different]. These things seem really rich to me, especially the balance between the idea of a global or large-scale crisis, and then a crisis in the community, and then individual moments of crisis. We use the same word for all those things, and I think there's interesting ways that they interact with each other."
Elsewhere, Damian Martin teased a more tumultuous and unpredictable system for this all-new Sleeper's declining health, with a "sudden turn of events" to deal with. "The overall theme of the game is about precarity and about crisis," they said, "and that manifests very much as you have a body which is in crisis, which is falling apart."
And while the Sleeper will amass a crew for their ship, it won't be like Mass Effect: "It isn't being Commander Shepard and running your nice, neat business ship."
New gameplay likely won't be shown until next year, but in the meantime a free newsletter series will be released over the next year to fill the time gap between both games. "It will be a monthly text-based narrative series that will have stories from different parts of the system as the corporate war starts to build up," said Damian Martin, "and that will carry the universe into the new state of the sequel world."
ORIGINAL STORY 11/6/23: Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, the sequel to developer Jump Over The Age's highly acclaimed tabletop-inspired narrative RPG, has been revealed.
Things are a little bit different this time around, with Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector introducing a brand-new - and steadily declining - Sleeper android protagonist, alongside a new setting where players will need to build themselves a life among the stars.
This particular Sleeper has been hiding out in the Starward Belt at the edge of the Helion System, and, having rewritten their own code in an effort to escape servitude, is now on the run with a malfunctioning body, a bounty on their head, and no memory of their past.
In Starward Vector, players pilot their own ramshackle stolen ship, populated by a crew they've recruited themselves, as they attempt to navigate a system in crisis - wrenched apart by two warring corporate entities - while taking on contracts to see them through to the next cycle.
It's all built around a tabletop-RPG inspired, dice-throwing-and-spending system similar to that of the first game, but Jump Over The Age is also promising new mechanics offering "more depth, complexity and challenge".
There's not much more to report on Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector just yet, but it's currently available to wishlist on Steam and is said to be "coming soon".