Art in this piece: Citizen Sleeper 2
Available Through: PS5/Xbox Series X/Xbox Series S/Nintendo Switch/PC Platforms
Last week I was talking to my therapist about the overwhelm of modernity—that global sense of inescapable everythingness. I talked about the miasma and mass of everything being, feeling, seeming shitty. About how having a phone is just walking around with a grenade of takes constantly exploding every 5 minutes. Doom and gloom for sure, but then I talked about finding moments of restorative disconnection. A blunt here, stargazing there, closing my eyes in the dark, the small moments. Then I talked about bigger moments, I talked about Citizen Sleeper 2.
I explained to my therapist how the game evokes an extraterrestrial cocoon. Using his words, I thoughtfully explained Citizen Sleeper 2’s impressive ability to transport the mind. Thinking about the game after rolling the credits, CS2 is a minor miracle—a descendant of Mass Effect 2 in virtual tabletop, dice-RPG form.
Back to that transportation though. Citizen Sleeper 2 is a text-heavy game that glitters and glows weightlessly. Like its repeated zero g motifs, the game’s prose glides through with an existential meditation of self, community, identity and oppression. There's no voice acting here, the game trusts your imagination. CS2 does maximize the atmosphere with its music—twinkling, pulsing synthscapes that also suspend gravity.
For the totally uninitiated, a sleeper is a biomechanical person, an emulation of someone else's mind who sleeps in cryostasis while their sleeper works on their debts to a company. It's a grim projection of astro-capitalism but seems terrifyingly plausible. While journeying throughout The Belt (CS2’s solar system), questions about metamorphosis and memory intertwine. Whose life are you even living? What is a good life? How do you take care of a body designed to disintegrate? Who can help and why? All these questions and hundreds more make CS2 a thoroughly thoughtful and frequently tender game.
This mini-but-mighty RPG is immersive in its spinning web of fantastic characters and hard choices. There are more than a few choices that I truly agonized over hours, I mean thinking hard about them hours after leaving my laptop. Part of this agony lies in the humanizing depiction and dimensions of CS2’s characters, the other part lies in its exquisitely stressful dice systems.
The first Citizen Sleeper used a set 5 dice that determined everything you did. It's a game that borrows from spoon theory and disability advocacy. Dice determine your successfulness in getting money to buy a drug needed to stay alive, getting housing, working a community protection beat, etc. There's only so much one body can handle in a day. Citizen Sleeper 2 takes those systems, and ratchets up the pressure. Dice can now break, have individual health bars, glitch and build stress. Hell, you can actually DIE die here. The game’s pushback means you need to strategize, weigh the costs/rewards of attempted actions and learn to stay on top of the various things threatening your sleeper’s existence.
Playing this game at 33 feels right for where my brain is these days. I've been thinking about the chapters of my life. I think about how each epoch of my life functionally feels like another one—a new person built on the bones of an older version of myself. I'm a growing, changing person adding to one life by living several over time. Citizen Sleeper 2 taps into these thoughts with graceful diffusion. It’s an invitation to get lost in thoughts about living. Many games spend 100s of hours thoughtlessly attempting to say something. Citizen Sleeper 2 is among the most thoughtful shinning stars of the medium, a powerful video game with a gentle heart.