Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.
The moments when Citizen Sleeper 2 makes me feel anything are the moments when it hurts me. Which it does with some frequency: The sci-fi exploration game’s new focus on “crises”—a contrast to the slow, steady push-and-pull between maintenance and degradation that dominated Jump Over The Age’s 2022 original—frequently creates brief flashpoints of feeling that are deliberately, blatantly unfair. It’s a built-in aspect of the game’s design, where anything worth doing relies on dice rolls that, most of the time, will carry some chance of severely fucking up. You can stack the deck as best you can, and, in times of quiet, take your time to wait for a big win. But sometimes, you just have to risk it—and when the failures come, it’s often in a way that leads to a cascade of agony.
“Failing forward” has always been part of the CitizenSleeper playbook, as fundamental to its design as its spaceborne universe of people eking out lives in the shadow of fractured corporate oligarchies. The idea that screwing up can be just as satisfying as victory is one of those ideas so obvious that most artistic mediums wouldn’t even bother to come up with a phrase for it, but it’s more complex in games: After all, it’s not some generic action hero getting hit with a setback that you then have to watch them overcome. It’s your hands on the controls, and a game telling you that—to pick an example from Citizen Sleeper 2—you’re the reason a bunch of people are going to die in a spaceship-set riot that you artlessly engineered. Citizen Sleeper 2 makes those failures even more likely by introducing new mechanics that ensure small mistakes can beget huge consequences, most notably a “dice health” system that means bad rolls can inflict increasingly drastic damage to your ability to affect situations. The game’s Steam forums are full right now of people talking about putting themselves in literally unwinnable situations through that rapidly escalating snowball of failure, exacerbated by the game’s unflinching unwillingness to let players roll back or reload their one bad day.
It’s harsh, deliberately so. Playing the game, on more than one occasion, I felt myself get genuinely, legitimately pissed off at how goddamn unfair it was being. There’s nothing like burning precious resources for a full re-roll of your day’s dice, only to see that they’ve come up all 1s or 2s, meaning you’re now forced to either waste time by going back to bed, or risk setting off one of those self-destructive cascades. “It’s all just bullshit,” I caught myself thinking. “Stupid fucking dumb luck.”
It’s in these moments, I think, when Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector comes closest to genuinely being about something. Certainly, they impacted me harder than the game’s writing, which often felt like it was full of meandering meditations on the importance of hope and looking after other people in a hostile universe. (One of the dangers of playing a video game made by people with politics you agree with is that doing the “right” thing is usually not just fairly simple common sense, but also tends to be abundantly rewarded; Citizen Sleeper 2 may be a hard game when it comes to nitty-gritty mechanics, but it’s an extremely easy one to “win.”) Some of these written moments landed well enough to make an impact—there’s a bit with a stray cat that pierced even my stony “do not pet the animals” heart. (The game is also much better when it focuses on the individual, exploring rich metaphors about identity that crop up naturally from its “human mind in artificial body” premise.) But the game’s general belief in empathy as an all-purpose antidote to top-down cruelty frequently felt like little more than white noise, a steady drip of platitudes being broadcast into my main character’s artificial biosystems. (Contrast last year’s 1000XResist, a game that also traffics in many of these themes, but does so in a way that acknowledges the messy, fucked-up nature of doing “good” in the world in ways that feel real, despite an equally fantastical setting.) In Citizen Sleeper 2, real villains are few and far between, and so cartoonishly vile that you can see them coming from a million miles away. It doesn’t just ask you to look for the helpers: It shoves them into your path with an aggression that belies the darker edges of the story it’s ostensibly trying to tell.
No, Starward Vector only makes sense when it hurts me. It’s in the play, not the story, that the game acknowledges the wobbly, awful terror of actually stepping up and doing something, the realization that you’re literally rolling the dice on something necessary that you also have no way to control. On more than one occasion, the game had me whispering “Please, just work” on a Hail Mary play that was the deciding point between failure and hard-won triumph, waiting with bated breath to see which way the dice would fall. It’s in these moments when the game grabbed my heart; everything else was just words.
