I enjoyed the first game in this series (see my review from last fall here) and am glad I only had to wait a few months to play its sequel. I’m not in a financial pinch, but something told me I should scrape together some money specifically to use in service of purchasing it. So, I sold some N64 games to a local video game shop and a box or so of books to Half-Price Books. I came out with about $30, which was more than enough. I grabbed a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Churn Out the Vote to go along with the game. I was all set. A new game, an indulgent snack, and some wintry weather on the Saturday afternoon of a long weekend. An attempt to carve out some time for myself and cultivate some joy amidst all the harm floating around in the ether.
As with the original Citizen Sleeper, you play the role of a being formed by the memory of a human that has been installed into an anthropomorphic robot. The difference here is that you are on the run, whereas in the original game, you were just trying to figure out what it meant to exist somewhere between human and machine. This time, you and a human friend have breached a contract and are attempting to elude the corporate stooge who owns you. There is some continuity with the narrative of the first game, but it’s entirely possible to enjoy this game on its own. The main goal is to determine why the system inside of you is failing and to prevent further harm to yourself. Plus, you might learn something about the nature of forming an identity.
At the start of the game, you can choose between one of three character types: machinist, extractor, and operator. I chose machinist, like I did for the first game, because I felt an affinity for a character who struggles to engage with others. (I have no mechanical abilities, however.) This choice ended up being helpful in that I was able to do a lot of fixing of various devices in the game, though the constant frustration of being unable to interact successfully in certain situations was limiting. Just like in the original, you progress through the game by rolling dice, slotting them into certain tasks based on their value, and choosing who you’d like to help or how you’d like to grow.
New in this sequel are the ideas of frame stress, glitched dice, and contract work, each of which adds a little bit of variety to the dice rolling, task completing, and dialogue selecting that are the core of the gameplay. In the previous game, if you slotted a die with a low chance of success for a task, the consequence would be that you would not move the task toward completion. You may have also moved a separate, competing task toward failure. Here, both of those outcomes may occur, and also, you might have an additional penalty of stress to your body. Over time, this stress manifests itself in your dice by making them break or glitch. A broken die needs special components to repair and a glitched die needs to be rolled to (as I imagine it) shake off the bad vibes for the next day. Some dice, when fixed with unsatisfactory components, will glitch more easily. So, there is a lasting consequence to being reckless with your dice rolls. Even if there is a time limit on a certain task, I found myself ending the cycles, or days, of my journey early because I had no good dice left. I am not a gambler. There is also a push mechanic where you can make a double-or-nothing choice where you will change one die to a higher value at the consequence of taking on more stress. I rarely used it and did not allot upgrade points to its development. Maybe your risk tolerance is higher than mine. An additional constraint comes in the form of contracts, which are similar to drives (i.e., main quests and side-quests) in the original game, except that they are one-and-done scenarios. If you want to help someone who is stranded on a nearby asteroid, you can do that, but you can’t leave them until the job is completed or you fully give up on it. You cannot try it again. You also cannot use some of the usual recovery methods you are used to, such as eating, sleeping, or fixing dice. The contracts usually last only a few cycles and may result in new crew members or items that are necessary for other drives in the game.
Oh, that’s right. There are other people in this game that join you on your ship. Your friend, Serafin, acts as a pilot throughout your voyage across The Belt, but you can take on a few other assistants as well. The ability to navigate from planet to debris field to space settlement in a ship is also a departure from the original game, where you spent all your time on a single space station. In the end, I had four crew members on my ship in addition to Serafin, and I had turned down at least one other potential mate who had annoyed me during a contract job. These crewmates mostly add color to the gameplay through their dialogue with you and each other. You can take two of them on a contract with you and they have their own complement of dice and skills. So, there’s a little bit of strategy involved in selecting your crew for these missions because you will not want to send three machinist types on the same task. Better to mix in a crew member with some social skills or the ability to withstand hardship.
Much, much more importantly that recruiting other people to help you on your quest to rid yourself of the virus-like malware that is corrupting your system is the fact that you can adopt a stray cat. At some point in your travels, you will notice that there is an unusual sound on the ship and that some of your supplies are missing. Through discussions and negotiations with those onboard, you hatch a plan to trap the creature. You can approach the situation with hostility or empathy. When you finally catch the critter, it turns out to be a cat. Although two of my crew members were at odds over whether to take on the darling, gray fluffball, I suffered no such misgivings. When presented with the possibility of selecting a dialogue choice that read “Trust me, cats are worth it,” I assented to it so quickly that I did not even process the possibility of making the alternate choice.
Despite my lack of hesitation in that moment, there were other places where I had second thoughts about what to say or do. In those instances, I wish there were an alternative to the incessant autosaving in the game. Had I made a truly regrettable choice, I would not have been able to reload from a point a few minutes earlier because there is no manual saving. As annoying as that is, it still works out fine in the end because the game is about 10 to 15 hours long. Any longer and the idea of a second or third playthrough would be too much of an ordeal. That said, the ending underwhelms with its inevitability. There is such a thing as too much closure, too definitive a conclusion.
There is plenty more I could discuss with this game. I haven’t even touched on the beautiful interplay between the colorful character art and the minimalistic backgrounds of the planets and ships you explore or the gorgeous ambient electronic soundtrack (again by Amos Roddy). Even the little sound effect that goes along with the camera shifting focus from a task to an extended moment of exposition or dialogue is done well. It’s the kind of sound you’ll hear hundreds or thousands of times in a game like this one, and when that little detail is done well, you will ease into playing the game effortlessly. One of those narrative moments that really stuck with me and that sums up one of the game’s themes happens in an area called the Greenbelt. As the name indicates, the area is comprised of greenhouses, but they are in a state of disrepair. Upon delivery of Stepsilk, a hardy plant that can grow in arid conditions, Aki, the manager of the garden says of the plant that “Like us, it projects itself across empty space, pushing out to its new conditions.” You may have heard of this idea before, that of being aphercotropic, or growing away from an obstacle. Think of yourself as a weed growing through a concrete sidewalk; just keep going. You will get there eventually, even if your characteristics or skills are occasionally a hindrance. If they are, then there’s all the more reason to ally with others in pursuit of your larger, shared goals as you engage in the drive for freedom.
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