An abandoned, powerful spaceship hides somewhere in the Starward Belt.
My contact Yu-Jin swears he can find it — I scrounge up a crew and zip to his coordinates, only to lose out to a competitor who chased us there. Exhausted and defeated, I grit my robot teeth and plan my next gig — anything to scrape together the fuel I need to evade the crime boss on my trail.
Desperation and hope intertwine in Citizen Sleeper 2, out Jan. 31. Like its acclaimed 2022 predecessor, the sci-fi video game puts you in the shoes of an android who's escaped a dystopian corporation (imagine Blade Runner, from a replicant's perspective). But despite its interstellar cyberpunk-esque setting, developer Gareth Damian Martin says the series grapples with issues close to home.
"I'm not really ever thinking about the future," Martin says. "I'm really twisting and emphasizing or making more palpable tensions that I feel in the present."
These tensions run from the global to the intimate. As an uneasy Gaza ceasefire and grinding siege in Ukraine splash across real-world headlines, Martin says that Citizen Sleeper 2 unfolds "on the shores of war." Distant battles rumble through the more immediate concerns of the game's protagonist and allies, who collaborate to scratch out lives on the margins of unchecked capitalism.
As cutting-edge as these themes might be, Citizen Sleeper's grounded in ancient gaming technology.
"Each day you roll five dice," Martin explains. "So low rolling dice are kind of important in the game, to not be something that you can easily use efficiently — they have to be something that you kind of take a chance on."
These digital dice force you to consider the risks of your precarious position. In Citizen Sleeper 2, Martin expanded the system to model trauma. Dice break if you get too stressed, requiring costly resources to repair.
"They'll take little scratches and nicks," says Martin. "By the end of the game, your dice have been broken over and over again and will be shown right there on the screen as a kind of allegory for all those marks of a story that happened — the body keeps the score, I guess."
Interview highlights
On failure being built into the narrative of the game
Yeah, this is a huge part of the philosophy of Citizen Sleeper. But then with the sequel, I really wanted to push hard on this idea of, "I'm going to invite you into situations where there's a lot of different right answers and a lot of different wrong answers." There's a lot of different ways that it can break down, can break bad, or it can break good. I want to create these moments that hinge on single dice, where you're deciding, "Do I use this dice for this" and try to emphasize those and bring stories out of them. You're always playing as a character who's struggling, and so when you struggle in the game, it kind of rhymes nicely with the things you know about the character. You know about their body that's falling apart and about them being pursued and desperate.
On how this game, released in 2025, speaks to major issues of our time
In a way, it's kind of for others to tell me how much they feel it does achieve that or not. It's very much about bodily autonomy in that very literal way and then also a political way. Citizen Sleeper has always been about this tension between, "Is it the most depressing thing in the world that these systems exist and can crush us without ever even knowing?" Or "is it incredible that we're able to build meaningful relationships within those structures despite the fact that they are so uncaring and vast?" So, I do hope that it feels productive.
On the game centering community, resiliency and resistance
I think that for me, I'm really interested in drawing the focus down into what people are doing to survive and thrive and build relationships and communities. Citizen Sleeper 2 is a real opportunity because I knew this would be a character who is transient and dealing with characters who are going through this transitional moment. To have you then engage with a community that is maybe becoming solid, but also, the knowledge that you can't necessarily become part of that community permanently. I think games have a kind of tendency to make everything feel permanent. So I really wanted this delicacy of change and of things falling apart and entropy and the kind of beauty of how people resist that and how people build meaning — despite the fact that they know that one day everyone they ever knew and everything they ever thought has gone. I find that eternally kind of beautiful.
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