Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Stabiliser was the core of Citizen Sleeper, in both its mechanics and metaphors. It was medication, essentially, the only way to halt your own planned obsolescence. As an android Sleeper, you'd been sold into indentured servitude by your 'original', the person who signed a contract to have their personality copied and emulated inside a robotic frame, as cheap labour. That kind of corporate arrangement is rarely built to last.

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Stabiliser was the core of Citizen Sleeper, in both its mechanics and metaphors. It was medication, essentially, the only way to halt your own planned obsolescence. As an android Sleeper, you’d been sold into indentured servitude by your ‘original’, the person who signed a contract to have their personality copied and emulated inside a robotic frame, as cheap labour. That kind of corporate arrangement is rarely built to last.

And so, even after breaking free, your Sleeper was kept tethered to a broken system by their dependency on Stabiliser. You’d have to pour every last ounce of energy you had into menial jobs, in order to afford the meds that stopped you powering down, even if the alternative was doing the same to yourself through exhaustion. It’s a bold choice, then, to begin this sequel by immediately kicking the habit.

This time your Sleeper (a fresh one, selected from the same three production-line models as the last: Operator, Extractor, Machinist) is a few years into their postcorporate life. Not that their new one, under mob boss Laine – whose Stabiliser supply kept his pet robot on a tight rein – was much better. At the game’s opening, they’re in the process of breaking free for the second time, rebooting their system and excising the parts that rely on the substance. This doesn’t go to plan, exactly, leaving your Sleeper amnesic and on the run, but it does mean no more worrying about the gradual degradation of your condition, and of the dice that power your every action. A bold choice, yes – but also a necessary one, the original Citizen Sleeper having begun to scrape the ceiling of its systems’ possibility space towards the end.