I
n any other game, two mega corporations obliterating each other in a galactic war would be the story’s focus. But in Citizen Sleeper 2, the conflict between Conway and Senetstat at the centre of the Helion System is background noise. “Citizen Sleeper is a game about the periphery,” designer Gareth Damian Martin says.
You, an escaped android, have more immediate problems than the brewing war at Helion’s centre. Out in the Starward Belt, an archipelago of asteroids at the edge of the corporation-dominated solar system, you’re running from a violent gang leader after stealing one of his spaceships. You need to keep your vessel fuelled, your supplies stocked, and your synthetic body topped up with a hard-to-find serum that keeps it from shutting down.
You will travel between the communities that have made homes for themselves in the carcass of the collapsed Solheim Corporation’s abandoned facilities. The Starward Belt is a “disparate community of little places built out of salvage and reconditioned tech from old corporate habitats, none of which can be fully sustainable on their own,” Damian Martin says. Darkside, for instance, is a city built in the shadow of giant solar panels.
At each settlement, you can take on contracts to get the supplies you need. “I don’t just want you to have a spaceship and fly around because it’s cool to do,” Damian Martin says. “I want you to play an important role in this society.” Settlers might ask you to dissect derelict ships for scrap metal, find food for a colony with no farming facilities, or repair the broken filtration machinery a station needs for clean water – whatever that fragment of the solar ecosystem needs.
Though Citizen Sleeper 2 isn’t a game about the sparring corporations that frame its world, you can’t escape the waves of the conflict swirling at the Helion system’s heart. “I describe it as like being on the shores of the war,” Damian Martin says, explaining how his partner, who’s from Romania, is hearing stories of Ukrainian and Russian sea mines washing up on the beaches of the Black Sea.
Every community you meet will be dealing with the waves of the war. The original Citizen Sleeper explored the precarious existence of a single illegal migrant. You spent each day trying to end with a little more than you had before, stepping between people who could exploit your vulnerability with impunity. The sequel draws your perspective further back: “Crisis is an expansion of precarity as a theme,” Damian Martin says. “Precarity is often an individual, subjective experience, [whereas] crisis is a collective experience that also happens to everyone individually.”
From your position on the edge of the warring companies, you’ll see the many sides of a crisis – what happens when supplies become short, refugees need homes and debtors don’t pay up. But it’s not a story about the corporations. “I’m not interested in how the corporations work internally,” Damian Martin says. “I’m not interested in flashing their logos on the screen or satirising them; I don’t care. They’re a big force in the world, but my focus is on the people on the periphery.”