The crew behind Citizen Sleeper is back with – unsurprisingly – more Citizen Sleeper. To recap: Citizen Sleeper is a series of Visual-Novel-esque games that in my opinion have just enough gameplay mechanics to feel more like a game than a straight Visual Novel. Yes, an immense portion of the game is talking, and reading, and making conversation choices, and basically doing a choose-your-own-adventure in video game form, but the vast majority of actions you do require inputting a die from your pool of 6d6 that you roll every morning. The combination of the roll and your proficiency in the kind of task you’re attempting to accomplish determines the probability of success or failure, leading to a game about making calculated risks and strategically allocating scarce resources to make progress.

All those core features return for Citizen Sleeper 2, you’re still drifting the zero-gravity halls of a space-faring civilization in decline, figuring out how to scrape by another day, and maybe help someone improve their bleak existence in the process. The scope in the sequel is expanded in basically every way. First off, you’re not stuck on a single setting on a chapter-by-chapter basis, the game is wide open very early on. You’ve got a little ship that acts as your home base now, and once you’re out of the tutorial the game opens up to let you (pretty) freely move between several starports, asteroids, and mining facilities, each of which has the same level of depth of characters, side-quests and missions as a whole chapter in the original game. There’s no real “home zone” the game, some locations are slightly more hospitable than others, some may have better buy/sell rates, but the missions are designed to bounce you around.

Citizen Sleeper 2 also expands on the scope of what constitutes a “mission”. In the first game, missions were all sort of scoped to one “zone” that might have several points of interest and long-term tasks you’re trying to focus on. Now while you’re exploring a zone you might get a tip for some contract work in the same local system but in a remote area. Those kick off little “instanced” excursions, where you pick specific crew members to come with you (who will hopefully all have slightly different proficiencies), and temporarily you’re locked into the mission until you either succeed or fail miserably. During missions you gain the ability to ‘push’ to re-roll dice at risk of taking on stress, and you also have two daily dice to allocate from each crew member you bring along, so you can try and balance out your proficiencies for a better shot at a faster success.

Note that these missions can be hard. You’re limited to 5 days worth of supplies on away missions, but depending on your situation you might not be going in with that many, even further limiting how long you can survive before you start accumulating daily stress. Stress will eventually start breaking your dice, limiting how many you roll each day, complicating your likelihood of success. Most of the time these missions have multiple tiers of checks you’ll have to progress, sometimes they have their own event timers (like, you have 3 cycles to complete 3 objectives before things go completely sideways), and you’ll frequently find yourself in a situation where you completely beefed your crew composition because one guy is proficient in what you need but rolled like garbage and the other guy is proficient in nothing but rolled sorta ok.

One big difference between the first and second games is that the first game was focused on scarcity, fear, and hiding. It was all about forcing you to make the very hard decision between spending your last 12 chits on food, Robot Insulin, or helping a little girl get off-world. Citizen Sleeper 2 is more about being on the run. The whole Robot Insulin situation has been removed because stuff is… happening… but that mechanic is sort of expanded because you’re supplying a whole crewed ship. The game is more about running, never spending too much time on one world, bouncing from place to place, staying low, running freight between planets to make a slim profit, etc.

Length-wise it’s… apparently significantly longer than the original. I’m a bit shocked by this, because until I went and looked it up Citizen Sleeper felt longer, but apparently I beat the original in 5h41m (nearly 100%) and Citizen Sleeper 2 in 13h55m (also nearly 100%). It’s weird, Citizen Sleeper 2 felt both more breezy and also way more punishing. There were so many missions I barely limped out of with 5/6 dice broken, zero supplies, nearly zero fuel, max stress, and barely enough cash and cargo on hand to fix the dice afterwards. But despite that I never completely failed a mission.

I played via Game Pass on a mix of PC and Xbox, after playing the original exclusively on Xbox. I think PC is the far better option, because drag & dropping dice is far easier than pick & placing with a controller, but honestly it probably doesn’t matter. In general I recommend it, but since it’s so short you should really play the original first to get a better introduction to the setting. If you end up enjoying the original, then I highly recommend the sequel.