What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

In the family of the CRPG, a game genre that, in the nineties, aimed to emulate the old school tabletop roleplaying games for computers, two distinct branches have developed in recent years. An oversimplification: CRPGs can either be narrative games or adventure games. The former, a subgenre largely stemming from Planescape: Torment and Disco Elysium, features games that eschew combat in order to focus on a fairly linear story, while developed political and philosophical themes. Meanwhile the latter — a subgenre with a much more filled-out history, spanning from 1998's Baldur's Gate to 2023's Baldur's Gate 3 (and many, many more besides) often focuses on traditional adventure stories, where the focus is more on exploring, fighting, and expressing power over the world through the decisions you make to shape the story and your character. I've been really only playing CRPGs lately and when you do you really notice just how fundamentally different these two subgenres are, how different a narrative game like Esoteric Ebb is from an adventure game like Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Principally, the narrative games are often extremely light on gameplay, and can even feel a bit like a chore; can even evoke feelings of "I wish this were a novel," as I often felt while, say, playing Disco Elysium and changing my clothes in the middle of a tense scene to get a better chance of passing a skill check.

The heavily Disco-inspired game Citizen Sleeper fit solidly into the "narrative" camp. That game was an episodic story set on a space station, with every episode sort of running in parallel, where you, an escaped robot slave, found a new community for yourself. But as its sequel, Starward Vector, evolves the formula, it becomes on the one hand considerably more linear, less choice-y — but also more gameplay-driven, more focused on telling its story through its systems like the adventure CRPGs do.

In both Citizen Sleeper games, the story progresses in "cycles." At the start of each cycle, or day, you roll a pool of five six-sided dice, and you have to find things to use those dice on throughout the day. You roll a six? You might want to use it to progress an important main story quest. Roll a two or a one? Spend it on something less important, like a gig, because your chance of failure will be higher. This "dice pool" system was honestly not very well implemented in the first game. The reason for this was that there was a whole separate game system, the hacking system, that used low dice rolls like keys in locks, so when you got "unlucky" and rolled all ones and twos for a day, you would just progress the hacking segments, whereas when you got lucky, and rolled high numbers, you would just do regular tasks. This effectively meant that you were never choosing where to spend dice: what tasks you must succeed on, what tasks were okay to risk failing. Starward Vector largely does away with this system, and in general, dials up the difficulty and pressure significantly.

Last year, I described Citizen Sleeper as a game about gig work, where every day you would work four or five different shifts for four or five different employers: whoever had work for you that day. Starward Vector by contrast is more a game about contract work; in it, you'll start jobs that take three to five days, and with your crew, fly out to those jobs and work with single-minded intensity on them till they're done. The pressure on these jobs is high: numerous game systems like stress and dice damage are designed to make failures cascade into more failures, so low rolls can be devastating, but tight timers mean that often you'll have to risk a bad result to get the job done in time. The general feeling with a lot of these jobs is that when you succeed, you succeed by the skin of your teeth, and when you fail — as I did in three jobs throughout the game — it was always due to a mistake on your part. When you fail a plot-critical job, the game will always ensure you have a way to fail forwards and progress the narrative anyway, but he mechanical effects of the failure — broken dice removed from your pool, high resource costs, or even a permanent glitch on death — will stick with you for a long time.

In addition to adding, in essence, difficulty and gameplay and time pressure, Starward Vector evolves on its predecessor in terms of how it structures its narrative. Citizen Sleeper the First takes place on one space station: the Eye — where a slate of largely disconnected episodes unfold in parallel. It largely lacks a main plot; though there is some connective tissue, my experience with the game was that it was more about exploring the Eye, and the people who live there. By making repeated decisions to stay on the Eye at the end of every questline, by how expansive and lived-in it becomes, the place begins to feel like a home for your character, which is, I would argue, the game's emotional core. Starward Vector takes place instead across a large asteroid belt on maybe a dozen different outposts, which you fly between in your ship the Rig, and of course none of these places are as well-developed as the Eye. Though the narrative remains episodic, it's a bit more linear and directed, with more connective tissue and a mostly set order in which you'll visit each station (though you can explore and do sidequests). Structurally, this allows for a better paced experience, with stronger core themes. But it also means that there's less of a feeling of agency in the narrative, and it's much harder to get invested in the world or the characters.

A lot of Citizen Sleeper 2's characters are carry-overs from the first game, albeit with slight redesigns, a few years on. Unfortunately, I recognized almost none of the characters — apart from the three refugee captains from the first game's ending DLC, who were all better fleshed out there than any of the base game's characters. Despite strong designs and visual identities, this general lack of recognizability speaks to the fact that Citizen Sleeper's characters were not particularly memorable, but I fear this is going to be even more true for its sequel. So many of these characters are just unbelievably flimsy, with their entire screen presence amounting to three five minute scenes in a ten hour game — barely enough to amount to an arc, in most cases; often, if they do change, it feels abrupt, clumsy, and forced.

This is a direct consequence of Citizen Sleeper's writing style, I think. It's tight and punchy, very plot-focused and fairly fast paced. On its own this isn't a flaw but it doesn't leave a lot of room for moments to sit with the characters, hear what they have to say, and watch them evolve. Starward Vector's intended fix for this problem is that the incidental dialogue characters have on jobs will help flesh them out, but that dialogue, too, feels wasted, because what characters I take to a job is determined not by what characters I want to hear from, but what skills I literally need to be able to succeed, and what they say is mostly static and work-oriented anyway. That plus a lack of strong character-specific dialogue voices means that characters are usually made up of no more than a gimmick, a strong portrait, and a clumsy arc, and the only characters that get well developed are the sleeper you inhabit, and, to a lesser extent, your friend Serafin who, unlike the other companion characters is always with you on almost every job and story mission, and has full episodes dedicated to fleshing him out.

An episode usually consists of entering a new station, maybe one where a timer is ticking to apply some pressure. You'll spend a couple cycles exploring the station by spending dice, meet some characters, and eventually, do one or two jobs for them, during which the plot will unfold. At the end of the episode, you might be given a bit of technology you need, or a lead on how to deal with the game's antagonsist, Laine. These episodes have a very nice flow both internally and from one to the next; the game is more-ish and hard to put down, just like Citizen Sleeper. But unlike its predecessor, Starward Vector's gameplay variety: alternating between relaxed station exploration and dialogue, and tense, skin-of-your-teeth jobs, contributes a strong feeling of pressure, momentum and variety that was sorely needed. Experienetally, it reminds me of one of the CRPGs I've been writing about these past few months, the adventure CRPG Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Kingmaker has similar ticking clocks, similar resource management loops, and a similar two-way split between its relaxed kingdom management segments and it tense, more story and combat-driven episodes as you fight to stabilize your kingdom in the Stolen Lands. Of course, Kingmaker is longer, more esoteric, and less polished, but the similarities here are not just structural, but thematic. Both games, fundamentally, are about bodily autonomy and sexual violence.

In Starward Vector, much like in the first game, you play as an escaped robot slave. In this one, though, you're not escaping a corporation. You're escaping a man, Laine, who lured you into working with him with promises of helping free you from your corporate masters, before, eventually, severely traumatizing you, taking control of your body, and severely damaging your memory. Waking up in tatters at the start of the game, you escape Laine's space station and spend the game trying to put yourself back together and heal. Throughout that experience, you meet characters who see you explicitly as an object, or who refer to you as a slave, as an 'it'; you meet other sleepers who have had similar experiences, and humans who don't understand, but will try to support you anyway. I can't talk about the ultimate message of this game without spoiling the ending — and I won't, because the game is very much worth playing — but by the end I was in tears, feeling a bit hopeless and a bit mixed up inside.

I think a good, spoiler-free way to put it is that Citizen Sleeper and Kingmaker explore similar themes from opposite directions. In Kingmaker, you make your burgeoning kingdom a home for outcasts, victims, and survivors, and support them as they fight their battles against the past; the game is about gaining stability, about healing, about proving to the world and your companions that you are a worthy leader — even, if you choose to — unto the point of redeeming that game's main villain, herself a victim of gendered violence and a millenia-long curse. But in Starward Vector, you play as the victim yourself, and the game isn't about gaining stability or healing; it's about coming to terms with your brokenness, with what you can hold onto and what, despite your best efforts, you can't. This story feels less exploratory, more specific; the type of painful, hard-to-swallow thing that a narrative RPG can do, and a rollicking adventure about growing a kingdom can't. But Starward Vector also surpasses it narrative CRPG peers, by using its mechanics, its dice, to reinforce that story about damage and brokenness and the long-lingering impacts of trauma. Even with its weak characters and occasionally clumsy writing, in its subgenre, it's my favourite experience since Disco Elysium, and an easy game to recommend.