One of the best indie titles of recent years hits new heights with an excellent sequel that becomes the first must-play video game of 2025. Despite its unusual gameplay and meditative pace, Citizen Sleeper was something of a breakthrough for UK developer Gareth Damian Martin. The dice-based space adventure racked up four BAFTA nominations and a nod at The Game Awards, albeit in the patronising Games For Impact category. The place where thoughtful, genre-defying games are lumped together and given a disengaged pat on the head, so they don’t disturb the crowd pleasers.

After multiple slices of DLC, Citizen Sleeper’s success has led to a somewhat unconventional sequel. It’s bigger, richer, and builds on the original’s foundations, but there’s also more friction shouldering you into its survival mechanics. If you didn’t play the original, Citizen Sleeper is a tabletop-inspired role-playing game driven by text-based sci-fi storytelling. You play as a Sleeper, an emulation of a human mind housed within an artificial body, who is on the run from the corporation that gave you life. This time though, you’re primarily on the run from a criminal gang leader called Laine, who is trying to control your synthetic existence for his own mysterious gains.

In your escape for a better life, you find yourself in the Starward Belt, a sequence of crumbled settlements at the edge of the war-torn Helion system. Instead of controlling the character directly, the game is played via an overhead view of a space station, with no action gameplay to speak of. The tabletop-style loop is hinged around fixed dice you’re given at the start of every cycle, which you can use in places of interest via the aerial view, such as shops and other facilities, in order to progress the story or maintain your survival. The higher the dice number is – and if your character class has the relevant skill – the better your chances are of completing a task successfully, whether that’s working a shift in a factory for cash or trying to hack into a device as part of a story mission.

Tension comes from balancing the completion of these tasks while ensuring you have the resources to survive through each cycle, which you manually end yourself once you have used all your dice. If luck isn’t on your side or you gamble with a low die, you might be punished with energy loss, which costs supplies, and in turn resources, to rejuvenate. The sequel introduces other layers of stress. If your energy runs out or if you fail certain jobs a literal stress gauge will increase and slowly erode health bars attached to your five dice. If left untreated, you’ll quickly find yourself on a slippery slope, with broken slots and limited options on how to crawl back to safety.

To add to the pressure, there’s also a new glitch mechanic. Some actions will boost a glitch meter, increasing the chance of a malfunctioning die occupying one (or several) of your slots. These only give you a one-in-five chance of success, so they become a very tempting gamble when you are clamouring for a hail Mary against the cyclical clock. These are well implemented as a death penalty too, with every wipe out (if all your dice break) applying a permanent glitch you have to contend with for the rest of the game. If you fancy an extra challenge, the highest difficulty option ends your run entirely if you die, heightening the stakes even further.

If the first Citizen Sleeper was relatively relaxed in its difficulty, Starward Vector isn’t afraid to squeeze your supplies and throw you into pressured situations where you’re one die throw away from failure. It does still have stretches where it eases up and relishes in the cerebral atmosphere, but the overall bump in difficulty feels like a considered swerve to accentuate the role-playing systems at the game’s core.

These revamped systems also make every choice, whether in the dice meta-game or in the narrative’s dialogue options, more meaningful and consequential. The original Citizen Sleeper, while great, was largely superfluous as a role-playing game, with tacked-on character classes and skill trees which you could mostly ignore. Here, everything is cohesive and complimentary to the overall design, in a way that is far more accomplished than its predecessor.

The added intensity baked into the mechanics coalesces with the narrative too. Yes, you’re a Sleeper that’s on the run, but your body is also in a gradual state of decline after an attempted reboot – causing memory loss and other malfunctions, which you gradually unpack as you encounter characters across the adventure. While the overall premise is similar to the original, the conceit is more compelling due to the sequel’s expanded scope. Instead of being pinned to one location throughout, this sequel, in a similar vein to Mass Effect 2, sees you traverse to different space stations across the Starward Belt, where you encounter different characters who can join your crew. Every crew member you acquire can then be utilised in isolated contract missions, who will team up with you with their own dice and specific attributes to complete the job at hand.