The most fascinating RPG of 2022 has a must-play live demo this week only

The best RPG of 2022 is getting a sequel next year and you can play a demo for it now. No, I’m not talking about that Elden Ring or Xenoblade Chronicles 3. The tabletop RPG inspired game Citizen Sleeper 2 builds on the first game’s moving story and incredible dice-based skill system, and from the short time I’ve spent with the demo, it might even surpass the original.

Citizen Sleeper 2 begins like the first game: your sleeper – a cloned human consciousness stuffed into a robotic shell – awakens on an unknown space station. In the original, you stuffed yourself into a shipping container to get to the new station and escape the corporation that was holding you captive. This time it’s even worse. You wake up with no memory of who or where you are, having woken up in the middle of a hard reboot. As you quickly learn, you were awakened by Laine, a criminal to whom you owe a debt of gratitude, and the reboot was carried out by your partner Serafin to reduce your dependence on Stabilizer.

Her rude awakening is more than just a narrative device, it plays a role Citizen Sleeper 2is the most interesting mechanic. In the original game, you had to take stabilizer every few days to keep your mechanical body functioning. This time there is no more stabilizer, but due to the interruption of your restart you are not working at 100 percent. The game’s new stress system is a tough replacement for tabletop RPGs like Blade in the dark.

Dice rolls determine your success in most actions, whether negotiating with an employer or hacking into a computer. If you fail a dice roll or use a special ability that allows you to re-roll the dice, you will accumulate stress that can have serious consequences if you allow it to build up. Once you stress enough, your dice will take damage as they land on certain numbers, eventually breaking and becoming unusable until you repair them. The stress system turns every dice roll into a risk, and the harder you push yourself against tough odds, the more likely your dice are to fail later. My biggest criticism citizen sleeper is that the mechanical stakes never seem as serious as the narrative ones – that’s no longer the case in the sequel.

Stress is particularly important with contracts, the biggest change Citizen Sleeper 2. Instead of being a loner doing odd jobs, you’ll be in control of your own ship, which you can use to take on bigger, riskier missions with the help of your crew. Contracts offer great rewards, but the price of failure can be enormous. Stress builds up quickly with contracts, and if you don’t handle it well, you may find yourself worse off than when you took the job. If there are any clues to the demo’s main mission, it will be contracts hard. Just like your character, contracts also have their own stress tracker. Every few stress points cause something to go wrong that you need to fix quickly to get the job done. If a contract’s stress meter is completely filled, you’ve screwed up the job and are going home empty-handed. With each roll of the dice in the demo’s final contract, I found myself feeling more tense and wondering more and more if my crew would make it out of this contract alive.

Crew members are not just faceless wage workers either. Each of them is a fully developed character who brings their own baggage in addition to their skills. In the demo, I recruited a woman named Nia, who totally saved me from the contract we made together, but also got me into trouble with her overbearing brother, who was pissed that she joined my crew instead of her help. Juni, another recruitable companion, causes even more trouble. Depending on your contract with her, you could end up losing your pay, making an enemy of your employer, or facing a difficult moral dilemma in the dangerous void of space.

citizen sleeperThe novel’s greatest strength lies in its writing style, and nothing has been lost in the sequel. If you have to build your own crew and complete tasks with NPCs, they have more chances to endear themselves to you – or to stab you in the back. The crew system in Citizen Sleeper 2 is perhaps the most promising part of all, but also raises the most questions. By the end of my demo, I had a difficult relationship with virtually everyone I met, and some members of the crew openly distrusted each other. I’m curious to see how well you can play off this drama, which is one of the best parts of real tabletop RPGs.

However these character dynamics falter, the writing gets into it Citizen Sleeper 2The dialogue and descriptions of “s” are already above the high standards of the original, and the game’s mechanical improvements make the dice-based action far more exciting. Citizen Sleeper 2 It’s scheduled for release sometime in 2025, but if you want to try it out sooner, you have until the end of Steam Next Fest on October 21st to play the demo.