I played Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and talked to its creator about quests that 'don't give you the dragon money', Mass Effect 2 as an 'anti-reference', and making RPGs that aren't based on D&D

pcgamer.com:

Citizen Sleeper—the original one—might be one of my favourite games ever, and it's for a lot of sentimental reasons. I played it right before getting this job, moving into a new apartment, and starting what is essentially a new life for myself, and boy did it hit dead centre.

For the uninitiated, Citizen Sleeper sees you occupying the body of a sleeper—a synthetic, failing body in a universe where AI is outlawed. A sleeper has a real person's consciousness uploaded to it as a legal workaround, plonking a living, feeling being into a body to make them work until they fall apart. So, naturally, you run away.

It's a game about carving out a home for yourself in the unfamiliar and hostile, and I love it dearly. Which is why I'm both delighted and baffled to say that my favourite thing about Citizen Sleeper 2 so far is how it's going to feel almost completely different.

I was able to play a short demo and talk to the game's creator, Gareth Damian Martin from Jump over the Age. In it, I assembled a crew, took my rig out to a defunct drone, and spent the next half an hour with my heart in my mouth juggling stress and trying to disarm it.

There are two major inclusions to talk about with Citizen Sleeper 2—Stress, and contracts. The newly-incorporated Stress mechanic essentially works as follows.

Failure states and ending cycles while starving can build Stress. The more Stress you have, the bigger chance you have to damage your dice: "[On] full stress, if you roll a [one to five on the die] you take one damage," Martin explains to me. «When you empty the health bar there, it breaks the die, and the die can't be used anymore.» This is a problem, because your dice are your means of interacting with the world of Citizen Sleeper—if you can't roll a die, you can't do a thing, and you'll fall further behind.

The goal with Stress, primarily, is to encourage players to take devil's bargains while out on contracts. Contracts are small missions that form the «meat and veg» of Citizen