A world-exclusive look at Star ward Vector, the indie RPG sequel with Mass Effect in its sights

By Alex Spencer

Game Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector

Developer Jump Over The Age

Publisher Fellow Traveller

Format PC, Xbox Series

Release 2025

When Gareth Damian Martin started making Citizen Sleeper in 2020, as a solo developer with just one release to their name, they didn’t expect too much. “I wanted to make something fast, in under two years, and something experimental. I didn’t know if it would work,”

Damian Martin says. “Just before release, I really was convinced that it was a niche game, and it wouldn’t do very well.”

A decade earlier, Damian Martin had graduated into a recession, with a degree in puppetry. The next few years were spent bouncing between jobs, working on everything from theatre to QA at Sega – and in between, doing an awful lot of zero-hours contract work. They poured all of those experiences into a cyberpunk RPG in the truest sense, putting you in the shoes of an android Sleeper scraping by on the streets of the future.

During the game’s development, Damian Martin recruited two collaborators to help define the look and sound of that future. Composer Amos Roddy had worked on their debut game, In Other Waters, and returned to produce a moody synth soundtrack for the next one. Guillaume Singelin, meanwhile, was a French graphic novelist who’d liked In Other Waters enough to draw fan art for it, and who brought a cartoony lightness that complemented the grittiness of the new game’s futuristic world. “They lifted each other,” Damian Martin says. There was an alchemy at work here, and perhaps it catalysed Citizen Sleeper’s breakthrough success. On Steam, the game sold as many copies in its first week as In Other Waters had in two years – not counting the multitudes more who played it on Game Pass – and was nominated for three IGF awards and four BAFTAs.

THERE WAS ANAL CHEMYA T WO RKHERE , ANDPERHAPSI TCATALY SEDCITIZEN SLEEPER’S BREAKTHROUGH SUCCESS

Guillaume Singelin might be an external contributor, but his art style, combining rugged details with looser cartooning on characters, is a vital part of Citizen Sleeper’s personality

Hexport, the game’s first major hub, is a makeshift space station built on the back of three abandoned solar reflectors

YOU BEGIN CITIZEN SLEEPER 2 ON THE RUN. “IT’S GOOD TO HAVE THAT PROPULSIVE ENERGY BEHIND YOU”

Damian Martin is responsible for the game’s 3D environment art, which has received a detail bump for the sequel. “We need a lot more visual variety now, because there are 15 locations in the game.”

Another aspect that struck a chord with players: the plight of the Sleeper. A real human personality copied into a robot body as a way of creating cheap labour, you had to wrestle with your built-in obsolescence, taking any job available to pay for the Stabiliser that kept you from falling apart. It proved a pliable metaphor, resonating with personal experiences of everything from poverty to disability. “People have a strong relationship with it,” Damian Martin says. “And I’ve got to respect that. I don’t have… You know, I feel certain things about it, but I don’t feel like those people do. Because to me, it’s a knowable object. To players, it’s a world – it’s alive to them.”

The experiment paid off, then, enough so that Damian Martin says others are already replicating its conditions: “In three years’ time, you will see a lot of Citizen Sleeper-likes.” That’s part of the reason they’re immediately returning to its world. “But also, I don’t want to just walk away and leave it. I want to make sure I’ve fully explored this form.” You might expect the game’s success to push them towards expanding Jump Over The Age, their studio, but they’re keeping development within the same tight bunch of collaborators. Still, there are some perks. While their previous games were made from home, or a shared office, today we find Damian Martin in a shiny new studio. Citizen Sleeper has brought a certain level of stability to the developer’s life, it seems. And they’ve returned the favour to your brand-new Sleeper.