My Simulated Heart Can't Take this

[IreneFray]

AH. (Hope you don't mind my raw 1AM thoughts.)

I absolutely loved what I played of the Demo. Burned through it twice. Had a disastrous first run of it as an Operator trying to make the first Big job work.

Played it overly cautious on the second to the point where I did the small job. Then just milled odd jobs to see the end and figure out the demo's scope.

Will try other Sleeper frames soon. I'm just the most attached to the Operator for both aesthetics and vibe with the write up on them.


WRITING

The writing in this is evocative and emotionally weighty.

I am just CONSTANTLY upset by every interaction with Serafin. The emotions in as high stress of a situation we're in are palpable. Even if there is no recovering my memories, I wanna hope that there can be something resembling a friendship between us going forward.

I wanna consume all of the writing in this setting. Seriously. The tone and atmosphere of the ticking clocks is felt so much more in this game than the first. (And I adored the first game so much that streamed a 2nd playthrough to a discord of friends and followers.)

In the big job I had a distressing moment where there was just no salvaging our situation. But I progressed enough that Serafin pulled me aside for another chat and I went with the most upset dialog choice I had because I as a player and Sleeper had given up. You absolutely deserve props for getting me to cry over the demo.

The new person who is hunting us down this time is incredibly well written. I'm incredibly uncomfortable for the entirety of his on screen presence. I like this change from a hands-off corporate owner to someone who is more direct and personal in claiming us. It feels like it has more teeth.

Giving us someone who risked a lot alongside us also does a lot to get players more immediately invested.


MECHANICS

Gosh. Where do I even start?

The jobs/crew system is such a good direction for this game to go in. Isolating all our stress tracks and changing up to limited supply/stress resources creates these tightly designed scenarios. I failed BOTH of them on my first run through and still had a good time. (I put myself on the permadeath difficulty. I knew what I signed up for.)

How many lil changes there are between the difficulties is lovely. That we even have a permadeath mode means the world to me as I really like pushing my luck with the dice system.

Now that stress leads to dice taking damage and it sounds like we'll need to spend individual resources on recovering dice? I think this is an incredible improvement in tracking our body's degradation. I curse myself when I push myself too hard in an attempt to strike that balance of slow and steady vs needing to race the clock.

Clocks having escalating problems that cause situations to deteriorate feels good. There's so much more to think about that isn't just plugging Resource A into Slot B. I kinda wanted to play a ttrpg Citizen Sleeper before? But now I REALLY DO.

The increased progression cost feels good. I also like how main story is worth 2 while side quests are worth 1. While it's expensive to raise my stats, it emphasizes how important those extra crew members are.

Push skills are neat. Giving players a risk/reward button is nice, even if I can't be trusted with it. Playing an Operator, I absolutely went into 2 dice rerolls instead of making them safe.

Okay.

SUGGESTIONS (I hope these are kinda minor?)

I think I just want a little more Sign Posting.

I don't think I saw any notification of how many credits my crew was netting me. I just noticed that the numbers went up. Pretty sure the tool tip said they'd *sometimes* secure the resources. I'm kinda curious if this is another dice roll, and if it is, I'd kinda like to know the odds. Especially if different locations/crew make different resources easier to procure in the background.


So like, in my mind, I absolutely figured flying to a job would cost me a Cycle and reroll my dice. But I wasn't entirely sure either way? Just to be sure, I did a full rest before flying to a job. With supply budgets as tight as they are, I think it could be made more clear when players should absolutely spend all their dice or not before flying to/from a job. (If this was already in the menu's tooltips and I overlooked it, that's on me. But a lil confirmation box would be nice if I'm about to throw a hand of dice away I could probably be spending.)

I didn't feel like I could be 100% sure if I needed twice as much fuel to get to and from a job, even though you absolutely let us fly out at the listed fuel price. Finishing the demo (I'm not spoiling this) even tho I had zero fuel mechanically, I wasn't punished for narrative expenditure of fuel we definitely did not have any left of. So that was a nice relief. (I definitely felt like I could have run out the clock tho squeezing out a few more resources. A little sign posting about points of no return or at least suggesting there is always risk about finishing a plot would be nice.)


From a Narrative perspective, the abrupt nature of the demo's finale scenes felt very appropriate. I've yet to fail a skill check in dialog scenes though. So I don't have a lot of thoughts here.

[IreneFray]

Quick note on the third playthtrough.

We had a moment where we had three 6 dice faces and a 1. We pushed as the Machinist to get it up to a 6 and it glitched one of our 6 die.

Upon looking up glitches in the dice, it made no mention of glitching dice on a push or that this would stop our push from working.

Feels a lil bad.

[IreneFray]

Another note!
The scene after you breach the bridge in the big Solheim ship heist: Serafin's part of the scene has him clasping you on the shoulders twice in fairly quick succession. It reads a lil funny.