I’m Not Meant To Know Every Train Schedule

In Citizen Sleeper 2, two things immediately caught my eyes on the Lotic-owned, icy asteroid called Wellspring. First, the giant wound designed like a scythe-shaped key, teeming with orange-tinted green light and disgruntled workers, that sits on the surface. Rocks usually have cracks, but intergalactic megacorps like Lotic view water as something to privatize and anything holding it as something to break, which makes cracks appear unnatural. The second eye-catcher was the train that moves just above Wellspring’s surface – mostly because it makes no sense.

I had come to the asteroid with a sense of urgency, ready to reunite Serafin with the long-lost sister he believed was there. However, I lost about 10 minutes upon landing just from staring at Wellspring’s train system. The longer I stared, the more convinced I became that it was an assault against logic. I could not find or determine a schedule. The frequency of its stops were erratic. It had no problem going right back to a station it just left before disappearing behind the asteroid and reappearing on the other end. I wanted to know everything it was refusing to give me.

I may have let this go in other games, but Citizen Sleeper 2’s space masses and superstructures had already demanded my attention. While the game’s Stress system and crew mechanics are fun additions to its predecessor’s formula, my favorite new element is how it pulls the camera out. Citizen Sleeper spent all its time on a fraught technical marvel called the Eye, with a zoomed-in perspective that focused on the exterior of apartment buildings, restaurants, scrap yards, communes, and more. It was never lacking in visuals to pore over, and this perspective worked well with the first game’s intimate, sometimes claustrophobic nature. But, players never get to see the Eye in all its former glory. The sequel creates enough distance to appreciate how big and convoluted everything in the Starward Belt is, while also reinforcing how space can make anything look small with enough distance.

These monuments range from awe-inspiring to tragic, each evoking introspection from the Sleeper, their crew, and players like me. They are designed with just enough detail to fit the stories found at each location, while also leaving patches of ambiguity for players to fill with their own ideas. It’d be wrong to call this happenstance given the creator’s inspirations. When speaking about tabletop games’ influence on his work with Rascal’s Chase Carter, Citizen Sleeper’s developer Gareth Martin said “a big part of where I started in games was being super interested in the gaps of the imaginative space that games can create rather than a fully rendered reality. It’s an invitation for the player to invest their imagination.”

Which brings me back to the train. Despite the time spent learning about Wellspring’s underground market and its very cautious clients, assisting in a general strike that demanded the resignation of Lotic’s leadership, and reflecting on a mutiny gone barely right during a related contract, I learned nothing about the rail rattling my mind. So instead, I decided to meet the game where it was and use my imagination. I seriously considered why a train would be designed like this. My conclusion: there is no good reason.

“No moral reason” was my initial thought, but there’s something lost in that slight specificity. “Good” captures the broad nature of this train’s faults – how in my imagination, it was designed with “wrong” in mind. I imagine if I were as cold as Lotic’s leadership, knowingly trapping workers in hellish contracts of my own fine-print design, I would want a way to control them when they’ve had enough. I imagine if I were as detached as Lotic’s leadership and wanted to control people who I pushed every cycle, I would ensure their transportation is limited and inconvenient. I imagine if I were on the board of a company as massive as Lotic and had every resource to enforce my will, in a place like the Starward Belt where the only things my competitors and I want to be free are fear and distrust, I would think no one would stop me. I imagine I couldn’t even imagine how this would backfire. I imagine I could afford the cost of any ignorance.

This could all be off the mark. Maybe the train’s erratic nature just means it’s flexible for the needs of any people on it. Or that it’s very fast and no one feels a need for two. Or that when Wellspring was first burdened with the ambitions of Lotic, the company only had a need for the one train and didn’t update the infrastructure as time passed. But frankly, in Citizen Sleeper 2’s case, specific answers don’t matter. What’s important is that, knowing what I do of Lotic and what I don’t of Wellspring’s train, the game invites me to fill in the blanks. By not giving me those granular details, it makes room to participate in its world-building and interrogate why it would be built like that at all. It’s a thoughtful exercise in deepening your understanding of the game, encouraging you to play around with a train and other less explained parts of the Starward Belt.

———

Wallace Truesdale is a writer who loves games and the many things they come into contact with. When he’s not ruining himself with sweets, you can find him on Bluesky, YouTube, and Twitch.