EatChildren
Currently polling second in Australia's federal election (first in the Gold Coast), this feral may one day be your Bogan King.
In 1968 a Russian icebreaker, tasked with mapping the North Pole, becomes stranded. Thirteen years later you, a meteorologist, arrive at the ship, having been sent on a mission to make contact with the vessel and discover what happened. Before you've even stepped foot on the ship it is clear that something is very wrong. What follows is about ten hours of intense psychological horror that's a little bit Metro, a little bit Amnesia, and a little bit Silent Hill.
Cryostasis isn't so much a 'game' as it is an 'experience'. It's linear. It's chapter based, structured not unlike Half-Life. It is story heavy, littered with scripted sequences to witness and interact with, along with diary pages and leaflets retelling "The Flaming Heart of Danko". You'll spend a lot of your time slowly trudging through corridors, exploring every nook and cranny of the ship, working out just what happened and why. Strange paranormal phenomena displaces reality, shifting you between both the past and present, witnessing the disaster unfold, piece by piece, first hand.
Seeing the past is one thing, but changing it is another. The frozen bodies of lost crew members litter the ship. Diving into their essence allows you to experience their last moments. These are the 'puzzles' of the game, not unlike an adventure game, tasking you with working out how each character died and, put in their shoes, changing their fate. Changing the past echoes to the present, opening doorways and shifting the environment, allowing you to explore the ship further.
Death seems fortune when you consider the alternative. Other crew members still walk the ship, disfigured and deformed, as monstrous beasts to combat. This is not a game of action fire fights and Michael Bay explosions. Weapons shoot loud and reload slowly. An axe swings with a real, violent force. Every encounter is an intense battle for survival, equipment weighted with realism, for better and for worse. And when you're not shooting or exploring you'll simply be trying to stay warm, using heat sources to refill your health and energy bars.
So is it worth playing? Yes, and no, depending on your tolerance for some clumsy ideas, engine issues, and the kind of game it is.
The first big issue is the engine, which is probably the worst performing game engine I've ever seen. I don't know if it's the unoptimised parallax map on every single goddamn texture in the game. I don't know if it's lighting/shadow issues, or anti-aliasing. I don't know if it's just a shit engine. End of the day, this game ran worse than any other game I've ever played on this system. And though the game has some impressive graphical tricks (aforementioned parallax mapping, which Eastern Euro devs seem to love), the game is hardly a show stopper. Crysis 2 DX11 / Battlefield 3 both look considerably better and appear to be doing more on a technological level, and both run tenfold better than Cryostasis did. So yeah, the game runs like utter balls.
Second issue is some of the puzzles. The way puzzles are set up, 'changing the past', is really fucking cool. But just as I likened the puzzles to adventure games, some puzzles have that an annoying adventure game quirk of nonsensical solutions. One 'puzzle', for example, has you enter the corpse of a man sitting in a seat near a broken window, his chest riddled with shards of glass. The logical conclusion of the man dying from the window exploding inwards is correct. My solution? To leave the room. After all, I had just entered the room through a door, and thought "This will save him! He wont be near the window!". I left the room, shut the door...and failed. I still 'died'. I tried the puzzle again, this time moving two rooms across. After all, the doors were unlocked, and the game had a nack for providing you with only what is required to solve the puzzles. Nope, still died. Turned out I had to stay in the glass room, walk behind the chair my character was seated in, and duck. The window exploded, glass shot into the chair, and I lived. A solution? Yes, of course, and reasonable too. But stupid given it was no different to my prior solutions that failed. The game has a few puzzles that do this, so be prepared for some trial and error.
Thirdly, and the combat/presentation will turn a lot of people off. I liken it to Amnesia or something because the game is slow, cumbersome and 'realistic'. For me, it aided the tension and presentation tremendously. It's a deliberate design choice and makes every encounter quite memorable. But wrestling with weapons wont be for everyone, and the lingering sense of vulnerability will be too much for some.
Outside of these quirks, I have to say I thought the experience was magnificent. The story is excellent, thought provoking and mysterious, and avoids tropes of "the big twist" in favour of deeper philosophical pondering of the human condition. The atmosphere of the game is incredible. It's scary, intense, cold, miserable, and haunting. From the way your character moves and shoots, to the snowed in presentation of the ice breaker, the game feels dark and unforgiving, like every step is a battle for survival against the true unknown. Very Silent Hill-like in its horror themes and the way it presents itself.
Recommended for delivering something different, imaginative and interesting, especially for horror fans with a taste for quirky Eastern European games that don't seem restrained by publishers and shareholders.
Cryostasis isn't so much a 'game' as it is an 'experience'. It's linear. It's chapter based, structured not unlike Half-Life. It is story heavy, littered with scripted sequences to witness and interact with, along with diary pages and leaflets retelling "The Flaming Heart of Danko". You'll spend a lot of your time slowly trudging through corridors, exploring every nook and cranny of the ship, working out just what happened and why. Strange paranormal phenomena displaces reality, shifting you between both the past and present, witnessing the disaster unfold, piece by piece, first hand.
Seeing the past is one thing, but changing it is another. The frozen bodies of lost crew members litter the ship. Diving into their essence allows you to experience their last moments. These are the 'puzzles' of the game, not unlike an adventure game, tasking you with working out how each character died and, put in their shoes, changing their fate. Changing the past echoes to the present, opening doorways and shifting the environment, allowing you to explore the ship further.
Death seems fortune when you consider the alternative. Other crew members still walk the ship, disfigured and deformed, as monstrous beasts to combat. This is not a game of action fire fights and Michael Bay explosions. Weapons shoot loud and reload slowly. An axe swings with a real, violent force. Every encounter is an intense battle for survival, equipment weighted with realism, for better and for worse. And when you're not shooting or exploring you'll simply be trying to stay warm, using heat sources to refill your health and energy bars.
So is it worth playing? Yes, and no, depending on your tolerance for some clumsy ideas, engine issues, and the kind of game it is.
The first big issue is the engine, which is probably the worst performing game engine I've ever seen. I don't know if it's the unoptimised parallax map on every single goddamn texture in the game. I don't know if it's lighting/shadow issues, or anti-aliasing. I don't know if it's just a shit engine. End of the day, this game ran worse than any other game I've ever played on this system. And though the game has some impressive graphical tricks (aforementioned parallax mapping, which Eastern Euro devs seem to love), the game is hardly a show stopper. Crysis 2 DX11 / Battlefield 3 both look considerably better and appear to be doing more on a technological level, and both run tenfold better than Cryostasis did. So yeah, the game runs like utter balls.
Second issue is some of the puzzles. The way puzzles are set up, 'changing the past', is really fucking cool. But just as I likened the puzzles to adventure games, some puzzles have that an annoying adventure game quirk of nonsensical solutions. One 'puzzle', for example, has you enter the corpse of a man sitting in a seat near a broken window, his chest riddled with shards of glass. The logical conclusion of the man dying from the window exploding inwards is correct. My solution? To leave the room. After all, I had just entered the room through a door, and thought "This will save him! He wont be near the window!". I left the room, shut the door...and failed. I still 'died'. I tried the puzzle again, this time moving two rooms across. After all, the doors were unlocked, and the game had a nack for providing you with only what is required to solve the puzzles. Nope, still died. Turned out I had to stay in the glass room, walk behind the chair my character was seated in, and duck. The window exploded, glass shot into the chair, and I lived. A solution? Yes, of course, and reasonable too. But stupid given it was no different to my prior solutions that failed. The game has a few puzzles that do this, so be prepared for some trial and error.
Thirdly, and the combat/presentation will turn a lot of people off. I liken it to Amnesia or something because the game is slow, cumbersome and 'realistic'. For me, it aided the tension and presentation tremendously. It's a deliberate design choice and makes every encounter quite memorable. But wrestling with weapons wont be for everyone, and the lingering sense of vulnerability will be too much for some.
Outside of these quirks, I have to say I thought the experience was magnificent. The story is excellent, thought provoking and mysterious, and avoids tropes of "the big twist" in favour of deeper philosophical pondering of the human condition. The atmosphere of the game is incredible. It's scary, intense, cold, miserable, and haunting. From the way your character moves and shoots, to the snowed in presentation of the ice breaker, the game feels dark and unforgiving, like every step is a battle for survival against the true unknown. Very Silent Hill-like in its horror themes and the way it presents itself.
Recommended for delivering something different, imaginative and interesting, especially for horror fans with a taste for quirky Eastern European games that don't seem restrained by publishers and shareholders.