CAYNE

I have played this title through STEAM and i ahve to say its a hell of lot of fun Reminds me of the old isometric classics like Planescape Torment,Baldurs Gate 1&2 ,Simon the sorcerer and of course the classic ALIEN movie... its a very very nicely made game great art,sound and level design some very nice puzzles and a nice theme through out my only complaint is its too short (3.5hours for me from start to finish!)

I started off enjoying this game. The game world seemed interesting and the initial story promising. As the game progressed, I was less impressed with the technicalities of the game - the audio didn't really gel with the character animations. There was a lot of backtracking which an incredibly slow protagonist. Lots of sealed locations that seemly are just present to make it feel bigger than it is. Some puzzles didn't really make sense, although that was probably just me being dense and also not really used to adventure games reusing the same item gimmick. The way backstory and important information was provided by the PDA's was a nice touch, although aside from some passwords, there wasn't really any clues as to some critically important information contained within these. And as there's no log, it meant more running back and forth re-reading the PDA's looking for lost info. It also becomes really obvious what is going on long before the end of the game, and generally you're kept in the dark for some time when playing these type of adventure games. There is at least once place you can die, and it's pretty obvious too that it will happen. Fortunately, there's no extended drama or forcing you to load a previous save, it just rewinds to before that point. However, ultimately, the charm this game had built with me evaporated with the ending as it rendered the whole thing pretty much irrelavent. Now in something like Farcry 2 which also has a fairly drastic ending, there is both choice, and many many hours of story to get to that point. Whereas with this game, given it's short length and the actions you perform (plus the distinct lack of choice), it's just pointless. Despite liking the lore and being curious about the full Stasis game, it's highly unlikely I would contemplate buying it now.

Ok so far so good, the intro and the story got me into it but as playtime passed, i realized that this " free / demo " was made in a rush and with bad design. Puzzles that 50% of the time make no sense, some bugs and trust me i can name at least 5. No tutorial(not so important) and/or no menu for button configuration(important) ... like i get it and i like it when a game makes you figure it out by yourself but i would like it if i can see what button layout i can use and/or what ui elements to use so i can play properly and not press all the button on the keyboard like to figure out what is the inventory menu. Limited rooms, lots of backtracking ... really now this should be a tech demo with stunning gameplay/point &click elements, in order to make people buy the actual game that is being sold/advertised - > STASIS. I feel like this "game "gives bad vibes to other people that wanted to try out STASIS but just went "meh " just because of this Free Sequel ...

First of all, this being free, obviously what you get cannot be expected to be too much. This is advertising for their kickstarter. I am aware. That being said, this game has a few ups, and many downs. It would be 2/5, only the price tag pushed it higher in my view. What does this game offer? Isometric point&click adventuring for ~2 hours depending on how fast you are. It has a nice creepy atmosphere and leaves most of the exposition to PDAs you can read, an optional mechanic I enjoy since the System Shock days. However on the downside, it has unskippable dialogue, wonky animations, the perspective + art style often make it difficult to know what is interactive in a scene, and the puzzles... oh dear the puzzles. The worst example was relatively early on with a can of protein powder which turns out to be basically the end-all-be-all gadget of puzzling. Apparently. Anyhow, it's free. What more can I say? Obviously it's cool for the price, but given that you still "pay" the time spent on it I feel there are much better point&click adventures out there, even if you have to pay money for them.