STASIS

A good point-and-lick horror adventure can't be beat. Unfortunately, Stasis is a hard game to praise, excelling in some things and not in others. The art direction in this experience is incredible; terrifying in its beauty. I just love the lights passing through the stained glass near the end. The world-building is fantastic, and it can kill your avatar. You can even kill yourself! It's bold and disturbing. And the overall story is fairly good. But the gameplay is so counter-intuitive. Forward progress is rarely obvious. In one sequence, you need to figure out that you need to run a loader by finding a dead body and tearing its eyes out. The means to do this requires some really careful scruitinizing of a pda and a lot of backtracking. Most of the puzzles are like this: lots of backtracking and looking around the screen carefully for anything that is possibly clickable. After awhile, this gets really tedious, and the puzzles cease being fun to solve. It's a shame for an experience with so much potential. Also, the dialogue writing is pretty bad, which is not good for a dialogue heavy game, both spoken and written. Most of the dialogue feels like it has the same "voice," making all the characters blur together. It's a beautiful experience, and I love the isomorphic perspective and the horror themes, but Stasis misses a lot of what makes point-and-click puzzles so much fun.

I read the positive reviews of this game and expected something great. Unfortunately, while is looks good and plays fairly well, the puzzles and logic are at times incredibly frustrating; the vast amount of text you read through looking for clues/guidance only to find out nothing, don't add to the wonky storyline. All that said, the best thing about this game is the numerous ways to die.

I enjoyed this game quite a bit. Great atmosphere, twisted story, and some hefty emotional baggage to boot! However, I can't forget the odd animations, sound artifacts, and cumbersome UI/interaction. Unskippable dialogue and cutscenes can be a bit bothersome at times. But, all in all a very good game to play alone in the dark!

The game has a very high production value, but in selected instances the quality of the artwork can appear outdated (like a PS2 era 3d model in a AAA game). It does not, however, subtract from the experience, and it's limited to one or two "first person" screens: the bulk of the game is made up of very fine isometric screens (think of Sanitarium). While the game looks stunning, because of the far-off camera sometimes it has problems with conveyance, altought puzzle difficulty keeps this in mind, except in two occasions, where it wasn't very clear that certains object were supposed to be interactable. The writing of the game is consistent, and conveys the grim and gory atmosphere very well. Unfortunately, a few spokens line sound like they were recorded without telling the actor what the context was going to be. Again, this is rare, and far away from the more emotionally charged moments, where the voice acting does a very good job. The theme of the game is also pretty rare (medical/gory sci-fi horror), and one that usually gets horribly mangled in its execution. Instead, the game is consistently creepy and unsettling, has some genuinely creepy moments, and while the core of the story is not the most original, it gets developed very competently. If you're in the mood for creepy gory horror, this game is for you.

Imagine waking up by falling out of a stasis pod on what seems to be a derelict spaceship with several broken ribs, among other injuries. This is not even your ship. You have NO idea how you got there. This is a GREAT way to start off a Sci-Fi Horror game, and it continues to deliver with a great mix of jump scares and grotesque psychological horror. The non-stop psychological brain-punches help to keep you disoriented, so you'll take a bit longer than normal just to come to grips with what's actually going on, which definitely works in its favor. The dark, dismal, sometimes disgusting atmosphere of the ship does a good job of keeping you on edge, as do the things that you have to see and do. In fact, sometimes, it's the things that you don't see that creep into your mind the most. A lot of the game's backstory is told through journal entries in abandoned PDAs, which is interesting, because now that smartphones are a thing (and certainly were in 2015), I don't even know if they make PDAs anymore. Of course, we went from making phone calls to sending text messages as our primary means of long-distance communication, so maybe the developers were poking fun at weird voluntary backslides in technology. The only glaring flaw is about half of the puzzle selection. You have some puzzles that are logical, satisfying and interesting, but there are more than enough that are just infuriatingly off-the-wall. Sometimes, it's not even that you don't know the solution; it's more that you don't know how the game wants you to go about the solution. Some of the things that the game thinks to be a very logical conclusion are reckless, or downright dangerous; stuff that wouldn't even work in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. I'd still recommend Stasis, though; it's a great example of Sci-Fi Horror done right, and they've built a very interesting world that would be enough for me to buy a sequel on that merit alone.