There's a lot of outside 'inspiration' in Stasis, but the game never quite lives up to the reputation of the titles that it imitates. It wants to be 'Alien', but sub-par writing and gameplay means that it falls well short of the mark. On the technical side of things, the game is so-so. The highly detailed, atmospheric backgrounds are definitely the game's strong point, and for a while, it almost feels as though it can coast along on this alone. On the other hand, in-game animation and cinematics are clunky and unimpressive. Audio is a major weakpoint; the music and SFX aren't bad, but the voice acting is rather dreadful. Storytelling is where the game really falls apart. Stasis leans on its inspirations to a fault. There's a long opening pan over the spaceship (Alien), interactive surgery (Dead Space 2), and an elevator blocked by biomass (System Shock 2 – and in Hydroponics to boot!). There's a lot of appropriation, but it's deployed in a mindless scattershot way, and none of the borrowed material ever meaningfully contributes to the atmosphere or story. It isn't helped by the writing, which veers between simply mediocre and absolutely dreadful. Characters act arbitrarily and without motivation, the tone varies wildly, and the final, ridiculous twists would make M. Night Shyamalan proud. Gameplay-wise, the entire game is undercut by passivity of the genre. The protagonist can certainly get killed, but it's almost always the direct result of player action. Despite the omnipresent gore, there's nothing in the shadows out to get the player; once you realize that you can wander around safely, the game loses any capacity to inspire fear, regardless of how many dismembered corpses it puts in your way. The rest is the usual adventure game puzzle solving, with the usual dose of find-the-pixel item hunting and occasionally baffling leaps of logic; it's par for the course for genre veterans, but predictably irritating for everyone else.
