This is a full-fledged point & click adventure game with a strong focus on item-based puzzle solving and discovering a sinister story via exploration, data logs and radio communications. Stasis tells a rather standard sci-fi horror story but with its many references to fan-favorite movies and games of the genre, you won’t be complaining. Like most horror stories, Stasis starts out slowly and becomes increasingly disturbing as you discover more. There are a few jump scares but due to the isometric perspective, they aren’t particularly scary. Within the first half hour of the game, I already found two satisfyingly brutal ways to die and by the end of the game, I had experienced at least 10 different gruesome deaths – half of which were self inflicted out of curiosity. The game has an automatic quick save so you don’t need to worry about saving at every corner. At a leisurely pace, the game took 9 hours to complete. Pixel hunting and timed puzzles are rare and manageable, backtracking is limited to 3-4 screens at the most. Overall difficulty is very humane due to the puzzles being based on science and being properly clued for the most part. Outside knowledge is rarely required, if you know what liquid nitrogen can do you’ll be fine. Performance was flawlessly smooth even on a low end system (2.2 GHz Dual Core, 4 GB RAM, Intel HD graphics). Stasis is prerendered at 1280x720 and scales to full screen by default. Window mode and font sizes can be adjusted in the Stasis config tool in the game’s main directory. At $25, the price is not cheap for an indie adventure but Stasis is so finely polished and well designed that you would guess it’s an AAA production. Highly detailed backgrounds, advanced lighting effects, smooth animations, even the voice acting is on a professional level. During my playthrough I encountered practically zero glitches or bugs and not a single one that affected gameplay.
