Game Review: Stasis
2018-Oct-18, Thursday 21:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Stasis came onto my radar thanks to this Rock Paper Shotgun review that praised the game in glowing terms. A kickstarted adventure game from a tiny South African studio that nevertheless managed to create a masterpiece of horror that spun its own unique feel out of its component parts. A game that was extremely effective at creating a mood, with a storyline that descends into "stomach-churning darkness." Sure, there were some annoying puzzles that had to be solved, and the characters were a bit one-note villain, but the rest of the game more than made up for those minor flaws through its baroque vistas and its visceral body horror.
Well, I disagree.
The space horror battle cry.
Stasis is about John Marachek, who awakens from...stasis
...on what seems to be an abandoned spaceship. The last thing he remembers is going into stasis with his wife and daughter for an interplanetary vacation, but neither of them are nearby. As he explores it quickly becomes obvious that something terrible happened on board the ship. Everything is abandoned, there are odd stains and broken machinery here and there, and the records people left behind--of course you're reading disaster logs--indicate the situation got worse and worse, with a strange fungus spreading throughout the ship, food running scarce, and then disappearances. There are monsters on board the ship, stalking the crew and murdering them, leaving bloodstains and bodies everywhere, and before too long you discover that the monsters came from cloning experiments that went horribly wrong.
And also, the room where John woke up is labeled "Product Storage."
Does this sound familiar to you? It should, because Stasis follows the space horror template to the letter. The main character wakes up in an abandoned facility and reads the records of the dead. Someone talks to them over the radio, guiding them from place to place, occasionally interrupted by a cackling madman. Scientific experiments become monsters feasting on the flesh of the remaining crew. Jump scares. Ruined environments. Creepy music. Horrible deaths.
It's very by-the-numbers. I kept hoping for some surprise, some twist or at least variance from the space horror template, but there weren't any. When the cackling madman turned out to a be a scientist who thought of the monsters as his children and had a god complex due to creating life, I shook my head. When John got captured, I sighed. When the guiding voice over the radio turned out to not be what it seemed, I nodded. Everything went down well-worn paths. The tropes are good but not interesting.
I mean, the ship is owned by the Cayne Corporation. How much more foreshadowing do you need?
As if.
The RPS review praises the mood, and I think that's mostly true.
The sound design is excellent. The music is by Mark Morgan, who wrote the soundtracks for Fallout 1 and 2, and provides plenty of ominous hums, throbbing base, and subdued strings to make the interior of the Groomlake a menacing place. There are a few scary moments just based on sound cues, with banging from vents, distant hissing or growling, or the remnants of corporate advertising holograms spouting out slogans amidst scenes of carnage. And the actor voicing John Marachek does an amazing job, really selling that John is just an average man who is suddenly thrust into a life-or-death struggle, constantly subjected to horrific sights and placed in horrific situations, and has to keep moving no matter how much he wants to lay down and die.
There are a few flaws, though. There seemed to be a lot of non-diagetic sounds inserted because they were creepy. There's a lot of distant muffled conversation, screaming, or laughing even though John is explicitly told that almost everyone on the ship is dead, and at least one point I heard a baby crying, because everyone knows that babies' cries are scary. John's voice actor is good, but the voice on the radio and the cackling madman are both just okay. And often even John's voice direction is inconsistent. I realize this probably resulted from recording the various parts of the script out of order and at separate times, but there's a point near the end where John undergoes something truly horrific and absolutely sounds like a broken man, to the point where I had a very hard time playing the game.
For about two minutes, after which he's calmly advising the voice on the radio how to remain still and hide from the monsters.
I understand the realities of audio production for video games. But in a game that's sold almost entirely on mood, the performance going from sad to calm to sad from scene to scene is jarring. It only happened a few times, but every time it snapped me completely out of the game's atmosphere and then it had to draw me back in. Combined with the out-of-place sounds, I did get occasionally creeped out but it never lasted for very long.
The only jump scare I really remember is when I moved near a door, out of which light was spilling out, and the shadow of something running on all fours moved across the light. But when I went into the next room there was nothing there, so the moment of dread was only a moment.
I wonder what percentage of items in this game are body parts?
That's probably the major problem with Stasis. It's an adventure game, so all the scenarios and locations are set and there's no real surprises. Compare it to something like System Shock II, which has a similar scenario with an abandoned ship overrun with generic experiments. In System Shock II, the atmosphere comes from never feeling safe. Enemies respawn and weapons easily break, so even going back to earlier areas of the ship risks being attacked while low on ammunition. In Stasis, it's impossible to die except in a scripted fashion, and most of those deaths require deliberate action like touching an exposed power cord or walking into a cloning vat run riot with flesh. No matter how long I stood on the edge of the cloning vat, the monsters swimming in it never came after John. No matter what sounds I heard in the distance, the only monsters that ever appeared on screen appeared in scripted sequences and were harmless unless interacted with. The conventions of an adventure game and the uncertainty necessary for horror are diametrically opposed.
The action adventure game part is also pretty standard, meaning some puzzles are trivially easy, some puzzles are mind-bogglingly hard, and the solution sometimes is use everything with everything. Using the jumper cable on the sparking wire and running in into the cloning vat to kill all the monsters is pretty easy to figure out. Using the crowbar and the nylon rope together to make a crowbar grappling hook to drag the engineer's body over to get the keys to open the toolbox to get the jumper cables is somewhat more obtuse. Fortunately, the number of items at any one time is very small. John can only carry six items in his quantum storage unit, and often has less than that. Using every item on everything isn't hard, but it's not good puzzle design. How exactly was I supposed to know that this mound of mangled flesh provided a flesh item, and then that I had to pulverize it with a pistol butt to provide raw organic material?
A lot of clicking, I guess.
Be careful what you wish for.
Stasis is an adventure game. It's not bad, and it has some high points. But playing this game really drove home why so many adventure games during the classic era had two genres, comedy and whatever their putative genre was supposed to be. The format of adventure games relies on trial and error, on scripted events, and on ridiculous situations like looting all the batteries on the deck after disabling the guard robot with a charged defibrillator and a overflowing sink clogged with bloody bandages and then using those batteries to power a surgical laser to cut through a window rather than, say, throwing a chair through it. That this takes place in a abattoir that used to be a functioning genetic research black site in space does add to to the atmosphere but it could never overcome the fundamental disconnect for me. Once I realized that John could only die at specific points the jump scares stopped being scay, and once I ran into one too many mood whiplashes the mood wore thin too.
It's okay. Creepy at points, annoying at others. I don't regret the four hours I spent on it, but after I finished I deleted the game and hid it from my library. I doubt I'll ever go back.
The quality of its first three-quarters, from its sumptuously repulsive creature art to its gigantic-yet-claustrophobic industrial environments, and the way its survival-focused puzzles fly you forwards on dark wings of logic, would be impressive if they came from a Double Fine-sized studio, let alone a game whose credits take less time to read than a bus ticket.That kind of thing.
Well, I disagree.
The space horror battle cry.
Stasis is about John Marachek, who awakens from...stasis
...on what seems to be an abandoned spaceship. The last thing he remembers is going into stasis with his wife and daughter for an interplanetary vacation, but neither of them are nearby. As he explores it quickly becomes obvious that something terrible happened on board the ship. Everything is abandoned, there are odd stains and broken machinery here and there, and the records people left behind--of course you're reading disaster logs--indicate the situation got worse and worse, with a strange fungus spreading throughout the ship, food running scarce, and then disappearances. There are monsters on board the ship, stalking the crew and murdering them, leaving bloodstains and bodies everywhere, and before too long you discover that the monsters came from cloning experiments that went horribly wrong.And also, the room where John woke up is labeled "Product Storage."
Does this sound familiar to you? It should, because Stasis follows the space horror template to the letter. The main character wakes up in an abandoned facility and reads the records of the dead. Someone talks to them over the radio, guiding them from place to place, occasionally interrupted by a cackling madman. Scientific experiments become monsters feasting on the flesh of the remaining crew. Jump scares. Ruined environments. Creepy music. Horrible deaths.
It's very by-the-numbers. I kept hoping for some surprise, some twist or at least variance from the space horror template, but there weren't any. When the cackling madman turned out to a be a scientist who thought of the monsters as his children and had a god complex due to creating life, I shook my head. When John got captured, I sighed. When the guiding voice over the radio turned out to not be what it seemed, I nodded. Everything went down well-worn paths. The tropes are good but not interesting.
I mean, the ship is owned by the Cayne Corporation. How much more foreshadowing do you need?
As if.
The RPS review praises the mood, and I think that's mostly true.
The sound design is excellent. The music is by Mark Morgan, who wrote the soundtracks for Fallout 1 and 2, and provides plenty of ominous hums, throbbing base, and subdued strings to make the interior of the Groomlake a menacing place. There are a few scary moments just based on sound cues, with banging from vents, distant hissing or growling, or the remnants of corporate advertising holograms spouting out slogans amidst scenes of carnage. And the actor voicing John Marachek does an amazing job, really selling that John is just an average man who is suddenly thrust into a life-or-death struggle, constantly subjected to horrific sights and placed in horrific situations, and has to keep moving no matter how much he wants to lay down and die.
There are a few flaws, though. There seemed to be a lot of non-diagetic sounds inserted because they were creepy. There's a lot of distant muffled conversation, screaming, or laughing even though John is explicitly told that almost everyone on the ship is dead, and at least one point I heard a baby crying, because everyone knows that babies' cries are scary. John's voice actor is good, but the voice on the radio and the cackling madman are both just okay. And often even John's voice direction is inconsistent. I realize this probably resulted from recording the various parts of the script out of order and at separate times, but there's a point near the end where John undergoes something truly horrific and absolutely sounds like a broken man, to the point where I had a very hard time playing the game.
For about two minutes, after which he's calmly advising the voice on the radio how to remain still and hide from the monsters.
I understand the realities of audio production for video games. But in a game that's sold almost entirely on mood, the performance going from sad to calm to sad from scene to scene is jarring. It only happened a few times, but every time it snapped me completely out of the game's atmosphere and then it had to draw me back in. Combined with the out-of-place sounds, I did get occasionally creeped out but it never lasted for very long.
The only jump scare I really remember is when I moved near a door, out of which light was spilling out, and the shadow of something running on all fours moved across the light. But when I went into the next room there was nothing there, so the moment of dread was only a moment.
I wonder what percentage of items in this game are body parts?
That's probably the major problem with Stasis. It's an adventure game, so all the scenarios and locations are set and there's no real surprises. Compare it to something like System Shock II, which has a similar scenario with an abandoned ship overrun with generic experiments. In System Shock II, the atmosphere comes from never feeling safe. Enemies respawn and weapons easily break, so even going back to earlier areas of the ship risks being attacked while low on ammunition. In Stasis, it's impossible to die except in a scripted fashion, and most of those deaths require deliberate action like touching an exposed power cord or walking into a cloning vat run riot with flesh. No matter how long I stood on the edge of the cloning vat, the monsters swimming in it never came after John. No matter what sounds I heard in the distance, the only monsters that ever appeared on screen appeared in scripted sequences and were harmless unless interacted with. The conventions of an adventure game and the uncertainty necessary for horror are diametrically opposed.
The action adventure game part is also pretty standard, meaning some puzzles are trivially easy, some puzzles are mind-bogglingly hard, and the solution sometimes is use everything with everything. Using the jumper cable on the sparking wire and running in into the cloning vat to kill all the monsters is pretty easy to figure out. Using the crowbar and the nylon rope together to make a crowbar grappling hook to drag the engineer's body over to get the keys to open the toolbox to get the jumper cables is somewhat more obtuse. Fortunately, the number of items at any one time is very small. John can only carry six items in his quantum storage unit, and often has less than that. Using every item on everything isn't hard, but it's not good puzzle design. How exactly was I supposed to know that this mound of mangled flesh provided a flesh item, and then that I had to pulverize it with a pistol butt to provide raw organic material?
A lot of clicking, I guess.
Be careful what you wish for.
Stasis is an adventure game. It's not bad, and it has some high points. But playing this game really drove home why so many adventure games during the classic era had two genres, comedy and whatever their putative genre was supposed to be. The format of adventure games relies on trial and error, on scripted events, and on ridiculous situations like looting all the batteries on the deck after disabling the guard robot with a charged defibrillator and a overflowing sink clogged with bloody bandages and then using those batteries to power a surgical laser to cut through a window rather than, say, throwing a chair through it. That this takes place in a abattoir that used to be a functioning genetic research black site in space does add to to the atmosphere but it could never overcome the fundamental disconnect for me. Once I realized that John could only die at specific points the jump scares stopped being scay, and once I ran into one too many mood whiplashes the mood wore thin too.
It's okay. Creepy at points, annoying at others. I don't regret the four hours I spent on it, but after I finished I deleted the game and hid it from my library. I doubt I'll ever go back.
