Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason

"A captivating experience"

I happened to stumble on this game on sale on one of the web based distribution websites, and decided to give it a go. In reflection of my overall experience it was certainly a good investment. This game does many things well, and a few things poorly, however as an overall experience it was certainly captivating, and looking back I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed it despite its weaknesses.

To summarise the story, you start out as a Meteorologist who wakes onboard the an Icebreaker that has become shipwrecked in the north pole. You get very little in terms of an introduction, however the sequence of events that lead to the ship's demise are revealed as you progress through the game. The story itself is unfolded wonderfully - In most cases by way of cutscenes and flashbacks of your surroundings before and during the sequence of events that lead to the ship becoming damaged. For instance, you may be walking through an ice encrusted, worn and damaged corridor, when all of a sudden the screen flashes back to before the events that lead to the ships downfall - so you see the crew running around, doing their chores, in bright, well lit areas, before the flashback ends and your again faced with trudging alone through the bleak, ice encrusted environment. In most cases you are not able to interact with the environments or crew during these flashbacks, however they are a great visual snapshot of of illustrating what happened during the sequence of events that lead to the ships predicament.

Furthermore, Cryostatis allows you to re-live the final moments of any dead crew members that you encounter, so that you can correct the series of actions that lead to their demise. These actions are called 'Mental Echos', and by starting one you get to take control of the crew members, and replay their actions through their eyes moments before their death. The outcomes of these actions then have a ripple effect that carries through to your time as the main character as you play through. This is best summarised as an example - The following Mental Echo actually happens in game - It does not contain any storyline spoilers, however if you want to play through the game without knowing any of the set pieces then please skip the next paragraph.

As an example of the Mental Echo mechanism, in one milestone of the game you reach a locked door, with no apparent way of opening it. On further inspection it can be seen that the door is actually missing one of its many handles. However at the base of the door lies the corpse of a crewman. By re-living his final moments you are then faced with the same locked door, however this time through the eyes of the crewman just moments before his death, rather than as the main character. After a few seconds of trying to work out how to repair the door a wave of water comes crashing in behind you, and you're thrown back into the reality of the main character, and it becomes obvious that the crewman died from being trapped in the room and drowning. On further attempts re-living the final moments as the crewman you discover the missing handle of the door nearby, and are able to unlock the door, thus saving him before he is crushed from the wave of water. In doing so, when you return to your reality, the door is now open, since it was now successfully opened in the past.

You are able to re-try Mental Echos as many times as necessary to find the correct sequence of events to save a crewman, and almost all of these Mental Echos are mandatory, since by saving them you open up an area that was previously unreachable. And it certainly makes for very interesting trial and error gameplay, albeit slightly morbid.

However apart from these moments as crewmen, or the flashback sequences, the environment has a bleak, chilling, lonesome and sometimes terrifying feel, and it's hard not to feel sorry for the main character as he trudges through it. This however eventually plays through as a weakness, because exploring a ship trapped in a glacier of ice doesn't really allow for much variety for your landscape. This means that the textures, look and feel of the first level is representative of almost the entire game.

The game presents itself as a first person shooter, however If you're looking for a Serious Sam type of game with ridiculously large guns and piles of dead bodies then this isn't the game for you. The pace of this game is slow, there are probably no more than 10 types of enemies in the entire game, and most of them are spread out very sparsely across the levels. Also, of the 10 weapons you get, you'll probably find that only 2 or 3 of them are useful, and the mechanics behind them are very clunky. The fights are not fluid, and often I found a shot that almost certainly would have been registered as a hit in any other game just seemed to miss my target. The first person shooter aspect of this game is definitely lacking, and you will be more inclined to play if you enjoy a rich and engrossing story rather than if you are a trigger happy action junkie.

In terms of the combat, the game will try to surprises you a few times. Many of the few enemies you meet will throw themselves out at you and quite unexpected times. It isn't a blood and jump fest to the extremes of games such as FEAR or Dead Space, however you can still expect a fright or too. In saying that, I am generally a bit of a wimp with scary games, and by about half way through I felt I'd seen about all the tricks the game had up its sleeve. However there are definitely 2 distinct moments I can remember in the game that caught me off guard, where I may or may not have screamed like a little girl.

The health system is an interesting mechanic. Your body heat acts as your health, and it will slowly fall, gradually reducing itself to the temperature of your surroundings. Taking damage from opponents will also reduce your temperature, and if they manage to do enough damage to drop it below zero then you've met your fate and you'll need to reload. Scattered throughout the ship are various heat sources, which allow you to warm your body, thus restoring your health. While this is a unique mechanic, it does promote a fairly cheap tactic of restoring your body heat at a heat source, running through and finding new opponents to bludgeon with a melee weapon (thus conserving ammo), before backtracking to the heat source to restore your heat. It's like having a health station that never runs out of healing power.

The health system therefore makes the difficulty of the game fairly trivial, and experienced FPS players should not have much trouble with any of the fights. The Mental Echo puzzles generally fairly short and simple, however there are a few times when I played that I struggled to find the correct solution, before kicking myself after the answer was deceptively obvious. The length of the game is perfect - It's long enough for you to be fully gripped by the main storyline, while short enough for the repetition and chunkiness to get overwhelming.

I will finish up with my major gripe about the game. As I've described several times above, having the story unfold of how the ship's downfall and the crews demise in such a visual manner is simply wonderful, and when playing through it really encourages you to play on just so you can see what happens next. And, once finishing the game, you will have a pretty good idea of exactly happened to lead to lead to the ship to be where it is. However despite this, there are other elements of the storyline, external to the ships fate that really made no sense at all. I had more 'What the?!?' moments in this game than any other I can remember, and by the time the climactic battle happened I'd just given up trying to follow it. This really seems to be quite a common theme many survival horror games - Dead Space, Fear, Bioshock are all examples - When you need to scroll through forums to get peoples interpretations on exactly what was going on to try and answer your own questions then I feel the game has let somewhat itself down.

Finally, the score. While playing through this game I found it so engrossing and captivating, despite some flaws, that it was destined for an 8.5. However that was until some parts of the storyline got utterly confusing, at which point it became 7.5. However since this website does not allow for half scores, the final score is a 7. Overall though, this game was a great experience, and it certainly has my recommendation.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/29/09

Game Release: Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason (US, 04/24/09)