The development of Stasis was spearheaded by two brothers, Chris and Nic Bischoff. The overall effort and final product are commendable, and this is a game I’m happy to recommend to point-and-click and/or horror fans. But, the experience is marred by a few design flaws. Some of these flaws are subjective obviously, your “mileage” with them may be more or less than mine.
That said, what first intrigued me about Stasis was that it reminded me of two of my all time favorites: Sanitarium and System Shock 2. It’s got that isometric, layer-on-layer (my term, for better or worse) perspective and “look” of Sanitarium, as well as the dark, creepy, deep-space sci-fi atmosphere of System Shock 2. Whether or not the brothers were inspired by these games is not important, but I was eager to dive into this horror-based adventure.
Upon launching, you’ll notice there are no options other than tweaking the brightness or volume. The resolution is locked in a 16:9 ratio of dimensions I cannot name exactly, but even on my 21:9 display with black bars on the side it wasn’t a big deal. Sure, I had hoped for a higher resolution experience — but this type of game is more about the artwork and animations instead of raw fidelity. On that note, the artwork is great. Often grisly but never without leaving a good impression, the art is one of the strongest aspects of the experience. The animations aren’t quite as good, some animations like walking to certain areas are rigid, although this may be a function of the game design. I say this because John seems forced to follow a strict path, complete with a ninety-degree turn at times. There are also times when you double click to go to a certain location and John goes somewhere else on the same screen, but not where you expected him to. Other animations are blank and the specific object your working with might not be shown on screen; these are relatively minor and forgivable points.
Stasis has both a compelling story and a great setting at its core. You play as John, a man in his late 30s, maybe early 40s, and some time ago you, your wife Ellen, and daughter Rebecca bedded down in stasis for a long trip. When John awakens, he discovers his family is nowhere to be found and he does not recognize his surroundings. The ship’s crew seems to be either missing or in various states of violent death, yet much of the ship’s electrical and computer systems are functioning. It’s as though this massive ship is aimlessly drifting somewhere above Neptune. Dark, chilling, chock full of mystery and questions, Stasis did a fine job of getting me hooked early.
Navigating about and interacting with the world is entirely mouse driven, and in fact only the left mouse button is used. Items of interest are automatically ‘named’ and described as you hover over them, and the cursor changes to indicate when you can interact with something. This does end up being kind of misleading though because your inventory items can be used with objects in the game world that do not have an interact icon. Moreover, something seemingly minor but actually did a lot to disconnect me from the gameworld was the inability for John to examine items in his inventory. Once you pick up an object, you can see its artwork in the inventory and see its name, but you cannot get John to comment on it. Worse yet is you will try to use an item with an in-game item and you get zero feedback. It’s also odd that the inventory HUD art is permanently situated in the lower left corner of the screen, ideally I think that would be something players could toggle or have to hover over to make appear. Anyway, I tend to think of myself as being pretty good at point and click adventure games, but I think the inability for my character to examine the inventory to give me some short blurb on it hindered my ability to solve some of the puzzles.
The puzzles, as it turns out, are possibly the weakest part of the game. That’s not to say they’re all bad, they aren’t. There are a good number of logical, well-designed puzzles that make sense and you get that nice little triumphant and excited feeling when you solve them. These puzzles are competent and a boost to the game, but a lot of other puzzles are not setup nor executed well. I did end up referring to a walkthrough video on the Steam community page on a dozen or so occasions. I never like to do that, but the obtuse design of some puzzles made them frustrating and pace-breaking. The scope of the number of rooms, interact-ables, and inventory items is never large in Stasis, you probably won’t have more than a half dozen of each at any one time. That’s fine, but ambiguous puzzles, pixel hunting mechanics, and a lack of worthwhile feedback from the protagonist make a lot of puzzles much more of a chore than they should be.
While I’m on the subject of the puzzles and John, the protagonist, I’ll add that I disliked how John never had anything useful or even optimistic to say. Seriously, any attempt you make to solve a puzzle or combine items that are not correct are met with some asinine comments from John, which both appear on screen and to your ears. “No… that’s just crazy.” “I don’t know what I was thinking.” “Maybe… no, just no.” These are some of his most oft used lines. I know he’s in a bad place, but he’s almost chronically pessimistic. I get that player feedback does not always need to be positive or even informative, but dealing with that just added to the shorter-than-normal fuse I developed for the puzzles. And by that I mean my time-to-guide was less than typical adventure games because the destructive value of some of those puzzles relative to my overall experience with the game was becoming tipped heavily in the wrong direction.
John, as a character, is alright, but I have to admit I never got really invested in him or his plight. You’ll actually “meet” a dozen or so characters throughout the game, although nearly all of them through PDAs that you find scattered about the ship usually in story-related areas. These PDAs are cool for the majority of the game and provide you insight to the general timeline of events up to the point of when you came out of stasis. I won’t spoil those for you, but suffice to say that things were great until they gradually weren’t, and eventually everything went to hell. The PDAs provide this general overview through the eyes of individual crew members, as well as their relations with one another and other diary-like notes you’d expect to find. Interestingly, these PDA moments gradually get longer and longer, with multiple lengthy emails and/or diary notes to read. I wasn’t sure if these were to help flesh out the story more before the endgame or just to lengthen the playing experience itself, but I’ll admit it became laborious to read some of the latter PDAs. I wasn’t particularly interested in the individual, already-long dead characters, and getting much of the same story information from different views was only semi-interesting.
The blood and gore walk a fine line of being overused as well. I appreciate the artwork and creativity, visually it was effective, but in terms of the atmosphere it got somewhat fatiguing. By that I mean I felt I was exposed to so much of it so regularly, that before too long I wasn’t necessarily shocked or awed at what I saw. Again, your mileage may vary here, as a fan of brutal death metal a lot of this imagery wasn’t new to me. Fortunately the scare jump moments are held in far tighter reserve and while I can’t say I outright jumped at anything, The Brotherhood did a nice job with these.
Ok — I’ve spent a lot of this article talking about things that I did not like so much with Stasis. These included some poorly designed/executed puzzles, pixel hunting, poor feedback from the protagonist, difficulty to get really invested in the characters and their plight, and the potential overuse of text accounts (PDAs) and blood/gore that led to some fatigue. There’s clearly some cause for concern when you take a bullet point approach to this list. On the plus side, however, there’s still a lot to like, and more importantly the good points outweigh the bad. Some of the good elements to Stasis I’ve already mentioned. For one, it runs great, I experienced no bugs, and it Alt+Tabs really well, too. The story is interesting and features some nice twists, the atmosphere and sense of wonder is apparent and fostered pretty well. A lot of the puzzles are well designed and executed, too. And while this might not sound like a good thing, I appreciated that the game did not overstay its welcome. Unlike some designs in the genre, another room, another puzzle, another object is not necessarily a good thing. While Stasis’ ending is not as tight and satisfying as I would have liked, I think The Brotherhood made the right choice to wrap things up when they did. And, there are several Achievements that you might want to go back for which can improve replay value. A lot of these Achievements are in discovering the creative ways that John can die. Indeed, John can die and when that happens, you’ll be placed at a recent, silent checkpoint. Unfortunately, there is no way to speed up scripted conversations, though.
With that, let’s get to the summary…