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Originally Posted by GameSpy
1c's flagship title attempts to out-isolate and unsettle BioShock.
Release: TBA 2008
Spiffy
Novel gameplay elements could allow for some interesting scripted scenarios.
Iffy
Scripted scenarios currently a bit rough around the edges.
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It's Thursday night, June 5th at the Russian Consulate in San Francisco, and we're playing musical chairs with a couple of colleagues, alternately sitting and standing in front of a high-powered (and decoratively airbrushed) PC. We're taking turns being befuddled by 1c Company's "flagship game" Cryostasis, which, despite its enviable position atop the Russian publisher's ledger, is represented by a mere two PCs in the grand ballroom.
The setting is appropriate, and not simply because it's Russia's most ambitious publisher staking this patch of foreign soil for the night to show off its wares and trumpet its relevance and largess -- despite its grandeur, the ballroom at the Russian Consulate in San Francisco can get downright cramped when filled to capacity. And Cryostasis appears to be all about making you feel like the walls are closing in.
Would You Kindly Make Your Way to the Exposed Boiler?
It's difficult not to think of BioShock when playing Cryostasis. Remote, god-forsaken setting? Check, though in place of an abandoned deep-sea arcology, you get a derelict icebreaker, a ship designed to plow through frozen waters (in this case, the Arctic Circle). Echoes of the past made tangible, recalling horrors experienced by those unfortunate enough to come before you? Check, but replace BioShock's mislaid audio diaries with actual dead bodies whose grim final moments the protagonist can posthumously live through and hopefully course-correct.
An all-valuable resource, pervasive when you don't need it, and seemingly scarce when you do? Check again, though Cryostasis' take on "Adam" is much more elemental, and not nearly as laden with moral poignancy: plain heat, garnered from anywhere you can scavenge it on the threadbare ship. When you warm your hands over, say, a radiating boiler, it acts as the rough equivalent of a Half-Life energy station, but with some added consequence: If you run out of heat, you'll be useless for a long while (unable to open doors or climb steps) before you fully succumb to the cold.
There and Back Again
The fact that both Cryostasis stations were in relative high demand at the event was only half the reason we all took turns playing. In truth, we were actually thwarted by the game a good deal of the time, often by its harsh (likely not fully-tuned) difficulty level, but also by the lack of feedback in its scripted scenarios. If the build on display was any indication, Cryostasis is not going to hold your hand. It's easy to suspect that this is a philosophical choice on the part of the designers; confusion is one of fear's primary ingredients, after all.
In regards to the minute-to-minute action, the game seems to play it pretty lean. Enemies don't come in throngs -- rather, encounters appear lengthy, deliberate, and in the case of the sequence on display, sloppily resolved by a few plodding shots of a bolt-action rifle or the rough strokes of an ice axe. Some enemies lumber and limp, others charge in, and one even displayed antics reminiscent of BioShock's hook-handed wall-crawlers. They're cut from the same cloth as Rapture's erstwhile revelers, too -- these guys appear to be former icebreaker crewmen, addled and disfigured by whatever catastrophe befell the ship.
Though there's probably no shortage of potential catastrophe when you combine a nuclear icebreaker with the frigid, remote waters of the Arctic Circle, you could probably assume that what's going on in Cryostasis will be pretty twisted. One of the "Mental Echo" sequences in last week's demo suggests that the inhabitants of the ship were driven mad long before they were mutated into whatever-it-is-they-are. The snippet depicted some very human people in a state of panic, urging the character whose memories you're probing to disarm a deranged rifle-wielding assailant. The flashback takes place in the very room where you encounter your unfortunate subject's corpse, and if you manage to rewrite history by avoiding getting pegged by the shooter, the door he's slumped over becomes unlocked. Why? Because the crazed rifleman never locked himself in there after killing everyone. Get it?
Interesting stuff indeed, which could amount to some very cool scenarios. Cryostasis has until October of this year to come into its own. Look for an update next time we see it, likely around August to coincide with the Games Convention in Leipzig.
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