Cryostasis is a survival horror game from Ukranian developer 1C, which until now has been known for mostly forgettable games such as Canivore and Vivisector. The story revolves around a Russian Meteorologist, Alexander Nesterov, stationed at the North Pole, when he is recalled and told to expect pickup by the nuclear icebreaker North Wind. While a couple months at the pole should earn anyone a vacation, as luck would have it, Alex reaches the ship only to find it trapped in the ice and lifeless. With falling temperatures and the loss of his dogsled, he goes inside to try to avoid freezing to death, and hopefully figure out just what happened to the ship.
This comprises the core of the Cryostasis experience and some of its greatest strengths. The protagonist has no story. His name and occupation are of no importance and are only referred to in game a single time. The only story is that of the ship and crew and what lead to their frozen fate. Soon after entering the ship, you begin to experience flashbacks of the ship at various parts of the disaster, and by the end, you get a pretty good idea what happened, particularly when you see the same events from multiple viewpoints all over the ship. It?s refreshing change from the notes and audiologs in so many other games and is very illustrative of the ?Show, don?t Tell? principle of good storytelling, particularly in a visual media such as the computer game.
The game takes it a step further. One of the games big selling points is the ?Mental Echo? ability, where you will every so often stumble across corpses with a red glow coming from them. Touch them and you will be drawn into their mind to relive part of their past and control their actions. In these sequences, your goal is to accomplish some task they failed at. If you fail, you are dumped back into the present and just try again, while success causes the body to disappear (presumably because they died somewhere else?).The effective of this is hit and miss. Sometimes, it?s fairly obvious what effect you had because you immediately see it. Other times, it?s unclear what the relation between cause and effect is. Some of the tasks are pretty easy, you have to wonder just why they failed in the first place, unless they just didn?t try. In some cases, the result of what you did is very unclear. Sure, you kept the crane from getting smashed when the iceberg hit, but how did that help you? Probably the most interesting use of this is where later in the game you find a crashed helicopter on the deck that prevents you from accessing the hanger. By mental echoing one of the crew, you can prevent the helicopter from crashing. The helicopter plays a part in the rest of the flashbacks, which makes you wonder about the far reaching consequences if the helicopter was actually supposed to crash before you came along.
The other interesting feature of the game is the lack of a health meter. Instead, you have a thermometer which represents your ?health?. It?s an interesting idea and does a good job of reinforcing that the entire game is a struggle about man vs. the elements. Being that the ship is frozen and the weather outside is below freezing, one of the major struggles in the game is not freezing to death. The thermometer slowly drops while in an area that is particularly cold, with the ambient temperature represented on the thermometer. Going outside will kill you within minutes. Being hit by enemies also causes your temperature to drop. The only way to regain health to find sources of heat and warm up next to them for a few seconds, sources such as lights, burning embers, steam valves, running equipment. As you progress through the ship, keep an eye out for buttons and switches that can be used to turn on lights, heaters, etc. Each source can be used as many times as you want, but different sources will only raise your temperature a certain amount.
While it is a unique and refreshing system, it does fail on a few levels. It heals enemy damage, including bullet/stab wounds, as easily as exposure, which doesn?t make much sense how putting your hand up to a steam valve for 30 seconds heals bullet wounds in the chest. The other flaw is that despite the ship being frozen for an unknown amount of time, you still find burning embers, hot steam valves and working electronics. Most of the equipment starts flawlessly, despite being in deep freeze and then subsequently wetted when the temperature increased (from you turning the equipment on). Not a big deal as it?s needed for the mechanic, but it does tend to impact the realism a little and a throwaway line about a little bit of power left in the batteries would have been nice.
All of these elements create a refreshing and atmospheric story of a ship, captain and crew in peril in one of the most remote parts of the world. The game?s best parts are some of the most atmospheric, particularly those near the end. There is one sequence that is rather creepy and unique when you go through the medical decks, where many of the crew spent their final hours. The game alternates between wandering the silent decks and flashbacks to when they were alive with screams and dying sailors, and becomes even more disturbing when you notice that even as you see and hear what happened, none of the people are actually moving. Everything is frozen in time, like a wax museum, but the dialogue continues, as if hanging in the air, as the doctors are discussing treatment for the radiation sickness most of the crew is experiencing. It?s not seen again during the game, which is why it works so well.
This is why it feels rather sad that 1C had to tack a shooter onto it, which is much more bland and unintuitive. While some of the crew of the north wind died and await you to come along and change their pasts, others inexplicably began turning into ice zombies, or worse, ice mutants, which range from the normal to the bizarre (a spiderlike creature). All are rather stupid and none are terribly difficult to defeat, except the spider creature.
Fighting the ice monsters is done with the suspiciously large amount of WW2 era rifles and submachine guns stored on the ship(considering it?s an icebreaker, not a warship). It all works as you?d expect it to. The PPSH is powerful but chews ammo, the bolt action rifles take forever to reload in a firefight, the sniper rifle is actually surprisingly useless. None of the guns have on screen crosshairs, so aiming down the sight is a must.
The level design is competent, but very linear. The interior of the ship does look like you?d expect it to, though very little can actually be interacted with except what the game wants you to.. You will end up going through every room in the game and in the exact same order, with the aforementioned ice monsters jumping out at you at the same place every time. While this is good for scripting, it cuts down on replay value and feels like one of the major areas the game could have been improved upon and polished.
The ending does little to explain the purpose or presence of some of the more esoteric elements in the game. No reason is ever given for why the crew became ice monsters(and only some of them, at that). The fact that you fight the ice monsters during the flashback sequences and some of the mental echo sequences, yet nobody ever mentions this makes it even more bizarre. My best theory is that they are supposed to be ghosts of the marooned souls (evidenced that some of them actually materialize out of thin air in front of you) or abstractions of the cold(as their attacks remove your body heat). It?s equally possible they are all hallucinations of the main character as he fights to maintain his sanity and life in the cold and solitude. Maybe the ice monsters in the mental echoes are supposed to represent the breakdown of the crew after everything went to hell. The final scenes variate between compelling drama of the human kind and completely bizarre shit which, in the end, satisfyingly resolve the story even while leaving you thinking ?What the hell was that all about??
In the end, Cryostasis is a unique First Person Shooter that uses its gimmicks (Mental Echo and Temperature meter) to successfully immerse players in the story they wanted to tell, by using narrative in a refreshing way that the player lives the disaster instead of just hearing about it, all while wandering the corridors of the aftermath. The only real flaws are the pedestrian shooter elements and no real explanation of some of the more bizarre elements.
This comprises the core of the Cryostasis experience and some of its greatest strengths. The protagonist has no story. His name and occupation are of no importance and are only referred to in game a single time. The only story is that of the ship and crew and what lead to their frozen fate. Soon after entering the ship, you begin to experience flashbacks of the ship at various parts of the disaster, and by the end, you get a pretty good idea what happened, particularly when you see the same events from multiple viewpoints all over the ship. It?s refreshing change from the notes and audiologs in so many other games and is very illustrative of the ?Show, don?t Tell? principle of good storytelling, particularly in a visual media such as the computer game.
The game takes it a step further. One of the games big selling points is the ?Mental Echo? ability, where you will every so often stumble across corpses with a red glow coming from them. Touch them and you will be drawn into their mind to relive part of their past and control their actions. In these sequences, your goal is to accomplish some task they failed at. If you fail, you are dumped back into the present and just try again, while success causes the body to disappear (presumably because they died somewhere else?).The effective of this is hit and miss. Sometimes, it?s fairly obvious what effect you had because you immediately see it. Other times, it?s unclear what the relation between cause and effect is. Some of the tasks are pretty easy, you have to wonder just why they failed in the first place, unless they just didn?t try. In some cases, the result of what you did is very unclear. Sure, you kept the crane from getting smashed when the iceberg hit, but how did that help you? Probably the most interesting use of this is where later in the game you find a crashed helicopter on the deck that prevents you from accessing the hanger. By mental echoing one of the crew, you can prevent the helicopter from crashing. The helicopter plays a part in the rest of the flashbacks, which makes you wonder about the far reaching consequences if the helicopter was actually supposed to crash before you came along.
The other interesting feature of the game is the lack of a health meter. Instead, you have a thermometer which represents your ?health?. It?s an interesting idea and does a good job of reinforcing that the entire game is a struggle about man vs. the elements. Being that the ship is frozen and the weather outside is below freezing, one of the major struggles in the game is not freezing to death. The thermometer slowly drops while in an area that is particularly cold, with the ambient temperature represented on the thermometer. Going outside will kill you within minutes. Being hit by enemies also causes your temperature to drop. The only way to regain health to find sources of heat and warm up next to them for a few seconds, sources such as lights, burning embers, steam valves, running equipment. As you progress through the ship, keep an eye out for buttons and switches that can be used to turn on lights, heaters, etc. Each source can be used as many times as you want, but different sources will only raise your temperature a certain amount.
While it is a unique and refreshing system, it does fail on a few levels. It heals enemy damage, including bullet/stab wounds, as easily as exposure, which doesn?t make much sense how putting your hand up to a steam valve for 30 seconds heals bullet wounds in the chest. The other flaw is that despite the ship being frozen for an unknown amount of time, you still find burning embers, hot steam valves and working electronics. Most of the equipment starts flawlessly, despite being in deep freeze and then subsequently wetted when the temperature increased (from you turning the equipment on). Not a big deal as it?s needed for the mechanic, but it does tend to impact the realism a little and a throwaway line about a little bit of power left in the batteries would have been nice.
All of these elements create a refreshing and atmospheric story of a ship, captain and crew in peril in one of the most remote parts of the world. The game?s best parts are some of the most atmospheric, particularly those near the end. There is one sequence that is rather creepy and unique when you go through the medical decks, where many of the crew spent their final hours. The game alternates between wandering the silent decks and flashbacks to when they were alive with screams and dying sailors, and becomes even more disturbing when you notice that even as you see and hear what happened, none of the people are actually moving. Everything is frozen in time, like a wax museum, but the dialogue continues, as if hanging in the air, as the doctors are discussing treatment for the radiation sickness most of the crew is experiencing. It?s not seen again during the game, which is why it works so well.
This is why it feels rather sad that 1C had to tack a shooter onto it, which is much more bland and unintuitive. While some of the crew of the north wind died and await you to come along and change their pasts, others inexplicably began turning into ice zombies, or worse, ice mutants, which range from the normal to the bizarre (a spiderlike creature). All are rather stupid and none are terribly difficult to defeat, except the spider creature.
Fighting the ice monsters is done with the suspiciously large amount of WW2 era rifles and submachine guns stored on the ship(considering it?s an icebreaker, not a warship). It all works as you?d expect it to. The PPSH is powerful but chews ammo, the bolt action rifles take forever to reload in a firefight, the sniper rifle is actually surprisingly useless. None of the guns have on screen crosshairs, so aiming down the sight is a must.
The level design is competent, but very linear. The interior of the ship does look like you?d expect it to, though very little can actually be interacted with except what the game wants you to.. You will end up going through every room in the game and in the exact same order, with the aforementioned ice monsters jumping out at you at the same place every time. While this is good for scripting, it cuts down on replay value and feels like one of the major areas the game could have been improved upon and polished.
The ending does little to explain the purpose or presence of some of the more esoteric elements in the game. No reason is ever given for why the crew became ice monsters(and only some of them, at that). The fact that you fight the ice monsters during the flashback sequences and some of the mental echo sequences, yet nobody ever mentions this makes it even more bizarre. My best theory is that they are supposed to be ghosts of the marooned souls (evidenced that some of them actually materialize out of thin air in front of you) or abstractions of the cold(as their attacks remove your body heat). It?s equally possible they are all hallucinations of the main character as he fights to maintain his sanity and life in the cold and solitude. Maybe the ice monsters in the mental echoes are supposed to represent the breakdown of the crew after everything went to hell. The final scenes variate between compelling drama of the human kind and completely bizarre shit which, in the end, satisfyingly resolve the story even while leaving you thinking ?What the hell was that all about??
In the end, Cryostasis is a unique First Person Shooter that uses its gimmicks (Mental Echo and Temperature meter) to successfully immerse players in the story they wanted to tell, by using narrative in a refreshing way that the player lives the disaster instead of just hearing about it, all while wandering the corridors of the aftermath. The only real flaws are the pedestrian shooter elements and no real explanation of some of the more bizarre elements.
). Look forward to reading your next one.
