There's a fine balance required of the in media res approach to story telling and Cryostasis misses the mark by holding on to the ambiguity far too long. We played the game for several hours and still can't really tell you what it's all about. We do know that the player starts on a massive Russian icebreaker that has struck a glacier and has been stranded for a long time. There are flashbacks of a dogsled accident right at the start, and eventually you'll even start to relive events from the ship's past. There's friction in the chain of command, flooding disaster, a spreading sickness and an assault by some type of ice mutants. The opening even throws in a little Russian fairytale about a tribe that vanished into the forest and were transformed into, well, into something.
At first, the quirky nature of the story, and even of the story-telling, are captivating and encourage the player to dig deeper into the mystery and start putting the pieces together. The trouble is that things don't really come together soon enough to keep the mystery interesting. Even after playing for several hours, we're no closer to figuring out what's going on. We've heard that the ultimate resolution manages to tie most of the elements together in a neat little package, but since we hit a massive no-clip bug about two-thirds of the way in, whether the ending is great or not is kind of a moot point. In any case, the game needed to have solved at least a few of the mysteries before we gave up on it.
The one thing that does manage to keep you going is that many of the flashbacks are interactive and serve to provide a background to the disaster and even give you a chance to save members of the crew from their horrible fate, or at least postpone it. Scattered throughout the ship are dead crewmen whose red, pulsing hearts indicate an opportunity to intervene in the past and save their lives. Simply activate these corpses to be taken back in time to stop flooding, repair the ships systems, or kill mutants. In all the cases, you'll have to succeed at these past life moments in order to progress to the next area of the ship. The puzzles aren't at all hard but if you fail you'll have to retry them until you get it right. ........
What is your rig's configuration? :Srite said:Is my rig okay?
|Anish| said:Frankly, after playing Dead Space, this became a big turnoff for me mainly because of the storyline and the graphics.
They could have made this game really nice, but somewhere it has just not lived up to the hype.