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TimovieMan - 14 October 2015 06:49 PM

This game is brutal…

...its about time!

TimovieMan - 14 October 2015 06:49 PM

The resulting cutscene left me staring at the screen in utter shock for five minutes, unable to move, and crying…

I will refrain from saying anything until you have reached the end - but there is also something odd about that scene…

Yeah, Stasis ain’t your typical happy, feel good kinda game.

Finished the game.

Graphics are outstanding, the amount of detail is astounding (even small things like the subdued breathing of near-death characters), and the sound design is incredible (particularly at making you uncomfortable).
The little security holograms / ghost hallucinations? we occasionally see in the corner of our eye, or the hybrid movement in piles of goo make the game even more unsettling than the subject matter already is.
And kudos to Chris Bischoff for having the balls to actually have children killed in this game. Chris, you magnificent bastard, you!!!

Also many bonus points from me for the many effective jump scares, the poignant use of that lullaby as the game’s main theme, and for the incessant brutality, the very bleak “downer” ending and especially for forcing Maracheck to watch his daughter getting killed - that was a real punch in the gut that hit me hard. I’ll say again: Chris, you magnificent bastard, you!!!

I disagree with the criticism that the PDAs take the pace out of this game. I’m a completist player, and I take things slow, so I read every single line of every single PDA, and they only ADD to the quality of the game for me. I loved reading the thoughts of the people on the Groomlake, seeing their personal side-stories unfold, and getting multiple points-of-view on the same events. The PDAs are like a bundle of self-contained short-stories that make the Groomlake feel “lived in”. (I was going to say “alive” but with the abundance of death everywhere… )
For me personally, instead of breaking the pace, it enhances the immersion.

Puzzle design is great as well, with most of the obstacles advancing the story and not just being there for the sake of having more puzzles.
There were four instances that had me stumped for a while:
- once because the puzzle was just that good (obtaing the drill by [spoiler]cutting the electricity[/spoiler] - not the most obvious method)
- a second time because two important clues (to waking up a man in stasis) were deviously hidden in plain sight (seriously, I had stopped looking in detail at the PDA covers when it was obvious there weren’t any real clues there, just “added atmosphere”, and then I suddenly HAD to look at them again for real puzzle clues! Fiendish! )
- a third time because of a more poorly designed (or at least poorly-clued) puzzle: obtaining the stinger from the bug queen. We got from the PDAs that the queen was more docile after being milked, so I assumed that we would be able to get near her after that. It wasn’t really clear that we needed to wait until the actual moment of that weird gas exhaustion happened, so I ended up dying there several times. And all that for an object whose purpose could really just as easily have been fulfilled by that metal plate - its edge could have cut the amber open just as quickly as a claw/stinger, imo.
- the last time was because of a poorly-placed trigger (where you need to approach the cage with the seemingly dead hybrid, only for it to move when you do, before triggering your first in-person run-in with Dr. Malan).

After this first run-in with Dr. Malan, we’re treated to what I consider to be the strongest moment in the game (but also the most brutal). After that, sadly, the game suffers pacing issues where we go all too fast (with fewer items and descriptions per screen) to an overly short final confrontation. Not that the ending feels rushed per se, but it just feels like it deserved to be a bit longer. I was also fully expecting the game to last a little longer at that point (but that could just be me not wanting it to end).

Furthermore, there were two instances where dying meant you had to go through an unskippable dialogue again and again (at the first appearance of the gun turrets and at the start of the final confrontation), and there were also some very minor quirks (like the ‘use’ cursor not working immediately if you still had to walk over to the hotspot in question, or Maracheck’s path finding not being optimal), but definitely nothing gamebreaking or even that annoying. The positive stuff FAR outweighs the negative!

With the game’s overall quality, I consider myself a VERY satisfied backer. STASIS delivers, and Chris now has my attention for all his future projects!
But I expected nothing less, of course.




As an aside: the main villain, Dr. Malan, shares his surname (and his title and probably also his God complex) with the South African prime minister that ushered in Apartheid 60 years ago. Not a coincidence, imo.




I’ll leave the wild theories and full-on spoiler discussion for my next post.

Iznogood - 03 October 2015 12:09 PM

First of all, regarding Th’ea [spoiler]then right up to the end I actually hoped that she would turn out to be good! I of course never trusted her one bit, and if you read all the “cooperate spy” pda’s, then it is pretty obvious that she had to be the outside agent that was controlling whathisname, but I kept hoping that the developer would throw a curveball, in the form of that seeing all the monstrosities that had happened here would somehow have changed her, and that she now cared more about exposing this than about the money, but that obviously wasn’t the case.[/spoiler]

My thoughts exactly! I was also hoping for a more nuanced intention and/or motivation…

Regarding his wife, then the most logical explanation is indeed, that she was one of the three birthing women that he killed. Both the pda telling that she was used very successfully as this, and Johns reaction, singing the lullaby, when he kills them very strongly suggest this.

I agree, but the lullaby thing could actually just be John’s guilt at having to mercy-kill those women, without a link to his wife. He hasn’t been coping particularly well with death throughout the game…

But if that is the case, then who was the dead women in the stasis chamber at the end? I simply don’t buy the theory that she should be a clone of his wife.

I’m not buying any of the clone theories either. If the game has shown anything, it’s that the entire process of cloning doesn’t work as intended…
Your Becky theory actually explains the identity, though.

And then there is the whole Becky scene, in an earlier clip we see Becky as being a blonde, but the child that we see being murdered is a brunette! The most obvious explanation for this is THAT IT IS NOT BECKY!

This is my *second* theory of what happened (but it’s probably the most foolproof theory: if that is not Becky, then the woman in the stasis pod at the end is not Ellen either, but the mother of whoever that girl really was! Remember: we used the girl’s DNA to track down the mother!)

My *first* thought/theory on the other hand has a different explanation (and is actually something of a curveball - but I quite like it anyway ). More on that later…

How John could not notice this, is a bit of a mystery, but I guess that it could be explained by his whole state of mind, which the suit keeps warning us about, similar to how he doesn’t react stronger to the pda about his wife.

Don’t forget that John is constantly in pain and drugged up as well. That doesn’t help.
My other theory may provide an additional explanation…

This also got me wondering about the whole time-line. The only way that we know that John has been in stasis for three years, is because he finds a calendar on a wall and comments on it, but how do we know that the calendar is current? It wouldn’t have been the first time, that an outdated calender had been left hanging somewhere, and I also seem to recall the Th’ea hesitated when confirming that it had been three years, though that might of course just be my imagination. But what if it hasn’t been three years, but instead 10 or 15 years?

This thought occurred to me as well, but I actually prefer to think of it as being closer to 4 years - with the game taking place in February or so (three months after the shit hit the fan on the Groomlake) and that calendar obviously not having been changed a month earlier (after everybody started dying). We also don’t know when John initially left for Titan - it could have been early in the year making his “3 years” statement already “3 and a half years” from the get-go. Or he could even have counted [spoiler]3 years from the moment he was to arrive on Titan - one does not enter cryostasis for a trip that takes mere days/weeks but rather for one that takes months/years[/spoiler]. We really can’t know for sure, but I like to think 3 and a half to 4 years...

If this is the case, then it might also mean that one of the three pregnant women that he kills, is ACTUALLY HIS DAUGHTER BECKY!
This would much better explain why he starts singing the lullaby, after turning off the power supply. And if the mother was suited for giving birth for hybrids, then it also makes sense that the daughter would be, especially since they had both suffered from the same genetic disease. It also explains why the “Becky” we see getting killed is suddenly brunette instead of blonde, and it means that the dead women in the stasis chamber at the end, could actually be his dead wife.

Actually, I think this is taking that theory a step too far, personally. In an unprotected environment, a corpse takes only a good month to turn into the sort of dry husk we see at the end, so it doesn’t mean that Ellen had been dead for years.

[spoiler]The one problem with this theory, is that John and Th’ea uses the blood of the dead child, to trace the location of Johns wife. But Marlack (or whatever his name was), could have arranged all of this, he might have been aware of what Th’ea was planning, and then planted the blood and arranged the whole “Becky dead scene”, in order to smoke out Th’ea. it all makes at least somewhat sense imo

Makes sense. He’s definitely sneaky enough for this…



To be continued.

Continuing…

[spoiler]The other possibility is of course [spoiler]that the dead women in stasis is just some random women, that Th’ea thought was John’s wife, but that she was just some random corpse, and that either Becky or John’s wife, depending on which of the two the pregnant women was, is actually still alive somewhere, but I doubt that is the case.[/spoiler]

Like I said: if you assume that the girl wasn’t Becky, then it’s perfectly possible (and even highly likely) that that’s not Ellen either.




Here’s my curveball:
[spoiler]When John, Ellen and Becky go into stasis for their trip to Titan, Ellen is pregnant![/spoiler]
The Groomlake doesn’t just kidnap/hijack random people in stasis for their experiments, they’re specifically looking for “women who gave birth/were pregnant in the last three months or so”. Ellen being pregnant might have been the trigger for the Marachecks’ abduction in the first place!
That could mean that the DNA-tracking doesn’t point to Becky, but her now-3-year-old baby sister. This could explain the difference in age and hair colour while also explaining why John doesn’t fully notice the difference as they probably look very much alike otherwise...
Then that also means that the woman in the pod at the end is in fact Ellen, who could have died at any point prior - decomposition is fast enough for a corpse to look like she did after a good month. Remember, there’s a 3-year-gap to bridge and a lot can happen in such a time-frame. Plus there’s only one confirmed “alpha male hybrid” spawned from Ellen. The success of that first hybrid birth might be why Malan is keeping her corpse stashed somewhere instead of disposing of her like he does with almost everything else.
The fate of Becky is unknown in this scenario (she could have fallen victim to a hybrid for instance), though…

So that other theory is still probably the most sound.

If only Chris would let us pick his brain over this.
But not knowing is fun too - let the speculation continue!

Oh - this is WAY more fun..

Nice speculations going on here I finished Stasis yesterday and it is truly a brutal and evil masterpiece! Meaningful and well balanced puzzles, perfect atmosphere and beautiful isometric graphics. Minor issues too but nothing too serious. Soundtrack is also superb. Track 12 ”Friendship” by Mark Morgan is my favourite: somehow it`s full of hope, sadness and desperation at the same time. Daniel Sadowski`s “Determined” (#16) is brilliant too.

I`m sure reading lots of pda texts is not everyone`s cup of tea, but I enjoyed them a lot. The story is so much richer with them, but I`m sure you can still enjoy the game even if you dont read them all. The game is full of small details and hints, which leave plenty of room for speculations and theories what really happened on Groomlake and I like that.

Really looking forward my collector box, new Cayne chapter DLC and what Chris will do after that. I´m sure Stasis will be a strong contender for best adventure game 2015 title! Job well done Christopher Bischoff, I salute you!

As for the PDA’s then I fell a bit ambivalent here. On one hand I like reading them, and though that they added a lot to the story. On the other hand there are a lot of them, a bit too much reading for my taste. The ideal for me would have been if the amount of PDA’s was cut down to about half.

TimovieMan - 16 October 2015 10:19 AM

Here’s my curveball:

Ooh! I like that, wish I had thought of it myself .. though I still think I like my own theory more

One little note though:

TimovieMan - 16 October 2015 10:19 AM

The Groomlake doesn’t just kidnap/hijack random people in stasis for their experiments, they’re specifically looking for “women who gave birth/were pregnant in the last three months or so”. Ellen being pregnant might have been the trigger for the Marachecks’ abduction in the first place!

I think that their ship was randomly hijacked, and that Ellen turned out to be suited for the experiments was purely coincidental.

Hey Adventurers.

I wrote a post mortem on the games production here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3qu866/stasis_an_adventure_game_post_mortem/

I tried to post it in its entirety but it killed the post size limit.

Stasis is also currently on sale on GOG and Steam for 40% off!

http://www.gog.com/game/stasis

http://store.steampowered.com/app/380150/

Hey Pyke (and everyone…this is my first post on AG)!

Just wanted to say many congrats on STASIS.  I’ve been stoked about this for a long time and I picked it up this weekend to help ring Halloween in.  Really, really digging it and looking forward to seeing more of the story.

Well done!
-Zack

Woo! Thanks Zack! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts when you finish it!

I’ve just completed it. Really enjoyable! The PDAs are a necessary evil imo. Everytime I saw one or two PDAs twinkling in the scenery, I was like ‘*groan* oh no, more reading” But I suppose I’m also somewhat of a completist and had to read all of them. They definitely add a lot to the suspense and atmosphere of the game. There were one or two times where I’d come back to a room for no real reason other than randomly checking rooms because I was stuck, and would happen to find a PDA I’d missed the first time. Had to read it! Fortunately quite a few of them were only one or two lines then click next.

The reference to curing Ebola was clever, not only because Ebola is so current, but because such a great service to humanity by Dr Malan was overshadowed by his otherwise extremely evil behaviour.

I’m glad there was no hotspot highlighter, at least, I don’t think there was one. Just makes the game more challenging and interesting.

My only complaint is not being able to fast forward cutscenes with dialogue. Other than that, a very solid game. 

Cool!

Awaits eagerly.