Stasis (PC)
Stasis took me completely by surprise and it turned out to be one of the best adventure games I have played in the recent years. It follows pretty much the same recipe as Sanitarium with its twisted characters and dark atmosphere, but is set on a science space ship where something has gone horribly wrong. Even those few moments of comfort that you experience on your journey come in a form of a memory, so if you expect anything else than a dark and gritty story, this game might not be for you. It's dark, it's twisted, it's depressing, it's shocking and most importantly it's well executed, despite some flaws that I will get into later.
Just a small taste of the darkness that awaits you.
The good
There is a lot of things that I liked about Stasis. It has a great atmosphere which portrays almost perfectly the feelings of isolation and depression, music and graphics are good, voice acting was solid for the most part, puzzles are very logical, the story is interesting and engaging, the world is believable, the ending is shocking, there is a lot of variation between the areas, and the game is filled with many small touches that make you appreciate the extra work the developers put into the game - like the spinal surgery for example. All of these things come together in a very solid adventure experience that I have been sorely missing since the 90's.
The foul-smelling mountain of flesh crawls with several post-mortem insects.
The bad
Unfortunately, there is also a lot of things that drag down the whole experience which prevents me from categorizing Stasis as an all time classic. Many of these flaws stem from my personal preferance - like my inherent dislike for cheap deaths - but there are some design decisions which objectively lower the score as well. For example, the game seems to be divided into different sections so that once you clear a section you can never go back. This results in puzzles being very localized and as a consequence much easier to solve. This also makes your inventory ridiculously small, since you will never carry more than 5 items at the same time. Then there is a lot of log reading involved, which could have been cut down by two thirds without any detriment to the story. Logs are well written and interesting, but the whole premise of the game is to save your familiy which creates this sense of urgency that makes you want to skip over them. At the same time it doesn't make any sense that absolutely nobody locks their journal entries with a password - even when they are clearly writing about things that they would want to keep hidden.
Just a small taste of the puzzles that await you on your journey.
There is also one point in the game where you need to look at the corpse in a cage in order to trigger an event that leads to your capture by the mad scientist. The problem is that there is absolutely no way to figure this out and it felt like a very artificial way to move the storyline forward. Unless you press on that cage out of pure curiosity, you will get stuck for no apparent reason. This wouldn't be a problem if you always needed to click on items to get a description, but Stasis gives you full descriptions just by moving the mouse around, so once you scroll over a description you will have absolutely no reason to click on a decorative item.
These were my biggest complaints and my biggest reasons for lowering the score. There are also some smaller issues with the pathfinding or the fact that the game makes this huge backstory about "Samantha" monster, but never goes anywhere with it. Small complaints that don't affect the score too much, but I need to mention them.
Ouch! That will leave a scar.
Final thoughts
I know I mentioned quite a few things in my "bad" section, but quite honestly they are rather small gripes with an otherwise good game and they just prevent Stasis from becoming a true classic. In the end I give the game 7.5/10 and recommend it warmly. I also hope we will get a sequel or more adventure games from this developer!
Final score: 7.5/10
Click on the link for more screenshots.
