Adventure Gamers - Forums

It must be a very obscure game, there is no entry here in Adventure Gamers nor in Moby Games.

chrissie - 21 January 2024 05:59 AM

The game was pleasant enough to play, it was quite challenging which I liked & had an interesting mechanic ghost being able to occupy other bodies but I thought it was underused. 

My overall thought was that the developers have a lot of potential but this game was somehow sorely lacking in substance for me & definitely not a classic despite a few good ingredients.

Do you know better than the reviewer? they said it’s classic, which is not! 

Finally finished Stasis 2: Bone Totem which I started… a month, two ago? Anyway, it was a great experience and a long, solid game, not something you finish casually during holidays. My impressions didn’t change much from what I wrote earlier: where it shines (characters, graphics, puzzles), it shines, where it fails (storytelling, music), it fails.

The story itself is pretty great, chock-full of horror tropes, just what one might expect from a Lovecraft-inspired underwater expedition where everything goes wrong. The trio of protagonists along with several additional “companions” have to live through all kind of dangers, from floodings to breakdowns to monsters, inhuman experiments and mental disorders. Really liked the husband-wife team of ocean explorers, both strong, charismatic and loving characters, as well as their naive anthropomorphic bear-like “smart toy” Moses who is simply charming despite scary looks.

The way they move through levels caring about each other reminds of Lost Vikings/Gobliins/DoTT. Had no problem with them sharing one inventory (it wasn’t just a design choice, the technology of sending objects on molecular level was mentioned somewhere), while Mac’s prosthesis arm and Charlie’s engineering skills made it more interesting to solve puzzles. They is enough variety, they are neither easy nor hard, involve a lot of cool futuristic gadgets and nasty things extracted from dead or living creatures - just how I like it. Wish the controls were bit different so that we could use inventory on every active object, not just special close-up areas, but you can’t have everything.

Isometric presentation combined with cinematic cutscenes also adds to the unique experience. They even referenced Sanitarium at several points, and not only it. But the way they decided to tell the story… Argh. Every time you enter a new location (and there are lots of locations - unlike your normal isometric RPG, this game consists of smaller areas) and move a bit to explore the surroundings, the characters start chatting in the upper panel. Usually something like “Oh my God! What is this place?” “It’s a room!” “What were they doing in this room?” “I don’t fucking know!” “Watch your language, Mac!”

The game either freezes as you listen or lets you read pop-up descriptions of nearby objects while they keep talking on the background — which is not helpful at all — and you still can’t approach usable objects and have to wait until they stop. And this could happen 2-3-4 times per location and becomes very stressing. And after a while new characters are added to the chat, and it becomes so noisy that you just stop caring about what they say, just SHUT THE HELL UP! Even more ridiculous is how we are often told there’s little time/health/something else left (especially during the last two chapters when tension grows and puzzles are almost gone), and yet they keep talking, talking, and talking…

IMHO a poor design choice that seriously hurts the gameplay and atmosphere. Could’ve been easily avoided, for example, if we were allowed to chat through a menu, whenever we felt like. Or by simply cutting out 80% of dialogues. And this was made even worse by the multiple logs full of entries and emails left by the crew members of the abandoned tanker. The game is so rich visually, we could learn the fates of those poor souls just by looking around, why they even bothered to add those cliched diaries of deceased people that have little impact on the story? Despite several hints to several puzzles, they were mostly useless writings which you stop paying attention to at one point.

I was also quite surprised to learn that music was composed by Mark Morgan who wrote some of my most favourite ag soundtracks (Zork Nemesis/Grand Inquisitor), as well as Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1-2 and some other classics. In Stasis music is mostly forgettable, sometimes consisting of distant scratching sounds or even whistling (very irritating when you are trying to read a log and someone starts whistling in your ear). Few actual melodies felt like remixes of themes from Dark Corners of the Earth and the movie Dagon. Not everything Lovecraft-related should sound similar, really.

I know this is an indie game made almost sorely by one man, and as it is it’s fantastic. Many great cinematic cutscenes that exist just to show horrible deaths of protagonists whenever we make a wrong move. This felt cool and oldschool. While I’m not happy with the way the story is told, writing is actually good, and, despite the whole bleakness, there’s enough room for jokes, especially involving Moses. There’s something special about the way the game looks and plays, and I was always happy each time I saw a name of a new chapter instead of “The end”. If only the developer gave us more freedom to explore, without constant interruptions and artificial barriers, it would be a marvel of a game!