Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason

This is a game I have been looking very much forward to since it was first announced. I heard it was going to be in the first person, but more of an adventure game than a shooter, which is exactly my type of thing. I've finally got my hands on it and the results are a mixed bag of, funnily enough: generic shooting, clunky hand to hand combat and some innovative ideas that didn't quite reach their full potential.

The game kicks off in Antarctica where you take control of our hero, Alexander Nesterov, a meteorologist. In the opening scenes we are shown Nesterov discovering a shipwrecked Icebreaker - and it's an impressive sight the first time you see it, with the snow whistling around as you strain to look up on the massive ship. Once on-board, it's your task to find out what happened and why. This starts off in a pretty clever way, giving you small flashbacks of how Alexander came across the ship in the first place and how he got on-board.

After about ten minutes on the doomed Icebreaker you'll discover you're not alone. The ship is also inhabited by some sort of ice monsters; these will be your main enemies throughout the game. The first time you come across one of these monsters, you don't expect it. The game does a good job of making you let your guard down, showing you a flashback of an ex-crew member struggling for their life and then all of a sudden it’s you getting attacked. It's a good way to give the player a fright and it worked on me, however, the vast majority of the time, when the game tries to scare you, it's done in the same way; see a frozen corpse, see a flashback and then be attacked. It gets a little tedious after a while when you know there's something coming.

This doesn't detract from the game in any major way though as it's still enjoyable, however the combat system for fighting these monsters is a letdown. Think Condemned: Criminal Origins, and you'll have a good idea of how melee combat works here. The problem is that it's neither as fluid nor as satisfying as Condemned. It feels clunky as you swing a punch or throw out a combo and you'll miss a lot of the time, thus leaving yourself open to attack. Once you get your hands on a gun however, it's a different story - from that point onwards, the game is too easy. The difficulty curve is certainly uneven.

Along the way, you'll find assorted letters and documents giving you insight into the story along with some flashback cut-scenes. Thankfully, since this is the way the game mainly tells its story, the actors doing the voiceovers when reading letters/documents are pretty capable.

The graphics in Cryostasis are one of its stronger points. It's one of the first (if not, the first) games to use PhysX real time water physics and it's impressive in motion. The water and ice effects are some of the best I've seen, although be warned; the game doesn't like to be played on multi-core machines for some reason, and you may experience slow frame rates with certain features turned up to high, or even medium.

One of the games main features is the way you regenerate health. Since you are on a frozen ship in the Antarctic, it's a tad chilly in there, so you'll need to heat yourself up. This is how you regain health. The idea is good in theory but the atmosphere that draws you into the game is sometimes broken when you realise you can regain quite a lot of health simply by placing your hands a few centimetres above a light bulb.

The game’s second main feature is something called "Mental Echo". It is a good idea, but I don't feel it's used to its full potential here. The basic gist of it is this; if you come across a frozen corpse and it's blocking your way, you can dive into the deceased crew member’s body, as it were, and change his past. For example, if there is someone frozen on a set of ladders you need to climb up, you can dive into his memory, and replay his last moments via flashback. This gives you a chance to save the man's soul, and when you have saved his soul, his body is no longer in the physical world, meaning you can now climb the ladder.

This may sound all well and good, but I don't feel the mechanic is used as well it could be. It could have been put to great use, if only you were given more than one option in each "memory". Instead, if you do it wrong or fail to save the man's soul, you must simply start the flashback from the beginning until you get it right. This is a common theme with the games flashbacks, you have one option – do it wrong and you have to do it over. If there were perhaps consequences later on for messing up a man's fate or not finishing a flashback fully, I feel it could have added to the game’s atmosphere for one and its replay value for another.

Replay value is something this game is severely lacking, with no form of multi-player and a linear single player campaign which I had finished fairly quickly there's not much reason to go back once you've completed it once. However for the one run you'll give it, it's a solid adventure game with a fairly well crafted story. The clumsy fighting mechanics and the linearity let it down somewhat though and you may well find yourself struggling to find the need to complete it. Cryostasis is by no means a bad game - far from it, it's just nothing we haven't seen before.