What, you don’t like my Bond joke?
Ukrainian developer Action Forms and Publishers 1c Company (Russia) and 505 Games (European) have come together to tell us that they’re tired of the same old games. That have been coming out for this generation of gamers. They’re tired of the over-hype and need to focus on unimportant things like tweaking an achievement system or putting in a zombie nazi mode to justify a $60 price tag. Hell, they’re even tired of the $60 price tag and went just over 1/2 that, at $40.
Interestingly, they also incorporated Nvidia’s newly acquired PhysX technology, putting Cryostasis on a short list of games taking advantage of the new technology. Action Forms was able to give a new experience to players through a game that focused almost exclusively on storytelling and creating an atmosphere in which you really experience what the character experienced. An old nuclear icebreaker who’s hit an iceberg (ironic, isn’t it) is the stage, and you are Alexander Nesterov, charged with discovering what went wrong. This is a journey that is, like most journeys, flawed yet worth taking. There are few games recently that can say they really did something new or different. Cryostasis is one of them.
Read on for the full story after the jump…
The setting is bleak. You’ve just fallen through the ice, and landed near a hatch. You can’t crawl out of the hole. The wind is howling like mad outside. So, you open up the frozen-over hatch which causes your PC to freeze up for about 3-5 seconds, then you get to watch the beautiful ice crumble down in slo-motion. I look at my box to check for smoke, because this is the first game its done that on. It speeds up considerably after this and I don’t really worry about it much but it happens again not long after and now I’m worried. A quick search online shows that the game only utilizes a single core and that others are having similar issues and I don’t have to worry about my Quad-Core burning up on me.
Graphically, I have to say you need to take the opportunity to view some of the effects with PhysX on and then turn them off to get a real point of reference. At first I didn’t really see anything to get excited over, but when I turned them off I figured out that I wasn’t excited because the PhysX graphics was presenting to me what I expected to see. It didn’t actually look like a video game in parts – to be fair, let’s say suspending my disbelief was easy because it looked so damn good. In a few places, you have to deal with electricity sparking. In the level called Ties, you have to avoid the water because its electrified. The sparks flying from the console actually were tiny spheres of light that moved from the wall to the floor. I stood and watched to see if it was a cycling patter and I could not discern one. It looked truly random.
My hat is off to Action Forms and Nvidia for creating such a strong graphical package that could do something like this. Aside from the terror-inspiring setting, the rest of the game looks amazing. As you get closer to the core of the ship, the ice on the walls begin to melt which looks amazing. The monsters in the game are freakish and terrifying. My favorite is one that sounds like a siren starting up, which made me jump out of my skin. As someone who gets too into their video games, I was jumping for just about every boo moment. With only the complaint of slowdowns when the action got really hairy I was very impressed visually.
The gameplay was very interesting, as at times it had a very real-time puzzle game feel to it, similar to how I felt with Portal. Essentially you somehow have the ability to use a Mental Echo, which allows you to enter the memory of a corpse (the ones that aren’t trying to kill you) and re-live the last minutes (or seconds) of their life before they came to lie in the spot that you see them. The puzzles range from simple to somewhat challenging. In one, you simply follow the directions that you are given by others in the “flashback.” In others, don’t be afraid to try odd things because once I spent almost a half-hour before trying something I thought was crazy, only to have it work. The shooting mechanics and combat were fair, however that’s not the main focus of the game and I honestly didn’t use it enough to get really good at it. I’m a FPS guy so my intrinsic skills were enough to get me through the combat without too many re-loads. The game offers pretty frequent auto-saves so dying without saving isn’t a huge chore. I was very friendly with my F5 quicksave, though. You get used to it near the end.
Sounds and voicework were good. In certain areas I wanted a bit of music or something, but honestly there were times when silence really set the mood. The sounds of the ship and everything that might or might not have been coming after me were quite enough to keep my blood cold. I keep the subtitles on because that’s how I roll, and there were a lot of times when the subs didn’t match the vocal. Small detail issue but still sometimes I got confused as to what was being said. I imagine that the subs may have been from the Russian version and they got a new set of voices when it was made for the US. Don’t know that for a fact, but its my guess.
The story, the main part of the game was, in and of itself not very interesting if it were presented from A-Z chronologically. A story of a ship’s captain and his first officer disagreeing about how to run the ship, and the captain’s decisions deliver the crew to an early demise, and you are where you are now. However, the way that its told through the Mental Echoes, and a neat tie-in through diary pages depicting an old Russian tale that loosely mirror’s the situation on the boat. You collect them as you move through the ship and the tie ins really only clicked for me near the end. Fortunately you are able to read all the ones you have picked up anytime through the menu. The way the game progresses, fixing the mistakes of the dead crewmembers you come accross, there are a few twists that I think were meant to be bigger bombshells than they ended up being.
However in the end the game was very satisfying and I whole-heartedly recommend it to anyone who really wants to expereience a different sort of game storytelling. For the price, you get a lot more than you do with some games out today. You can purchase it electronically directly from Nvidia’s Online Store. I’m looking forward to more from the trio of Action Forms, 1C, and 505 Games if this is the bar to which they set themselves. Well done, my friends from accross the ocean. Well done and continue to change the way people make and play games.
P.S. If you do pick up Cryostasis, make sure you have one of Nvidia’s 8 series Geforce cards or better so you can enjoy the PhysX features. The 8 and 9 series are relatively inexpensive now – check out newegg.com or tigerdirect.com for some great deals.
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Pics or it didn’t happen.
“Hell, they’re even tired of the $60 price tag and went just over 1/2 that, at $40.”
Seriously? Products sell at the price the market will bear. The reason Halo sold at $49.99 and didn’t go “Platinum” until the release of Halo 2 was because people still wanted to buy it at that price three years after release. “Platinum”, “Players Choice”, and “Greatest Hits” are just labels that say “We couldn’t sell this anymore at full price, so will you buy it now? PLEEEEEEASE?”
Also, please define “just” because I might just say *smirk* that “$70 is just over half of $100″. To me, that statement is ludicrous, and yet it’s only three and a third percent more expensive proportionally to your suggestion. If claiming that 40 is near enough to half of 60, then the intent seems to me to be to exploit people’s displeasure to handle basic math.
I remember reading an article that mentioned how people in a study without the aid of rulers or tick marks were able to identify fractions of a line with numerators as high as 12. Forty dollars is equal to two-thirds of sixty, not fullPrice/2+epsilon where epsilon is “very small such that epsilon^2 is very near zero”.
I think Barbie said it best, “Math is hard. Let’s go shopping!”
-Mike
You make some valid points here – I’ll address in-line.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
Fair enough point. I was on a bit of a time crunch so I made a concious decision not to do screencaps. In the future I’ll be sure to have them.
“Hell, they’re even tired of the $60 price tag and went just over 1/2 that, at $40.”
Seriously? Products sell at the price the market will bear. The reason Halo sold at $49.99 and didn’t go “Platinum” until the release of Halo 2 was because people still wanted to buy it at that price three years after release. “Platinum”, “Players Choice”, and “Greatest Hits” are just labels that say “We couldn’t sell this anymore at full price, so will you buy it now? PLEEEEEEASE?”
I have to disagree with you here. “Willing to” and “want to” are not the same thing. Halo was revolutionary for its time and its impact on the console FPS genre. While I agree that games are going to sell for as much as people will pay for them, I cannot believe that people would rather pay more than less. The issue of modded consoles and pirated software would be moot if this were true. This model also does not apply to most other games that are released. They don’t have the staying power of being a genre-defining franchise.
Also, please define “just” because I might just say *smirk* that “$70 is just over half of $100″. To me, that statement is ludicrous, and yet it’s only three and a third percent more expensive proportionally to your suggestion. If claiming that 40 is near enough to half of 60, then the intent seems to me to be to exploit people’s displeasure to handle basic math.
I remember reading an article that mentioned how people in a study without the aid of rulers or tick marks were able to identify fractions of a line with numerators as high as 12. Forty dollars is equal to two-thirds of sixty, not fullPrice/2+epsilon where epsilon is “very small such that epsilon^2 is very near zero”.
I think Barbie said it best, “Math is hard. Let’s go shopping!”
Tim’s Definition of
Just Over
– numbers falling in between half and 3/4 of what would be considered the “full” number 40 is 66% of 60, so I probably should have switched to 3rds and said that its 2/3′s of the $60 release. Fair argument and I’ll try to be more mathematically accurate in the future.