Cryostasis Review

It is a rare thing to sit down and enjoy something great. That without compromising itself shines like a star in the night sky. A thing which is beauty in and of itself. I have played that game. I am writing this review after just finishing the game Cryostasis.
This game hit my radar awhile back as a lot of game do, originally called Cryostasis: For Reason of Sleep. The game was held back from its original launch and it left my mind until a few days ago. As I was going through the store looking for a good game to tide myself over until the end of the month when all the games that I have been waiting for are coming out I had settled on a PS3 game but wanted to see if there was any PC titles that I should pick up, so that I didn’t miss anything.
As I am going through the PC section at my local Best Buy I spot a game that I had been waiting for a long time to come out. Which brought up a problem as I wanted a ps3 game to tide myself over until the end of the month and not a PC game, but ultimately I pick it up along with another pc title and the PS3 game and got home and put them down as it was late and near time for me to go to sleep.
The next day I get up and I have to work and I wasn’t going to let myself play my games until I had finished my work. When I had finally finished my work I popped in my Cryostasis game and was about to load it when auto installer wouldn’t pop up, after awhile of trying to get it to work I finally tried loading it on my brothers computer with his permission to see if it was working at all. It did and my drivers for my disk readers on my computer were not working. Some problem that occurs for no general reason and it was fixed the next day and finally I was able to load and start playing Cryostasis.
So how was the game. Well in short the game came at a budget price of $30. Yet I am happy to say dispite this pricing it was not a budget game. I would have happily paid $60 for this game and that is the price of the PS3 game I picked up. No this game is definitely worth more than was paid for it. Thus the games price adds to its greatness. Now that’s a word I don’t through around. I am somewhat of a philosopher and have come to the conclusion that perfection is an unreality. Perfection is an observation which means that if two people look at something and one does not agree it is perfect it isn’t so I don’t use the term perfect, yet, this game is like a game that came close to and touched perfection, it isn’t but it is a nice metaphor.

Cryostasis
Now onto the more important stuff which you want to know about. First lets talk pros. The game comes at a budget price which is great but they didn’t skimp on the work. The story is the most deepest and most beautiful thing I have seen in a long time. I must stop myself now before I go on again but to suffice to say it goes like this you are Alexander Nesterov and you are ordered to leave the north pole research station you are at and you will be picked up by this ship which turns out not to be the pleasure cruise one would hope for. Now without spoiling anything for those that want to play to enjoy the story I will say that it is deep and full of beauty. It gets a message across without trying to send a message and is not in your face except our morals and beliefs that other games that try this are. No it is of itself and lets you enjoy and interpret it as you see fit. Nice I know.
Now the game has two features which are unique (it says so in the manual but I must correct one. Raw Danger does something similar with the temperature feature but with water instead of the cold) These two features are one Temperature sensor which is unique but not innovative so I will give it to them on that. It involved the temperature of the environment and you. This is your life pretty much. Though the game is not about owe crap this is the wrong ship now I am stranded, no there are monsters created by the cold which the game will go into. I will go into more detail in the graphics area of this review. When you come across these former people even though the book makes it seem like there are only one of each there are a bunch of each. Now the book only details 3 of them but there are way more than that. They will attack you and deplete your temperature which is your life. Loose all your heat and you die. You can regain heat by finding things that give off heat and turning them on or just finding them. You use the right mouse button to get close to them and warm up. Though you can regain heat by just being in a warm room this is not a major way to do so until near the end of the game.
The second feature this game toughts and I will have to agree it is a first is the Mental Echo. This ability lets you go back in the characters past (people you find) and change the moment of their failure so they don’t meet a horrible end. Literally like time travel and it comes with a nice animation when you do it too. At first when I read that they were doing it that way I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, as I had been following the game for a long time and you can get the picture, but lucky me it was and it makes the ending of the game so much more spectacular.
Now for graphics. The graphics are nice. They have nice frost effects along the walls and when the rooms defrost they will have this nice water running down effect like in BioShock. You would expect that this wouldn’t look that great because of the games price but you would happily be wrong. Though it isn’t the best in the world it is good. Enemies come in multiple varieties and even if someone says that, that they are just reusing enemy models it doesn’t matter. At first it gives off a survival horror feeling and later when the plot is more understood it gives off another feeling and even though it would normally be a bad thing this game pulls it off nicely.
Another nice feature of the game is the small things it does. Like the cold breath that comes off your screen as you breath in the cold environments to the frosted over look your screen gets in the extremely cold environments it does this area really nice. Now at first my computer was running the graphics on low and I was still pretty pleased with what I was seeing so it just goes to show they didn’t fail here. (I didn’t relies they were on low my computer can handle much better and I did set them on high when I found out)
The game play is where games ether fail or succeed and this game succeeded. Though there is no blood but a nice little red ripple effect comes off the enemies body when you hit them. This is heat effect on them as they are frozen. Now most games make you fear the dark this game makes you fear the cold. Though it is not a major aspect it is pretty nice.
You have 8 weapons to use each are pretty good. At first you have nothing as you didn’t expect his crap to be happening and then you get a melee weapon very fast. Like first battle fast. The melee system is actually good in the this game and works quite nicely. Eventually you will get guns and they work nicely as well. This game has one of the most realistic loading I have seen in a game and it does hinder the game play but adds to the strategy. If you know you can reload here you know you can safely use this weapon but if you can’t you might want to stick to the auto or clip weapon. Guns are nicely done and the sounds are great. Actually the game boasts some fancy sound system which really doesn’t mean much to me but evidently make the game really great.
The game play is mainly linear in nature with a touch of openness to it which is nice, though I was expecting an open world ship kind of thing but this game did it nicely. You make your way through the ship unraveling what happened and the bad things themselves with the mental echo ability which is not over used so if you don’t like it don’t worry. It lets you take the perspective of the person where he was shortly before he met his end there and you will save the same person more than once and this adds immense depth to the game play. Though some of them were kind of tricky to figure out they were all fun.
You will fight different enemies along the way and even see your old friends again down the road and by that I mean meet some of the earlier monsters. It was a happy reunion kind of feeling and then we had to fight. Especially when you are running forward and some guy gets you in the chest with an axe. Ooo, not good. You will find out what happen and eventually… well you will have to pick it up to find out but game play wise, this game succeeded.
Over all the game came together nicely. There were very few cons to it. Some areas and these were few had some graphic issues and by few I mean I can probably count them on one hand few. The game at times was easy which wasn’t a major problem and it didn’t ruin the game in the least. The game didn’t have many glitches ether. It crashed only once and that was a fault on my end for having to much running at once. To top that off I didn’t patch the game. In fact there were no patches available when I loaded the game so basically they ironed out most of the problems in the game before launch. A good use of time of a push back if I ever saw one.
The game had decent length to it as well. The levels total in the high teens and each pointful and not just a filler level, the game didn’t have filler levels. I say this because the game could have easily ended much earlier then it did. I mean many levels earlier not just a few. Yet the game delivered great length.
In conclusion I recommend this game to anyone and everyone. I would use the term work of art for it and it and that doesn’t mean that it is art. It is a game that is a game. Honestly this is probably going to be one of the most highly recommended games of my life. It was by far one of the best games I have played in a long time. That is not to say the games that I have played weren’t good. They were and some even great but this game just shines and that is rare. If you are a true gamer you will like this game, if not love it. This is a sleeper hit and you must pick it up. It is a must have and worth the price.

Though I have to add after seeing some of the other things people said that the game was never to be like Bioshock I don’t know where they heard that. Second the game does not have a frame rate issue.

More Info:  Cryostasis
Buy: Cryostasis