First of all, it's on sale on steam for such an insanely low price that even if you end up not liking it it won't be much of a loss.
This game won Gamespot's best story of 2009 over games like Dragon Age, and rightfully so.
I bought it a few months ago for $20, and it's atmosphere and story surpassed any other game I've played in recent years. Some aspects in this game are just brilliant. The story is dripping with symbolism and metaphors. I guarantee that this game will leave you thinking about what happened long after you finish the game.
Cryostasis should be defined only as a mystery game. That is truly what it is, but the lack of a steadily conclusive ending is what gives it its low ratings and makes people call it a shooter.
The story in Cryostasis is one of the best stories I have ever found in a video game, and possibly the best science fiction story I have ever come across. It covers the chronicles of the Soviet Russian Nuclear Icebreaker North Wind before, during, after, and distantly after a collision with an iceberg proving less than fatal to the entire ship only by chance.
When you play Cryostasis, the story takes precedent in every part of the game, and it wouldn't have it any other way. The storytelling, however, is what makes the game amazing. A good story isn't as great without an amazing way to tell it, and in my opinion, Cryostasis is the only game with a storytelling method that can only be found in a video game.
The real puzzle solving is the storytelling. That is the real gameplay. Because you don't use the controls to do something doesn't always mean what you're doing is not gameplay. Not many developers, and not many reviewers seem to realize this. The game requires forward thinkers, or at least people who like to learn to discern the plot for themselves, at least, the plot other than the basic synopsis. It is up to them to figure out everything that is happening. There is no specific conclusion to the plot given, where, say, in another mystery, the murderer is revealed no matter how thick the player is. The game treats its mystery like a real mystery, rather than that to which many gamers have become accustomed. If someone goes in thinking everything will be revealed throughout the course of the game and that that's the only reason Alexander Nesterov's Mental Echo ability is there, it's not entirely his fault that he gets slapped violently on the wrist and then hit with a confusion stick.
Cryostasis' goal is to make the player think about everything. The story is not just told through its human characters. It is told through its personified characters as well. No other game had me thinking about what a color scheme represented, what the fable of a man and his leading of the exiled population of a primitive village represented, what the heat and the cold represented. Some give me such a feeling slightly, such as Penumbra or Silent Hill 2, but nothing has gone as far as this.
However, the game's technology is very powerful and plenty of people, and I mean plenty of people have complained about it running very slowly, or it not being to run at all on even Herculean computers. I suggest that you check across the Internet about how well it runs on hardware similar to yours and make sure you have the patch if you buy the game. This game demands powerful hardware to be played on maximum settings.
As it stands, it is my opinion that Cryostasis is right up there with Deus Ex and Planescape Torment because of the leap forward in how a story can be told and the respect and detail given to the plot of a game. I'm not against video games that have great stories and still go by traditional ways of telling them, such as Mass Effect or Penumbra, and Action Forms' formula will definitely not work for many games based on story at all, but it works in Cryostasis, and it is truly intelligent. This is the kind of thing, that if it happened in someone's dream, it would leave Sigmund Freud studying it for months to try to uncover what all was happening. It is revolutionary.
This game won Gamespot's best story of 2009 over games like Dragon Age, and rightfully so.
I bought it a few months ago for $20, and it's atmosphere and story surpassed any other game I've played in recent years. Some aspects in this game are just brilliant. The story is dripping with symbolism and metaphors. I guarantee that this game will leave you thinking about what happened long after you finish the game.
Cryostasis should be defined only as a mystery game. That is truly what it is, but the lack of a steadily conclusive ending is what gives it its low ratings and makes people call it a shooter.
The story in Cryostasis is one of the best stories I have ever found in a video game, and possibly the best science fiction story I have ever come across. It covers the chronicles of the Soviet Russian Nuclear Icebreaker North Wind before, during, after, and distantly after a collision with an iceberg proving less than fatal to the entire ship only by chance.
When you play Cryostasis, the story takes precedent in every part of the game, and it wouldn't have it any other way. The storytelling, however, is what makes the game amazing. A good story isn't as great without an amazing way to tell it, and in my opinion, Cryostasis is the only game with a storytelling method that can only be found in a video game.
The real puzzle solving is the storytelling. That is the real gameplay. Because you don't use the controls to do something doesn't always mean what you're doing is not gameplay. Not many developers, and not many reviewers seem to realize this. The game requires forward thinkers, or at least people who like to learn to discern the plot for themselves, at least, the plot other than the basic synopsis. It is up to them to figure out everything that is happening. There is no specific conclusion to the plot given, where, say, in another mystery, the murderer is revealed no matter how thick the player is. The game treats its mystery like a real mystery, rather than that to which many gamers have become accustomed. If someone goes in thinking everything will be revealed throughout the course of the game and that that's the only reason Alexander Nesterov's Mental Echo ability is there, it's not entirely his fault that he gets slapped violently on the wrist and then hit with a confusion stick.
Cryostasis' goal is to make the player think about everything. The story is not just told through its human characters. It is told through its personified characters as well. No other game had me thinking about what a color scheme represented, what the fable of a man and his leading of the exiled population of a primitive village represented, what the heat and the cold represented. Some give me such a feeling slightly, such as Penumbra or Silent Hill 2, but nothing has gone as far as this.
However, the game's technology is very powerful and plenty of people, and I mean plenty of people have complained about it running very slowly, or it not being to run at all on even Herculean computers. I suggest that you check across the Internet about how well it runs on hardware similar to yours and make sure you have the patch if you buy the game. This game demands powerful hardware to be played on maximum settings.
As it stands, it is my opinion that Cryostasis is right up there with Deus Ex and Planescape Torment because of the leap forward in how a story can be told and the respect and detail given to the plot of a game. I'm not against video games that have great stories and still go by traditional ways of telling them, such as Mass Effect or Penumbra, and Action Forms' formula will definitely not work for many games based on story at all, but it works in Cryostasis, and it is truly intelligent. This is the kind of thing, that if it happened in someone's dream, it would leave Sigmund Freud studying it for months to try to uncover what all was happening. It is revolutionary.
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