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LTTP: CRYOSTASIS: SLEEP OF REASON [one of the most obscure games out there] [review]

So I never played Cryostasis until now. Yesterday I finished the game and it's really good. A bit rough but very unique.
DEVELOPER: Action Forms
Platform: PC, Windows
Year: 2009

INTRODUCTION
Cryostasis sleep of reason came out 2009 exclusively for the pc. Microsoft windows to be precise. I'd like to say it made a big impact in the world of video games, but sadly, it didn't. It's a surprising title, you rarely see games coming out exclusively for the pc. There are games like that, but they're very rare. The biggest problem with cryostasis is that it ran like utter dog at the time of it's release. It was a very demanding game. Luckily, it's now an old game, so you can play it with all of it's bells n whistles. You would think that. But we'll talk about that later.

STORY
So what's this game about? Cryostasis takes place in the 80's on a Russian nuclear powered icebreaker called the North wind. You play as a metereologist named Alexander Nesterov and you're supposed to come aboard the ship but after arriving you then find out that the ship has been shipwreck since 1968 and the whole crew have gone bizzare mutations and transformations.
You have mental echoes through out the game. Basically you can alter the events through this mechanic and reverse the fate. It's a cool mechanic. Through this mechanic, the whole plot is presented to you. You'll slowly start to piece out what exactly led to the ship being shipwrecked and all the events that transpired through out this time. It makes no sense in the beginning but as you delve further it all starts to make sense. It's an interesting story too. It's about a captain ignoring the warnings of his first officer and relying on his years of sailor experience instead of technology and weather instrumentation. And since this is a nuclear power vessel, once the ship finally hit ice and chaos ensued, well, you can already imagine what's gonna happen next. That's as far as I'm comfortable talking about the story without treading into spoiler territory.

GAMEPLAY
How is the gameplay? Well this is a first person shooter. It has a mix of melee combat and gun combat as well. The melee combat is a bit clunky, I have to say. It works but ultimately it feels like a watered down version of Condamned criminal origins. You can block attacks with the right mouse button and you attack with the left mouse button. There are different combos of sorts, you hold a for walking left and then press attack, you're gonna perform an attack that's aimed left. It's an okay combat system but it's very clunky. The melee weapons are cool. You get a broken valve as a weapon, an axe and a chain wrapped around your hands. Interesting design. Then there the fire weapons. You get a solid repertoare, first one you're gonna get is the mosin nagant. It fires one bullet per shot and it's a slow weapon. The time between shots is big. But the realod time. My god, this is the slowest realoading weapon I ever saw in a video game. And I love it. It adds a feeling of tension and a strategic element. Then there's the mosin nagant scoped version, which is the same gun but with a scope attached to it. Then there's the Tokarev SVT which is a semi auto gun and this was my favourite weapon in the whole game. The lamest weapon in the game is the flare gun by far, it does absolutely no damage to the enemies. I really don't understand the purpose of this weapon. The only automatic weapon in the game is the ppsh. And it's quite useful against some tougher enemies. The most interesting weapon has to be the water gun. Yeah, the water gun. Since the game takes place in a very, very cold place, pouring water on someone is a deadly thing to do. And the water gun does just that. The only downside is you have to be almost point blank range. The ammo for this gun are the icicles you find hanging of the ceiling and other things in the game. I like how there's no ammo indicator in the game. The game just shows you the satchels of amunition and bullets. You gotta count them yourself. It's very cool. Weapons are clunky but I believe it was designed this way on purpose. You're not a military guy and you're wearing a lot of artic clothes so it makes sense. I gotta say, the movement in this game is very slow. Really, really slow. I dig it, and it makes sense. Yes, you can run, but your stamina drains quite fast. The main mechanic in this game is the heat system. So you're on a ship that is shipwrecked in the middle of the north pole. So you know it's cold as a whore's heart. Basically, you have to search for sources of heat, lights, ovens, fires, etc. That sorta stuff. And there's no health in the game. You replenish your body heat, health and stamina at these heat sources. It's a cool mechanic, I admit. I like the environments. It's all frozen and covered with frost and icicles. Really cold design. But as cool as the environments are, they're a bit claustrophobic and cramped. And this can sometimes be a problem when dealing with the enemies. The enemy design is cool. You're basically killing crewman. Mutated crewman. They vary in design, they go from regular looking dudes to a heavily mutated mutant with some strange wings on their back. Later on in the game they start to wear guns. That's where the big flaws come out. The environments are cramped and the whole combat system is clunky as hell. It's all manageable till there's a single enemy, but when there's more then one, it becomes a tedious task.
So I mentioned the mental echoes. You come across a dead body and you enter in his footsteps via this mechanic. You'll try to change the fate through these mental echoes. Most of them are pretty interesting and sometimes involve a simple puzzle. But it's all on rails. There's no freedom and you have to do everything the game wants you to do. But they are cool sequences. I especially like the one with dogs. So basically the crewman was eaten by dogs and you have to change that fate. You go in the mental echoo and avoid the dogs. It's really disturbing.
Some people are classifying this as a horror game. Well, I would disagree. It's more of an atmospheric action game with elements of horror.

GRAPHICS
When this game came out in 2009, it was a stunning looking game. But it also ran like a dog on machines of that time. It was a very un optimized game. I remember back in the day, I came to friends house and he was playing this game. And he had a beastly rig for that time. It ran at 20 frames per second. It was that bad. I think the game holds up today, graphically speaking. Everything is sprinkled with frost and it adds to the immersion. The textures are sharp and can still pass today. It's a really good looking today, even if it's 11 years old. I adore the physics system in the game. Everything moves around, boxes, oxygen tanks and other inanimate objects. I love it. I'm a sucker for game physics. So the performance. Since this is an 11 year old game, you think this wouldn't be an issue to run on any modern rig, right? Boy, you're wrong. I first booted the game and set everything on max. And it was a slide show. I was getting around 15 frames per second. I was shocked. So I thought this is maybe because I'm playing the game on an AMD card. Remember, this game uses the Physics API by Nvidia. So I turned off that. It didn't improve anything. I had to google what was going on because the game was unplayable in this state. I found that you have to turn off Nvidia Physics and also switch to using shader model 3,0. 4,0 shader model causes these performance issues. So I did that and it ran great. Locked 60fps with everything maxed out, well, except Nvidia physics and that shader model. It was all great until about 2 hours before the game's ending. Then it started to crash heavily. Everytime it crashed I got a message saying something like couldn't load the texture not enough video memory. And I was shocked. How can there be not enough memory. My vega 64 has 8 gigabytes of video ram. There were no cards that had 8 gigs of vram in 2009. Then I had to google that again because I was close to finishing the game but I was unable to do so because of these crashes. The solution is to set everything in the options to medium. And I did that and was able to finish the game. But this really pissed me off. I'm fine with lowering details in a modern game but lowering quality in an 11 year old game. That's some BS right there.
And there are quite a few other technical problems. Falling down through textures. That happened twice on me. Also the enemies clip through objects and doors. Not a big problem but in a game that wants you to get immersed as much as possible, these types of glitches really pull you out of the immersion.


THE BAD
clunky combat
a bit claustrophobic environments
many technical problems and glitches
the ending is just pure BS

CONCLUSION
Should you play Cryostasis if you haven't already? Well, I think it's worth playing. It's a slow paced atmospheric game with unique mechanics and it has a really interesting story. It's an 8 hour long journey through a big wrecked and sunken ship. If you can overlook some of the technical problems and some jank in the combat, I think you're gonna really enjoy this game. If I had to give a score to this game, I'd give it 7.2 outta 10.

And if you're too lazy to read, you can watch the review in 4k. My own.
 
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Never finished when it came out however I was impressed how the snow melted and how it looked. It ran like absolute shit and was quite boring which is why I gave up on it.
 
Never finished when it came out however I was impressed how the snow melted and how it looked. It ran like absolute shit and was quite boring which is why I gave up on it.
I think you should give it another chance. It has an insane atmosphere. And running it today shouldn't be a problem, just set to Shader model 3,0 and turn off Nvidia Physicx.
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
Seeing this thread I thought is new one, shame. It was good game and if I remember correctly it was technical behemoth when was released.
 
Seeing this thread I thought is new one, shame. It was good game and if I remember correctly it was technical behemoth when was released.
Yeah, we ain't getting a sequel, that team went bust. It was a bitch to run. But playing it on todays machines is worth it. There are still some technical issues but pretty playable overall.
 

M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
Yeah, we ain't getting a sequel, that team went bust. It was a bitch to run. But playing it on todays machines is worth it. There are still some technical issues but pretty playable overall.
Yeah I finished it, I remember that, but not much from the game, due to "recent" difficulties with memory. But well, I played Mass Effect, so all that dying shit was worth it : D
 

Terenty

Member
Wow, i thought i was the only one who played the game. For me its a masterpiece of atmosphere and story. I played the russian version (i'm from Russia) and it was great. The story is deep and with good message.

Its actually up there with Silent Hill 2 for me. Also the fact they managed to maintain such atmosphere without any music is a feat.
 
Wow, i thought i was the only one who played the game. For me its a masterpiece of atmosphere and story. I played the russian version (i'm from Russia) and it was great. The story is deep and with good message.

Its actually up there with Silent Hill 2 for me. Also the fact they managed to maintain such atmosphere without any music is a feat.
I'm so glad you loved it. I thought it was a masterpiece. It is a bit rough with some combat jank and technical problems, but it's a gem.
And I agree with you on the story. It's a great story. Up there with Sh2.
Did you like the ending in Cryostasis?
 
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kingbean

Member
I played it back when it came out. I never got very far into it, but I enjoyed the atmosphere but it ran like shit so I gave up on it.

Makes me want to replay the Penumbra games.
 
Damn you!
If you really wanna know, I would suggest playing the game. I guess you have a machine that can run it. If you do, just make sure you're using shader model 3,0.
If you don't wanna play it but you have to know the story, here, I copied the entire plot from wikipedia for ya.

Watch out! SPOILERS!
Cryostasis takes place in 1981 on an Arktika-class nuclear-powered icebreaker called the North Wind near the North Pole. The main character, Alexander Nesterov, is a Russian meteorologist who was supposed to board the ship for a lift home after completing a tour of duty at the pole; however he finds it's been shipwrecked since 1968 and its dead crewmen have undergone bizarre metamorphosis. Through the game the character finds fragments of Maxim Gorky's fairy tale The Flaming Heart of Danko, which parallels what happened to the ship and its crew.

The game starts with Alexander approaching the North Wind on a dog sled. The ship's horn sounds, and the ice all around starts to break; he falls down through but the bottom ice is thick enough that he doesn't end up in the water. He then enters the ship by following one of the dogs.

From flashbacks and Mental Echo the ship's tragic past is put together. The captain took a perilous course through the ice, ignoring the warnings of his first officer, who placed his faith in the latest ice-detecting instrumentation, in favour of his own instinct and seagoing experience. The ship collided with an iceberg and suffered significant damage. The first officer reported the captain's mistake when sending a report to the HQ; in return, the HQ responded that the North Wind, which had already been considered long in the tooth, would be decommissioned upon returning to port. The ship's security officer, knowing that the message will break the captain, warned the first officer to not relay it to him. However, trying to take revenge for the captain's disdainful attitude, and hoping for rapid promotion, he did. The demoralized captain took it to his old friend, the chief engineer; however, tired and frustrated, the chief engineer also dismissed him. Whilst the ship was undergoing repairs, it gradually became trapped by the shifting ice. After a few weeks, in an attempt to regain the respect of his crew and to finally break free of the ice, the captain decided to ram the encircling ice at full speed. However, he was wounded during the ramming when thrown off balance, and the ramming attempt was then stopped by both the security officer and the first officer, who threw the ship into full reverse, giving the dangerous "back, emergency" order. As a result of this the engine room caught fire and the nuclear reactor core destabilized; as the crew subsequently began to slowly die from cold, malnutrition and radiation poisoning, the first officer, security officer and chief engineer tried to escape in a helicopter with the wounded Captain, abandoning the doomed ship and the rest of her crew. As the helicopter took off, the ship's nuclear core finally failed, engulfing the ship (and the airborne helicopter, which was directly above it) with a mysterious energy force, turning the ship and its crew into the monstrous, ghostly form encountered by Nesterov.

Throughout the game, the main character comes across fallen crew members and has a chance to correct their mistakes by taking control of their actions in the past using the Mental Echo; as he does so, elements of the backstory of the ship change multiple times. For example, in the unmodified back-story, the outraged crew managed to bring down the escaping helicopter during take-off, and its wreckage remained on deck to the present day – after Nesterov goes back and corrects certain actions, in the altered back-story the helicopter successfully clears the pad and its wreckage consequently vanishes from the present, clearing a path for him. However, throughout the game, Nesterov is never able to access the corpses of the three officers responsible for the catastrophe itself, either because they were on another part of the ship he cannot reach, or because they successfully escaped from the ship on the helicopter and are no longer there, and so he is unable to prevent the original tragedy.

At the end of the game, having drawn his attention by repeatedly meddling with history, a battle with Kronos, the titan of time, ensues. If Nesterov wins, Kronos rewards his efforts by allowing him to choose to use Mental Echo on one of the three missing officers, and hence avert the entire tragedy. Possessing the first officer, he may choose not to give the decommissioning note to the Captain and instead go to help the crew with repairs; by possessing the chief engineer, he can sympathize and cheer up the Captain when he arrives with the message from HQ; by possessing the chief of security, he can choose not to support the first officer when he tries to stop the Captain from ramming the ice, instead helping the wounded Captain, whose ramming effort then succeeds.

After the final flashback, the character is returned to the beginning of the game. The dog sled sequence starts the same, but when Alexander is about to fall down the cliff, he is saved by the Captain, who, together with the first officer, the chief of engineering and the chief of security, leads him aboard the North Wind; now intact and free of ice.
 
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I finished it in 2009. It commits to its vision in a way most games don't. I loved every minute of it while also finding it extremely oppressive. I really liked the story too.
It has the best PhysX effects of any game, by the way.
 

Patrick S.

Banned
Grimbeard has a nice video on this game, too. I remember I could barely run this game on my then four year old PC (AMD 3200+, GTX 6800 Ultra).
 
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