KickStarter STASIS - An Indie Space Adventure Game - now with CAYNE DLC

[Dexter]

CAYNE

- Changes to resolution seem an obvious positive from the start, but somehow the backgrounds don't consistently look as good as STASIS in parts (higher resolution without more attention to detail), it kinda differs from room to room though (some look a lot better than others)
- 3D character and animations look even more awkward now compared to STASIS
- I don't like the changes to the Save System, inventory and the way object highlight and a lot of the UI works now, including the main menu in comparison. The PDA UI is somewhat of an improvement, but the single interact-able UI elements etc. look like "overlayed Unity text fields" instead of parts of the world like in STASIS, the large glowing rotating symbols indicating exit are also more intrusive than the simple "Exit" text.
- Combination of things make it look more amateurish than STASIS
- Pregnant lady in some metal harness can sure be rather athletic for the size of her belly, also kinda aloof at times given the situation she's found herself in
- Puzzles seem more "complex", not sure if for the best, the game starts with you having to figure out that you have to walk into the scanner in time after activating it to even get out of the first room (likely to filter a lot of potential players right there, given that only 56% have that achievement) and the second thing you have to do is use a can of protein powder as fingerprint dust on a terminal that I likely only figured out so quickly because there was a fingerprint dust puzzle in Thimbleweed Park I've played not long ago
- I got stuck at opening the PDT Printer room with a lot more rooms to backtrack through (instead of like in STASIS where sections lock off when you're done with them, new ones only ever open up all the time here) and likely wouldn't have gotten by for some time without looking it up, I tried using everything on the fuse and backtracking through the entire facility, but apparently you have to use the protein powder on the ID card (for some reason?)... and some of the Secrets where you have to exactly stand in a non-marked corner of a large room, Neva Eva
- Solved some of the puzzles by just randomly trying to combine inventory items after that point, like the stripper pole and the Blade
- Not sure about the constant dialogue cutscenes with "The Voice" where control is taken away from the player, felt annoying
- PDA stories are better interwoven with the game world and more interesting than the latter parts of STASIS, although a bit bizarre with the grotesque inbred creatures on display that look like they're out of something like House of 1000 Corpses or Head of the Family
- The protagonist is less unlikable than I thought going in, she kinda grows on you, like a fungus
- I knew I had to kill the big beastie with the force field since I first saw the button at the bottom right before I even knew it existed - the only question was how to get it there, no need for a big green glowing hologram over the body

I guess it's nice enough for a Free game, more than the sum of its parts and some improvements, but overall it doesn't hold up to STASIS. Is also a lot less subdued and ambiguous about the "Evil Corporation" part that apparently greenlit all the experiments and functions like some sort of cult instead of rogue mad scientists, also inferior to how it was handled in STASIS.

Beautiful Desolation up next.

 

[good fucking shit happen]

its almost an extreme heightened version of 70's horror.

Yeah, it did come across that way, with the weird science and how the protagonist was and everything. I loved the head in a vat used as a computer and Grubelina was wonderfully bizarre, the kind of thing you don't expect to see in a modern game where devs don't have the confidence to throw weird things and situations at the player. Bone Totem will turn out great for sure if you guys throw ideas between you, I have only played a bit of Beautiful Desolation so far as I have been saving it for a rainy day, but from what I did see I thought it was awesome. It felt fresh and that is a rare thing to say about a game these days.

 

[V_K]

CAYNE is actually much harder in terms of puzzles

Funny, I actually found Cayne significantly easier than Stasis.

Welcome to every adventure game developers nightmare.

Well, given that nightmares are your bread and butter, shouldn't you be happy?

 

[Pyke]

I'll spend weeks researching a specific historical event, linking certain pieces of history together, and thinking how the rules of the world can support this part of the story, and Nic will go "Make it a big fucking insect with udders".

It's a good balance - he pushes me out of my (sometimes safe and probably a little boring) need to be grounded in reality, and I will take his more insane ideas and pull them closer to a realistic (at least within the rules of our world) baseline. I'm a big 'background lore' guy - so I've generally got a pretty good handle on how to make things 'fit' in our world.

 

[Pyke]

 

[good fucking shit happen]

Nice. You did nail that thing about the puzzles having a clear goal before you started figuring them out.

 

[manifest]

Played through CAYNE over the last couple of days. I've kept my eye on these games since the early STASIS announcements, but I work up the bent and the patience for maybe 2-3 adventure games a year. Ramping straight through it in one sitting is usually the way to go, and I've always favoured short-format the likes of Amanita Design or Paratropic. This extends to other media as well: I love chamber dramas, anthology series, animation shorts. Keeping the scope of a project small, limiting locales to a single structure or set. CAYNE fills this particular niche well. Minor spoilers to follow, if anyone else is 7 years late to the party.

Chris's art is top of field for a 2-man studio. They've won awards for this and it's apparent from any screenshot, and it still bears repeating. Lovingly-crafted gore is in short supply these days, so from a fellow Dead Space enjoyer I appreciated what's on offer here. I know it's hearkening back to the golden days of isometric art like Sanitarium and some of the Codex's golden calves, but the static nature of the environments did perhaps jar if I were to nitpick. You traverse most areas several times, even on an ideal route, and while there are transitions based on your actions these mostly take place in cutscenes. In particular, the Annex and the Crew Quarters could've used a little flair, but their relative starkness does give some reprieve from the more wanton scenes. However, a compelling scenario is the one thing the adventure game can offer an otherwise fundamentally flawed design, devoid of kinetic pleasure, and The Brotherhood has joined the elevated few like Wormwood who can deliver. I'm a little flabbergasted at the industry and raw talent on display here, even years after seeing the initial reveals.

Puzzles are of the standard item-combining, inventory-management variety. These mostly follow a clear logic, and there's limited enough interactions and environmental prompts to essentially brute force few arcane ones. Blessedly there's no sliding of tiles or boxes of any kind. I reached for a walkthrough immediately to stop that man from screaming, though. There's a few pixel-hunt secrets that I likewise had no issue cheating. Your avatar is nine months pregnant, so some of the backtracking for clues in a particular log entry became tedious. I should have liked to have an SSD install for the transition loads. The messages could've easily been stored in a journal to reference later, rather than leaving the PDAs on the ground. You also withstand several explosions (including a fusion? meltdown) like Schwarzenegger tanking the nuke at the end of Predator, and each for each one I thought "that bitch/baby is dead." For the most part, though, items and puzzles followed a clear order of progression and I didn't spend much time aimlessly wandering. Could just be a consequence of the small playing area, we'll see with STASIS and Beautiful Desolation (terrible title, by the way).

Story and writing-wise, I'm somewhat torn. Overall I found the premise compelling. The opening scene with the birthing extractor is some harrowing shit, and despite nods to some very clear influences (e.g. your protagonist is named "Hadley") the plot manages to avoid feeling derivative. If anything, it's almost cozy, despite the extreme subject matter. It feels like a throwback to a less restrained, less politically self-interested era of sci-fi, and games in general. As for the prose itself, some of the environmental descriptions were a bit too purple. A few too many adjectives thrown around, but at least they're evocative and furnish the scenery well enough. There's quite a few of them, a bit reminiscent of the wonderful descriptions on every surface and object in System Shock. The crew's diary logs suffer a bit more. Large text dumps—adventure gaming's Achilles' heel—are admittedly the bane of my fucking existence, so anything I don't despise is well ahead of the pack. There's a clear throughline to the way the story is told through each crewmember's entries and structurally, it holds up well. However, there's an air of cartoonish excess permeating the scenario that hurts the game's otherwise very dismal, grimy foundation. Some of the characters (in particular Joseph and Julia) clearly felt like an inexpert author affecting a voice that they were neither competent or practiced enough to write. The character's motivations are more or less clear, only given that they are all extreme sexual deviants. Their perfunctory deaths feel clichéd rather than cathartic, like Friday the 13th with exotic orifices. This excess also extends to the game's attempts at humour, which are uniformly lame and very often crass, and the protagonist's upbeat attitude is at odds with her situation.

CAYNE just comes so close to getting it right that it'd be a shame not to kick it a little, for motivation. No recent trendy transhumanist optimism on display here, just gleeful Hobbesian antipathy, can't help but grin. I recommend.

 

[Pyke]

Thanks for that indepth writeup Manifest! I really appreciate it!

 

[manifest]

Thanks for that indepth writeup Manifest! I really appreciate it!

Hello, it is always nice to see the devs in their designated bullying boards here at the 'Dex. The pace of adventure games leaves me, starved of my usual dopamine-induced trance, free to compose critical essays at length on the finer points of game design and writing technique. Naturally, I have no particular qualifications or achievements regarding these fields, so I hope the full weight and import of my feedback rings through your head as much as my own.

In all good candour, I dove straight into STASIS after CAYNE. The damned marketing demo did its job and I'd struggle to remember another series I did that with. I hope zero moneys from your Gumroad store goes to those leeches at Valve. For the most part, any complaints seem to have been improved with the sequel or addressed in the previews for Bone Totem (looking forward to the highlight button.) I got a genuine scare from the security hologram, well done there. I'm enjoying the generally bleaker tone, and the suicide animations. Auto-trepanation is how I imagine the boys in Cape Town grew the talent to make these games in the first place.

Some notes on style: this is a delicate matter, and in trying to properly convey why particular words grate on the palette I feel the familiar suction of the editor's swamp pulling at my ankles, trying to evoke perfect rhythm for my own edification as well as others'. There are endless permutations of a phrase that can occur before it is inked, and weaving perfect metonymy is the jealous gift of greater talents than mine. I have to restrain myself re-writing anything I make a second pass over. Assuredly, I will never be published and seldom even read in this lifetime, so I'll content myself with dragging others into my swamp. I've written down a few words and phrases that stuck out to me in STASIS and CAYNE to perhaps better illustrate their offence.

It is strange to describe a spaceship as having "tremors." This may, in fact, be the exact phrase NASA uses, but it seems strange to describe airplane turbulence as "tremors," a word I associate with geological disturbances or muscle contractions. Similarly, I thought the usage of the words "menagerie," "smog," "hillocks" and "iron lung" less-than proper in their given contexts. If I were a middle school English teacher, especially an ESL teacher (I don't know the author's native tongue) I would probably praise this unusual phraseology, but there is a pattern of florid rather than precise descriptions running through pretty much every bit of flavour text. "The trams grip the tracks greedily with their many legs;" "A multitude of machines and pipes knitted together, lie redundant." This shit sounds juvenile, and it's a shame with the obvious amount of effort that went into writing them. I don't have alternative corrected passages to offer you, so I'll betray myself a bit and offer Calvino, Melville, McCarthy or, from games, the lore entries from Brigador as masterful examples of the precision I'm talking about here.

Meta elements of storytelling are likewise a tricky matter. I didn't like the self-aware log entries, wondering who would ever read them, but when the protagonist quipped on what a useful drill he was lugging around he voiced my thoughts exactly, and I laughed. The log-entries-in-the-wreckage style of storytelling probably fits the resources and scope of a small developer, and it lends itself to non-linear storytelling well. Yet, it feels a played out. I'm already getting Bioshock flashbacks before Bone Totem is even released. I suspect that game's story is already mostly locked in, structurally, but in Alien and The Thing we got to see the disaster in motion. It'd be comical to watch Kurt Russell's eyes slowly widen as he reads diaries off of corpses. For future devs doubtlessly employing this trope, rather than an amnesiac survivor crawling through the ashes, maybe send an auditor to assess the damages, or a detective (or Ghost Trick) to reconstruct the events from the aftermath. Overall, I would place the quality of the log entries a little below CAYNE, so at least the trajectory is positive.

Unskippable cutscenes are probably a matter of preference, at least between the player and developer. I read faster than the voice actors speak, but you might as well get your money's worth. It's difficult to concentrate on some of the entries with looping dialogue or screaming in the background, we'll chalk that one up to diegetic consistency. At least the recordings are high quality. I'd be interested to know how much the actors coaxed their lines to sound a bit more natural during their sessions. Occasionally environmental noise overlaps with the dialogue, and coupled with processed distortion I had a hard time making out what was being said.

I don't think most games frankly deserve this level of scrutiny. It feels incorrect to compare to other meagerly-budgeted adventure games when the production quality feels closer to Visceral or Frictional. If every part of the game hit the same highs, I'd be apt to accuse you of witchcraft. Thanks for the incline.

 

[catfood]

The game is free on GOG at the moment.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

 

[lightbane]

He talked shit of CAYNE.
Although I agree the writing here is quite forced, as a 9-month pregnant woman can make Lara Croft's acrobatic moves with little issue.