I review Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason again

This review is better written than the last one.

If you don't feel like reading there is a YouTube video found here. So now you will have video footage as well as regular narration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oggDhRIVUI

Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason is a game in which psychic meteorologist Alexander Nesterov must board a crashed nuclear icebreaker somewhere along the Arctic Circle and relive the memories of its crewmembers in order to try to save them from their fate. That sounds weird, doesn't it? There's no fancy way to describe it, really.

Cryostasis can be technically defined as both a first person shooter and a puzzle adventure. However, the game by very few means fits in either genre. It contains the basics of both, but not much more. If you are a shooterhead you will find basic AI with which to battle and pretty basic but meaty guns. If you are an adventurer you will find easy puzzles that sometimes even instruct you on what to do. If you are either or both you won't find much fun doing it all in corridors either, no matter how shiny they are.

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. Take Condemned as an example of what can technically be defined as a mystery game. While the player is given forensic tools, the story is utter nonsense and the entire mystery portion is an adventure in on-screen instruction following. Condemned should be defined only as a first person fighting game.

The two games are polar opposites, both prime examples of games misunderstood in terms of genre, but I digress with my little speech about Condemned. I digress about that terrible pile of faeces and am moving onward toward the situation with Cryostasis. Cryostasis is a mystery game and nothing more. Despite the poor shooting and easy puzzles, it is still something magical.

The story in Cryostasis is the best story I have ever found in a video game, and possibly the best science fiction story I have ever come across in my entire life. 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 I 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 shooting is part of the storytelling. If you play it as a simple first person shooter you will be disappointed because the plan of the game is not to throw a challenge at you, but rather show you the mutations of the crew. You can look at the man who has two PPSHs and searchlights attached to his arms who emits a siren sound when he sees you. You can see him as a weird monster who you have to shoot. You could also see him and wonder what character he represents and how that ties into the story. It's kind of obvious what he represents when I spell it out like that but there is so much symbolism strewn throughout the game.

The puzzles are present in order to simply add realism, but not much else. I'm fairly certain that there are doors on nuclear icebreakers with more than one handle. However, it doesn't get more complex than that in this 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 is designed for the gameplay to last much longer than the eight hours that will be taken to finish the game in a traditional sense. It's a lot like how good horror (note how I said good horror) will leave the player with a sense of dread walking up to his bedroom in the pitch black staircase after getting a midnight snack and possibly a pickaxe for safe measure. 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.

This is not only a step forward in storytelling, it is also executed very well. However, I feel obliged to say that a large portion of humanity is pretty stupid. I'm not saying anyone who does not favor the game is pretty stupid. I'm not even saying that anyone who overlooks the gameplay of the mystery is stupid. I'm saying that people who oppose such a thing are stupid. They are the sort of people who can go back to yelling that they commenced in sexual intercourse with whomever's mother in retaliation to being teabagged. Maybe even by me.

If I may take a few minutes to get my slobber off of how this game plays, I would also like to comment on the esthetics of it as well. Let's start off with the graphics, shall we. Well, they are nearly perfect, what with everything being very shiny. The environments, despite being very samey throughout, have a large amount of depth thanks to the fancy technology, which means that seeing water streaming down the walls of a recently lit room never gets old. I also need to incredibly commend the developers for making me feel like a human without being nauseated by weird screen movements. The feel of simply standing around after having saved someone's life is fantastic, as my player character Alexander Nesterov pants like a dog. Animations and physics all around are very nice.

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.

There is no musical score to the game other than a main menu theme and odd synth mixed with odd percussion, but there might as well be. The sound technology in Cryostasis is quite fantastic in nearly every way. Not only does nearly every asset of the game sound pretty great by itself, but the echoes of a Soviet wartime rifle down a long ventilation shaft has never sounded this real apart from actual real life. The high volume of every single noise going on adds to tension where there would otherwise be little in some little horror tricks the game plays on you.

As it stands, it is my opinion that Cryostasis is the best video game I've ever played because of the leap forward in trying to morph major elements of video games together. I'm not against video games that have great stories and still go by traditional ways of telling them, such as Metro 2033 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 entirely the antithesis of a pretty closed-minded old woman's conclusion that all video games have something to do with the downfall of society. 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.