E3 2007: Cryostasis Update

We head back into the cold to unravel the mystery that is Cryostasis.

Earlier this year we were introduced to a bunch of new games from 1C along with their announcement that they would be working with Atari to bring many of them to the United States. The Russian publisher usually has a pretty eclectic menagerie of games to show at each E3. This year was no exception though the number of titles was much smaller. One of the titles being shown was their AAA first-person shooter/adventure title called Cryostasis. It tells the story of a man that wakes up on a frozen icebreaker in the arctic only to find himself trapped in a struggle to survive the cold and the monsters wandering the corridors of the ghost ship.

Two major gameplay mechanics are at work here aside from the usual point and shoot FPS gameplay. These are the warmth meter and the mental echo. The warmth meter basically acts as health in this game. Because it's so cold, colder in some places than others, players will have to find sources of heat around the ship in order to keep themselves alive by warming their hands by the heat. Depending on the amount of heat, the environment will change and ice covering every aspect of the environment will melt away or freeze back over. Whenever one of the game's enemies appears in the area it'll bring the cold with it as well. In fact, most of the enemies do damage by lowering the temp.

These monsters are actually ex-crew members of this same doomed ship that have somehow been turned into ice demons. We were told that these monster crew were bad men that horded all of the heat sources to themselves once the boat became stranded dooming most of the other crew to their death. The mystery of how these men became the monsters they are in present time will be solved during gameplay.

The second mechanic known as mental echo is about gameplay and storytelling. When players come across dead bodies, they'll have to click on them to go into this mode which will transport the player into the role of that person. Most of the time this means they'll be completing an action that allows that dead person to live instead. Once a mental echo sequence is done, the player will warp back into his body and see changes in the environment based on what they did in the flashback. We've only seen snippets of this functionality but the idea is certainly interesting if a bit paradoxically challenged.

One thing we definitely noticed from the previous build we played at the 1C event earlier this year is that enemies are much easier to kill, which we're very thankful for. Now it takes a couple of shots from the bolt action rifle to knock and enemy down. It's still pretty stressful though because the bolt action takes a long time to rechamber the gun which allows the lumbering enemies to get closer and closer. Even in our short time with the game there were some decently tense situations and scary moments.

Look for more on Cryostasis as it gets closer to release.

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