Having just come from playing Cayne I pretty much knew what to expect with Stasis. I expected to not be a big fan of it’s puzzles but absolutely love everything else. This was spot on. The atmosphere was a delightful mess although the graphics were showing a bit of age compared to Cayne as they were lacking in colour variety and detail. The voice acting was top notch and everyone involved did a wonderful job. The music was great throughout. As for the puzzles, they were the same as Cayne, which is to say a mixed bag. My issue with many of them were the fact that many were what felt like random mixing of items and others required multiple tries. When I click on a valve and my character can’t turn it my train of thought never gets to “maybe I should try it exactly three more times” and several puzzles have this. Turning valve’s multiple times; hitting glass multiple times, etc. Usually in puzzle games something either works or it doesn’t. There was also a surgery puzzle I thought was terrible. The first part was alright but in part two of it you must hit buttons in a very specific order with little to go on as what that order is and if you die you start it from scratch. Being able to run was great. I do wish there was more of an objective list, it would have been very handy. I also wish that you could pause the game during dialogue but you can’t. You can die in the game but it isn’t really a big deal. A lot of it is common sense stuff of what not to do and if you do you respawn to a point usually shortly before. You never have to worry about enemies which is a bit weird. There are several creatures roaming about the ship; they have killed most of the crew; you can hear them running about; but they never attack you. I know the reason is probably due to combat not working well with a puzzle game but it’s still weird. I guessed the twists in the plot pretty much a mile away but the journey there was enjoyable enough I didn’t mind. The ending could have used a bit more of Epilogue but I guess in a way Cayne helps with that.
I played Stasis on Linux using the Linux beta. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs aside from Steam achievements not working. You can save whenever you want or there are auto save points as well. One thing I didn’t like was sometimes if I died the game would load an auto save point instead of my last manual save which was further along. It wasn’t a big deal as I just manually loaded the save file I wanted. There are no graphics options at all. Alt-Tab worked. I couldn’t monitor frame rate but I didn’t notice any lag. A couple times there were loading screens that lasted 3-5 seconds, which felt long for being on an NVME, but most loading screens were near instantaneous.
Game Engine: Visionaire Engine
Game Version Played: 1.3.9
Disk Space Used: 2.84 GB
GPU Usage: 4-15 %
VRAM Usage: 1165-3257 MB
CPU Usage: 2-11 %
RAM Usage: 2.9-3.6 GB
Despite the puzzles I really think Stasis is a solid game. Everything else is of such high quality I have to recommend it. Fans of the genre probably won’t mind the puzzles anyway. It’s worth it for the story; characters; voice acting; music and visual style. I finished the game in six hours and six minutes. I paid $5.74 CAD for it and felt that was fair value. Even $10 would have been alright.
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 21.3.7 | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB | Garuda Soaring White-tailed-eagle | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.16.16-zen1-1-zen