Whoopsie. I was at the beach last week and missed the release of Cayne, the short and free follow-up to isometric horror adventure STASIS [official site]. But I m back to work today, so here I am to drop the freebie game bomb. Boom. I don t know if it s good or not, but Alec enjoyed the original in our STASIS review, even if it had the occasional daft puzzle. STASIS is all about momentum rather than stop-start headscratching, he said. It flows. This is just one half of my back-to-work newsing though. Creators, The Brotherhood, are also yodelling about a Kickstarter for their new game, Beautiful Desolation [official site], which is halfway to its funding target at this very mo, and has some new trailers to show off. … [visit site to read more]

The makers of STASIS, the cyber-gothic adventure game which Alec thought was just dandy, have revealed their new game, Beautiful Desolation [official site]. We don t know much except that it will be set in a post-apocalyptic Africa in which giraffes have grotesque bulb heads (see above to recoil in horror), but we do have this short trailer and more news on their free follow-up to STASIS.

… [visit site to read more]

I thought Stasis [official site] was a mostly excellent gothic sci-fi pointer-clickerer, a few frustrating mid-game puzzles and its lack of support for high resolutions aside. My first world problems couldn’t hold an eerily flickering candle to those faced by protagonist John Maracheck in his nightmarish bio-horror trek across a System Shockish spaceship, of course. Unsurprisingly, South African devs The Brotherhood are working on a follow-up. Surprisingly, it’s going to be free. And also has full resolution support, which my monitor would be delighted about, in the event it somehow achieved sentience and didn’t then decide to kill me. … [visit site to read more]

Stasis [official site] is a traditional point and click adventure game with a sci-fi horror theme. Successfully Kickstarted by tiny South African studio The Brotherhood in 2013, it was released yesterday. Join me for some space-screaming.>

Perhaps the main reason adventure games and I broke up is that I found them too arbitrary to take seriously. The puzzles were so often at odds with the setting or theme, necessitating a suspension of disbelief (either that there really only are three usable objects in this room, or that the protagonist is simply too stupid to try anything else) that I was increasingly unwilling to provide in order to commune with some designer’s lateral thinking, or some writer’s gags. Even Grim Fandango, the last adventure game I loved, was guilty of this: that wonderful sense of journey regularly disrupted by an inherent illogic. I don’t enjoy puzzling for puzzling’s sake – but when it’s a puzzle which propels a game’s events onwards, that’s a different matter entirely. STASIS is all about momentum rather than stop-start headscratching. The majority of its puzzles act as natural stepping stones along its journey into body-horror darkness, not obstacles. It flows>.

… [visit site to read more]

Alec has been fascinated by isometric adventure-horror Stasis [official site] for a few years now with its bleak, foreboding atmosphere. A Kickstarter success story, it’s about a man coming out of the titular time-pause to discover the space station he’s on is broken in about seventeen different ways. Naturally it was being used for illicit research by an evil mega-conglomerate but it’s also now falling out of the sky in a decaying orbit. Around Neptune. Plus, of course, the various gribblies the facility has created are loose. Fun. All that and more in the launch trailer for the just-announced August 31st release date.

… [visit site to read more]