[guy who hasn’t played any adventure games besides Disco Elysium] Hmm...getting a lot of "Disco Elysium" vibes from this...

I think Stasis: Bone Totem is something of a victim of its own fan base. While I try not to let other peoples’ opinions of games influence my own, it’s impossible to fully deny that something getting wall-to-wall praise is going to set my expectations high. I’ve scarcely heard a single bad word said about any aspect of this besides the AI art that it launched with, and that all got patched out. This has a steep enough rating curve to suggest that it’s phenomenal. And while Stasis: Bone Totem is definitely good, I think that’s about all that it manages to be. This isn’t the earth-shaker that was promised. But hell, what is? We can’t all be juggernauts. There’s hardly anything wrong with only being good.

It’s not difficult to see why people love this game as much as they do. It has an interesting world, interesting characters, wonderful audio design, and a truly impressive pre-rendered graphical style on the interactables that hearkens back to old CD-ROM adventure games. I would die for Moses, but he wouldn’t want that for me. The relationship that he develops with Faran is far and away the juiciest piece of meat that the game asks you to sink your teeth into. Calaban is a distant second, though he’s still enjoyable; the irony is that the married couple seem to have the least chemistry out of anyone aboard this abandoned ship. I definitely think that the game tries to lean a bit too hard into crafting arc phrases that get repeated over and over and over again — every character independently thinks to themselves that "all you need to do is blink" for something to change — but there's a charm to it. Again, it's carried hard by Moses. He's a simple bear, but he's got a good soul. There's something deeply upsetting about a childish AI struggling to deal with feelings of loss and grief that it wasn't built to understand that could (and probably should have) carried this entire game by itself. I mostly just wanted everyone else to stop talking because they were taking up valuable screen time that otherwise would have gone to Moses and Faran, who remain two of the greatest homies to ever hang out on the bottom of the ocean floor.

While I liked the dialog, the narration prose gets on my nerves. Olga Moskvina is credited as the sole writer for the environmental descriptions — knowing that she worked on Disco Elysium before Stasis: Bone Totem is nothing short of shocking, seeing how steeply the writing quality has declined from that game to this one. A friend of mine spent several evenings trying to cope with the fact that Michael Kirkbride wrote Immortals of Aveum, and all of the laughter I directed at him has now rocketed back to me at double the velocity. How do you fall off this hard? This fiercely? I was convinced that it was all being written by someone who had never written before, not by a co-writer of one of my favorite pieces of media ever released.

Ten-dollar words are everywhere in every little green blob, covering them like smallpox blisters. So much of the vocabulary here feels almost as though it was destroyed in the editing stage by someone doing right-click thesaurus swaps on every other word. I feel like I'm reading something that was put together solely to flex the author's new English-to-Lovecraft translation program. Even the most boring of objects are "eldritch", or "Stygian", or "noctilucent", or any other archaic-ass word that doesn't quite mean what the writer seems to think they do. An emptied suitcase isn't an empty suitcase, it's "disemboweled". A film on top of water isn't an oily film, but an "odorous waxy complexion". Even when you are looking at something that's meant to be horrifying, the prose mostly just makes me roll my eyes; a cesspit of blood and bodies is described as a "thickening grume-river of congealed blood and matted offal [which] incites bubbles that vomit up distressing fetors of deep decay". Perhaps the worst of the lot is the simple statement that a bench "broadcasts discomfort". Ugh.

A big part of what I liked about Disco Elysium was the fact that it used some remarkably simple prose to convey some very heavy topics. It was as accessible as it was powerful. Similarly, a big part of what I liked about The Devil's Imago was that it knew when to invoke the sublime and when to dial it back; that which was beautiful was described as though it was beautiful, and the mundane was described as mundane. Disco Elysium was broadly simple, and The Devil's Imago was broadly complex, but neither of those works pigeon-holed themselves into being all of one or all of the other. There's nothing wrong with being straightforward as much as there's nothing wrong with being oblique, but when you're garrulously invoking expressions and articulations absent the favorable junction of circumstances by which your inscriptions may abide — that is to say, when you're dropping endless strings of big, fancy words without giving the rest of your writing a chance to breathe — it makes your work look amateurish.

I have to conclude that this is, ultimately, a directorial problem. I know that Olga Moskvina is capable of far better than what's here; I've read her poetry, and I've read her contributions to Disco Elysium. She's capable of some stunningly beautiful prose, and none of her other work falls into the overly-verbose trappings of the environmental descriptions in Stasis: Bone Totem. She writes with rhythm everywhere but here. The original Stasis had a similar problem — provided you consider any of what I've complained about here to be "a problem" — which only furthers my belief that she was encouraged to mangle her writing to make it fit into this universe. It's as if she was told to make it more gross every time she submitted a draft. This is like how potato chips were invented. Fifth tit revision in a row.

It's here that I realize that I've dedicated about six hundred words purely to Olga Moskvina's incidental descriptions and that there are other aspects of the game worth discussing. A decent pivot would be to say that this devolves into being tonally all over the place by the end of the game. Moses and Faran both die at the same time, with Faran succumbing to the loss of his life support, and Moses tearing himself in half to get the rescue suit to his humans. We're treated to a cutscene where Mac cries the Tear of the Goofy Goober over the sound of tinkling piano keys. He then rips the medkit off of the support suit that Moses died to retrieve and triumphantly states "Hmph! Medical kit retrieved!" not even five seconds later. He's back to sighing and rolling his eyes at the Russian ghost in his brain while Charlie lays dying of ancient parasites not ten feet away, so it's good to know that there's nothing so serious as to stop Mac from looking to camera like Office Jim whenever he discovers a new world-shattering revelation. Stone Age island-dwelling molepeople sank to the bottom of the ocean where they founded Latin American Atlantis and are currently preparing to re-invade the surface world, and Mac mostly just seems annoyed by the whole affair. Hell, Mac, I feel you. I can't pretend like this isn't stupid either.

Ultimately, Stasis: Bone Totem is good. I just can't shake the feeling that something is missing. Looking at all of the pieces individually, I feel like this should all work together; you assemble them into a singular work, and it feels like it's less than the sum of of its parts. Maybe that's wrong. It might be that the parts themselves failed to live up to their own potential. In the places where this had every opportunity to be a slam dunk, it instead manages only to drop in a lay-up, and the two points you get from the latter aren't worth the same two points you get from the former. Nobody's ever made a highlight reel worth watching comprised of just finger rolls.

I got the transcendence chip so that my immortal soul can go to the Nexus, sponsored by Walmart.