This review contains spoilers
I didn't like the previous Stasis enough to finish it, but I bought both of them together so I was going to end up giving this one a shot anyway. Luckily, it's an improvement on all axes.
The gameplay is significantly streamlined, featuring a ping system that takes the pixel-hunting guesswork entirely out of the equation. This works in conjunction with the good sense of pace the game inherits from its predecessor, such that there are always new puzzles to mess around with, but never so many at once as to be overwhelming (even with three protagonists to juggle). Another advantage of Bone Totem's is that it has an official walkthrough on its Steam page, which you'll need because there are two or three puzzles that are legit just horrible. Good hit rate overall, though.
I also much preferred Bone Totem's story over the original's. It has so many disparate elements shoved into it that it can't help but be interesting, even if I'd hesitate to call it "good". The Cayne Corporation from the original has been elevated to religion status, cranking its cartoon villainy quotient past "cliche" and onto "hilarious". Mac, one of the protagonists, even uses "Cayne" in place of "God" in his expletives (Ford only knows who would consider that a good idea). All of this is presumably due to the Nexus, some sort of digital heaven attained through an implant that uploads you to the cloud when you die. This is a premise that I think could have been pretty interesting if it had been given any narrative weight; instead, it's referred to rarely and obliquely, and by the time you've pieced together what it even is you have more important things to deal with.
Another example of Bone Totem's all-over-the-place-ness is the threats you encounter. It seems like every single employee at Deepsea-15 had their own pet science experiment, and even now I can't remember which of the ten different disasters I read about actually put the place out of its misery in the end. Many times, Bone Totem tells the classic anti-capitalist story of the faceless executive trampling over the passion of the ground-level employee because it isn't profitable... except at Cayne Corporation, everyone's passion seems to be for dangerous and morally repulsive cowboy science, and it makes the execs look almost like the good guys for trying to quash them. The parasite that gives everyone a shared hallucination was another one of those neat ideas that felt like it could have had more oomph, especially as a parallel to the Nexus, but you only get a bit of a glimpse into it near the end.
Speaking of the end... cannibal mole people! I appreciate their inclusion, as the occult symbolism lets the game greatly widen the scope and variety of its setpieces, though they have a pretty tenuous connection to the earlier half of the story since the Cayne scientists are all too busy with their own sins against God to care about the city of bone and flesh they live on top of.
Also one of the protagonists is a sapient teddy bear? It's an odd choice, to be sure. Most of Moses' arc didn't quite resonate with me: it's not very compelling for a robot to overcome fear or guilt, it just makes me wonder why a children's toy would be given those feelings in the first place. That said, once I got over that initial cynicism I found Moses' affectations pretty endearing, and his unlikely friendship with the shockingly earnest Faran ended up being my favorite part of the game.
This has been a very scattershot review, but in my defense it's a very scattershot game. That's not an approach I usually appreciate, but ultimately I think it worked out well for Bone Totem. In time, I'm bound to remember the stuff that stuck more than the stuff that didn't.
The gameplay is significantly streamlined, featuring a ping system that takes the pixel-hunting guesswork entirely out of the equation. This works in conjunction with the good sense of pace the game inherits from its predecessor, such that there are always new puzzles to mess around with, but never so many at once as to be overwhelming (even with three protagonists to juggle). Another advantage of Bone Totem's is that it has an official walkthrough on its Steam page, which you'll need because there are two or three puzzles that are legit just horrible. Good hit rate overall, though.
I also much preferred Bone Totem's story over the original's. It has so many disparate elements shoved into it that it can't help but be interesting, even if I'd hesitate to call it "good". The Cayne Corporation from the original has been elevated to religion status, cranking its cartoon villainy quotient past "cliche" and onto "hilarious". Mac, one of the protagonists, even uses "Cayne" in place of "God" in his expletives (Ford only knows who would consider that a good idea). All of this is presumably due to the Nexus, some sort of digital heaven attained through an implant that uploads you to the cloud when you die. This is a premise that I think could have been pretty interesting if it had been given any narrative weight; instead, it's referred to rarely and obliquely, and by the time you've pieced together what it even is you have more important things to deal with.
Another example of Bone Totem's all-over-the-place-ness is the threats you encounter. It seems like every single employee at Deepsea-15 had their own pet science experiment, and even now I can't remember which of the ten different disasters I read about actually put the place out of its misery in the end. Many times, Bone Totem tells the classic anti-capitalist story of the faceless executive trampling over the passion of the ground-level employee because it isn't profitable... except at Cayne Corporation, everyone's passion seems to be for dangerous and morally repulsive cowboy science, and it makes the execs look almost like the good guys for trying to quash them. The parasite that gives everyone a shared hallucination was another one of those neat ideas that felt like it could have had more oomph, especially as a parallel to the Nexus, but you only get a bit of a glimpse into it near the end.
Speaking of the end... cannibal mole people! I appreciate their inclusion, as the occult symbolism lets the game greatly widen the scope and variety of its setpieces, though they have a pretty tenuous connection to the earlier half of the story since the Cayne scientists are all too busy with their own sins against God to care about the city of bone and flesh they live on top of.
Also one of the protagonists is a sapient teddy bear? It's an odd choice, to be sure. Most of Moses' arc didn't quite resonate with me: it's not very compelling for a robot to overcome fear or guilt, it just makes me wonder why a children's toy would be given those feelings in the first place. That said, once I got over that initial cynicism I found Moses' affectations pretty endearing, and his unlikely friendship with the shockingly earnest Faran ended up being my favorite part of the game.
This has been a very scattershot review, but in my defense it's a very scattershot game. That's not an approach I usually appreciate, but ultimately I think it worked out well for Bone Totem. In time, I'm bound to remember the stuff that stuck more than the stuff that didn't.