I don’t want this to be an excessively scathing review, what The Brotherhood devs did here is an amazing work of love and I encourage them to pursue their vision as much as they can and at the best of their capabilities. Contrary to many horror games, those made of poor and cheap ideas thrown around for shock value to create the bare minimum Outlast-clone, Stasis Bone Totem is far more than competently made, with a clear image behind, engaging concepts, strong writing and intriguing puzzles, and the sum of each part is a chore to play.
For example, it’s a given apparently that point-and-click adventure games must have some sections with a sprawling, intertwined map where multiple interactions must be followed simultaneously to progress, at the risk of having maybe too much backtracking, unintuitive inventory puzzles and some areas that are visually less interesting than others. That is the entirety of this game.
There are so, so, so many screens to traverse that at one point I dreaded finding new places rather than feeling curious at what might expect me. In no small part because there are clear limits in what the map design could achieve with texture and effects alone, and so much of the impact was conveyed through written descriptions, of gore, flora, environments, decors and so on, and they are fine, evocative even, but there is just too much of them.
I don't think a horror game necessarily loses its spark when the danger and mystery behind it are solved, but there is a moment when the balance between subtext and text is broken in favour of the latter and, at that point, you start to think the game is actively wasting your time. Each time I found a new room and scanned it with the ping, ten new green points with no interactions but text would pop up and I shivered at the idea of having to find and read each of them. That’s not even mentioning what I felt whenever a new PDA showed up. The cardinal sin, however, is having entire areas devoid of anything but items to pick up or just descriptions; if a room is only there to make the player walk more from one puzzle to the other instead of offering anything worthwhile but text, that room should not be there in the first place.
Same goes for the dialogues between the characters, there are only amazing voice performances in the game, and the players will absolutely take note of that because the characters never ever shut up. Every minute, interesting thing in the game necessitates for them to actively react and describe, talk between each other about what’s clearly there in front of them and it’s excruciating. It’s fine in terms of showing their interactions, the family dynamics and how they feel in key moments, but again it’s just too much text, just let me find something disturbing and react to it before any of these berks have something to say about it.
Between the end of chapter 2 and the halfway point of chapter 3 I was detached from anything that was happening in the story. There had been some interesting twists, but I had to run around empty maps so much, between so much text and hearing so much of the same reactions and dialogue from the cast, that it made some of my favourite tropes (the underwater horror, being trapped in a sci-fi confinement, violent murder mysteries and the moral implications of what capitalism and religion do to people) felt cheap and overwritten.
Sometimes it felt like the developers knew this too, because there were many terminals and documents scattered around with barely any text or commentary but simply pictures of experiments and unknown lifeforms or old drawings of alien schematics, and they were just so much more effective precisely because there was no explanation or reaction.
Stasis Bone Totem is kind of worth the effort though, I kept going ‘til the end because this is the type of video game that needs to be made. Just last year we had Signalis and Iron Lung, among many others I certainly have not even heard of, and they did nail the feeling of being trapped, haunted, oppressed, helpless but having to move forward, and they clearly conveyed all these emotions through gameplay and very little with straightforward narration, because in such hostile and terrifying situations the mind can fill in the blanks immensely well. A lot of work was put into SBT, amazing and effective work, just too much work for the kind of experience, I think, it was going for.
For example, it’s a given apparently that point-and-click adventure games must have some sections with a sprawling, intertwined map where multiple interactions must be followed simultaneously to progress, at the risk of having maybe too much backtracking, unintuitive inventory puzzles and some areas that are visually less interesting than others. That is the entirety of this game.
There are so, so, so many screens to traverse that at one point I dreaded finding new places rather than feeling curious at what might expect me. In no small part because there are clear limits in what the map design could achieve with texture and effects alone, and so much of the impact was conveyed through written descriptions, of gore, flora, environments, decors and so on, and they are fine, evocative even, but there is just too much of them.
I don't think a horror game necessarily loses its spark when the danger and mystery behind it are solved, but there is a moment when the balance between subtext and text is broken in favour of the latter and, at that point, you start to think the game is actively wasting your time. Each time I found a new room and scanned it with the ping, ten new green points with no interactions but text would pop up and I shivered at the idea of having to find and read each of them. That’s not even mentioning what I felt whenever a new PDA showed up. The cardinal sin, however, is having entire areas devoid of anything but items to pick up or just descriptions; if a room is only there to make the player walk more from one puzzle to the other instead of offering anything worthwhile but text, that room should not be there in the first place.
Same goes for the dialogues between the characters, there are only amazing voice performances in the game, and the players will absolutely take note of that because the characters never ever shut up. Every minute, interesting thing in the game necessitates for them to actively react and describe, talk between each other about what’s clearly there in front of them and it’s excruciating. It’s fine in terms of showing their interactions, the family dynamics and how they feel in key moments, but again it’s just too much text, just let me find something disturbing and react to it before any of these berks have something to say about it.
Between the end of chapter 2 and the halfway point of chapter 3 I was detached from anything that was happening in the story. There had been some interesting twists, but I had to run around empty maps so much, between so much text and hearing so much of the same reactions and dialogue from the cast, that it made some of my favourite tropes (the underwater horror, being trapped in a sci-fi confinement, violent murder mysteries and the moral implications of what capitalism and religion do to people) felt cheap and overwritten.
Sometimes it felt like the developers knew this too, because there were many terminals and documents scattered around with barely any text or commentary but simply pictures of experiments and unknown lifeforms or old drawings of alien schematics, and they were just so much more effective precisely because there was no explanation or reaction.
Stasis Bone Totem is kind of worth the effort though, I kept going ‘til the end because this is the type of video game that needs to be made. Just last year we had Signalis and Iron Lung, among many others I certainly have not even heard of, and they did nail the feeling of being trapped, haunted, oppressed, helpless but having to move forward, and they clearly conveyed all these emotions through gameplay and very little with straightforward narration, because in such hostile and terrifying situations the mind can fill in the blanks immensely well. A lot of work was put into SBT, amazing and effective work, just too much work for the kind of experience, I think, it was going for.