Stasis: Bone Totem

Recommended. Plays great on Deck. There a couple places where there could have been a bit more guidance on puzzles. Using three characters is interesting, if a little tricky. I think they made it work 90% of the time. I enjoyed the story. Oh, and I recommend going ahead and doing things that you know will get you killed: each death has its own cut scene that I thought were worth it.

[h3]A Game That Gets Better If You Don't Drop It[/h3] I almost dropped this game after one hour. Point-and-click gameplay was already annoying me, the underwater industrial setting felt suffocating and monotonous, I didn't care about the characters, and the story gave me very little reason to care about what was happening. Point-and-click is a very specific genre, and I think for it to completely work for me, the puzzle logic needs to be extremely readable. The whole idea is that you combine things, take them apart and interact with the environment in ways that supposedly make sense. The problem is that they make sense inside the developer's head. It isn't even that the puzzles make me feel stupid. My logic simply works differently. I would never think that these two particular items should be combined, or that this random object can even be dismantled. Once your logic isn't on the same wavelength as the developers', you eventually reach the classic point-and-click state of just clicking everything on everything and hoping something works. The game makes this even more cumbersome with its interface. One character can combine certain objects, another can dismantle them, and it isn't always obvious what belongs to which category. Items are also distributed between different characters, so sometimes you need to transfer something between inventories before you can even try the interaction you want. Instead of making the puzzles deeper, this mostly creates additional clicks. So gameplay-wise, I really wasn't impressed. Point-and-click is already a difficult genre to make universally intuitive, but here I also had some problems with the actual implementation of that logic. Thankfully, the developers provide a massive walkthrough directly on Steam. It honestly saved the game for me. At some point I stopped treating BONE TOTEM as a puzzle game and started treating it as a story. The moment I realized I was about to start randomly clicking every inventory item because I had no idea what the game wanted, I didn't try to be proud and independent. I opened the manual, found the solution and moved on. Does that kill some of the point of playing a puzzle game? Probably. But I wasn't having fun being stuck either. [b]The Setting and Atmosphere[/b] The beginning was especially difficult because everything is underwater, dark, metallic and depressing. Corridors, machinery, abandoned rooms, more corridors. I understand exactly what the game is going for with the claustrophobia and thalassophobia, but initially it created more rejection than fear for me. This gets much better. The further you go, the stranger and more interesting the locations become: temples, underground cities and increasingly bizarre structures. Eventually I stopped thinking about how much I hated the early environments because I actually wanted to see what was next. And visually, the game can be genuinely creepy. Not scary in a jumpscare kind of way, but creepy in the "something about this makes my skin crawl" way. If you actually sit alone at night, think about what is happening and try to imagine yourself in the situation of these characters, the atmosphere works really well. The story also touches quite a lot of things: religion, loss, family, civilization and some much bigger questions that I definitely wasn't expecting from the opening hours. [b]The Characters and Story[/b] My biggest problem early on was simple: why do I care? The game introduces a mystery before giving you much reason to care about the people involved. I had basically no connection with the two main characters for the first few hours. Then Moses appears. In this miserable world of metal, corpses and underwater horror, he finally gives the game some warmth. He was probably the first character I genuinely became attached to, and somehow that made it easier to care about everything else too. The story itself also gets progressively better. At first I felt like I was simply forcing myself forward because I wanted to know what happened. Then one mystery connects to another, the locations get stranger, the characters start making more sense, and suddenly the questions become questions I actually want answered. The second half is genuinely good. My first hour was probably the worst one, then the game became tolerable, then interesting, and by the end I was properly invested. [b]Is it like SOMA?[/b] It is difficult not to compare BONE TOTEM to SOMA. They have a lot in common, and if you liked one, I think there is a pretty good chance you should at least try the other. But SOMA did one thing much better for me: immersion into the character. In SOMA, it very quickly feels like this is happening to you. Maybe that is partly because it is first-person and you spend the game inhabiting one identity. You don't just sympathize with the protagonist; by the end it feels almost like you personally went through that experience, and some of the questions the game asks naturally transfer onto yourself. BONE TOTEM never quite reached that level for me. It is third-person, you constantly switch between three characters, and there isn't that single identity for you to completely attach yourself to. The difference is almost like the difference between experiencing something yourself and watching a really good movie. In BONE TOTEM I cared about the characters and wanted to know what happened to them, but I was still watching their story. SOMA made me feel much more like I was living mine. [b]Overall[/b] So yeah, gameplay-wise I wasn't particularly impressed. The point-and-click logic frequently didn't match mine, the inventory system made some of it more cumbersome than necessary, and without the walkthrough I honestly don't know if I would have finished it. But once I stopped trying to prove that I could solve every puzzle myself and simply played it as a story, I had a much better time. The atmosphere is great, the visuals can be wonderfully disturbing, the story becomes surprisingly interesting, and there is a lot more going on thematically than I expected when I started. I almost dropped it after an hour, but I'm so glad that I didn't!

Wow, Stasis: Bone Totem blew away any expectations I had going in. After maybe one chapter I went and wishlisted the other games in the series. It's a mix of rpg, point-and-click, and even a little hidden object, with a bunch of high-fidelity cutscenes thrown in. The whole thing is fully (and well) voice acted. There's no combat, although there are a few situations where you can die by making a bad choice or missolving a puzzle. The environments are rich and detailed: visually, aurally, and there's an absolute ton of descriptive text, as well as additional flavor text in the form of pda logs. The story is engaging, weird, and [i][b]dark[/b][/i]. Some of the puzzles are [i]extremely[/i] obscure - they're all solvable, but some of them maybe require you to notice an offhand comment buried in a pda log, or a small decoration on a wall somewhere else. The gameplay is really solid, and there are a bunch of nice quality-of-life touches that definitely didn't exist in rpgs and point-and-click games of my youth. For example, you can easily highlight all the descriptions and interactibles in an area. Or, I mentioned you can die, but after watching your death cutscene, you start back in the same area and the option to do the thing that killed you is removed. This makes trying things risk-free, and a number of times I went into situations like "I bet this kills me, let's see how!" I played about 70% of it on the steam deck, and the controller support is :chefkiss: If you're a horror fan, big recommend for Stasis: Bone Totem content warnings: child death, body horror, extreme gore