Stasis Comes Out Of Stasis On August 31st
Today in news post titles that write themselves.
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.
That's not great at explaining what you actually do, so here's the skinny: it's an old-fashioned point and click, right down to gruesome deaths for the wrong actions. John Maracheck, as your avatar is called, needs to find his daughter, wife and an exit from the plummeting Groomlake before everything gets a bit gassy in Neptune's upper atmosphere. He's also nearly dying after all that time in stasis and his route is plagued by fiendish puzzles.
What the trailer shows off rather well is how pretty the game is. 2D games in the modern era can now have such extraordinarily detailed environments as the resolutions they're rendered at skyrocket. Solo dev Christopher Bischoff has spent five years crafting it and those who backed at a beta-receiving level on Kickstarter should be getting keys soon as a preview of the full game, according to this update post.