Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason

"This is the North Pole's welcome. No marching band, no flags, no speeches."

"As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence....Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, "What are we to do?"... The only possible answer is, "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure."

—Vladimir Solovyov, quoted at the very end of the game.

Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason is a first-person Survival Horror game, released originally in December 2008, developed by Ukraine based studio Action Forms. It follows the experiences of Heroic Mime Alexander Nesterov as he investigates the shipwrecked nuclear icebreaker North Wind. The game starts off rather similar to most games of the genre, as Alexander is lost and confused within an unknown and hostile environment. As the aforementioned wrecking took place near the North Pole, ice and searching for heat are key motifs throughout the game. Freezing to death is a very real possibility. Also, the crew of the North Wind has gone mad and is intent on killing Alexander. Mild inconvenience.

Cryostasis rapidly morphs into more Mind Screw than almost any video game ever conceived. Interspersed with Alexander's conflict with the demonic presence on the ship is the heavily metaphorical tale of Danko, whose actions and flaws parallel those of the Captain. The monsters you fight are personifications of the crew's shortcomings. Despite the bleak setting, all of the action leads up to a rather heartwarming ending drenched in symbolic meaning.

Alexander has an interesting power at his disposal, named the Mental Echo; He can enter the memories of the dead and alter their actions, correcting their mistakes so they at least do not die in despair, or simply helping them survive just a moment or so longer so that parts of the ship that were sealed before become accessible. Doing so also provides an insight into exactly what happened when the ship crashed, and the relationships between key characters. This is an interesting storytelling technique as it means the main character never physically comes into contact with a single sane, living person during his adventure.

A major showcase for Nvidia's PhysX graphical engine, Cryostasis is a very beautiful game too, rivaling even Crysis. However, the game does not utilise more than one core in current-day CPU's, meaning the game stutters even on high-end PCs. It is also quite buggy in parts, which when combined with the slow storytelling and (some would say) repetitive level design can frustrate and bore some players. However the game is welcomed as, at the very least, an interesting experience.

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Tropes used in Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason include:

• Anachronism Stew: Some of the early trailers and ingame documents state that the North Wind was lost in 1968, though statements about the age of the ship and the appearance of vehicles such as the Kamov helicopter imply that the game takes place in the early 1980s. A theory, supported by the ending of the game, is that there are two timelines in the game: in the original proper timeline the North Wind never crashed and Alexander is due to be picked up by it, as the radiogram in the game indicates. This timeline is restored by the end of the game. However, in the divergent timeline, the North Wind crashes in 1968 and Alexander enters its parallel reality when he boards the ship, where the sins and flaws of the crewmembers are personified into monsters. At the ending of the game, by proving you're worth to the God of Time Khronos, you successfully avert the ship's impact with an iceberg by taking possession of the the central characters within the story who influence the captain's decision. By doing this, you not only save yourself from the deadly fall you experience at the beginning, but also the entire crew of the ship.
• Apocalyptic Log: Various records are found throughout the story, along with extracts from an Russian fable that parallels the main story. The "mental echo" segments have the player experience the logs firsthand.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: One boss you fight has spider-legs made of ice growing out his back. There are also several enemies with moth wings.
• The Captain: Subverted. The game itself is actually a chronicle of the decline and fall of the captain of the North Wind, though at the end, Nesterov has an opportunity to make everything better.
• Cool but Inefficient: You're given a rifle with a scope about halfway through the game, but given how most of the fighting takes place in small rooms, it's actually slightly less useful than the iron sights.
  • The Water Cannon is this too. It's a very powerful weapon, but hard to aim (especially at enemies in motion), and it guzzles ammo like you'd expect a device that's basically a boiler attached to a hose to do. At least said ammo (icicles) is plentiful.
• Dead All Along: It is strongly implied that Nesterov dies at the beginning of the game and the whole game is about freeing his soul from the North Wind.
• Did You Just Punch Out Chronos?: the end boss.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Despite the Nightmare Fuel and oppressive mood, the game ends on a pretty high note.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors/Playing with Fire/An Ice Person: The conflict between hot and cold plays a central part in the game's design. Your character is healed by heat and his attacks have heat-based effects (based on the red burn marks that appear on enemies whenever you hit them), conversely, the monsters are all frozen zombie-like creatures which damage you with cold whenever they hit you (even their bullets cause damage by freezing).
• Elite Mooks: After a certain point, the ice-zombie creatures you encounter start becoming distinctly less human. These are the creatures that tend to have heavy melee attacks, unpredictable movement patterns, and/or machineguns.
• Giant Mook: One of the rarest enemies is a huge, 7-foot tall brute in a hooded black coat who dual wields flashlights and PPSh submachine guns; he's slow, but it takes a very large amount of damage to kill him.
• Guns Are Worthless: Well, these guns are worthless--your first gun was state of the art in 1891, and while the WWII Soviet rifle is better, they're meant for open-field warfare and are very awkward in the extreme close-quarters of the ship. You'd think a submachinegun would great for tight quarters, but the player character doesn't seem to be proficient in automatic weapons, so he has great trouble actually hitting anything. Some enemies are best handled at range, but most of the time it's more effective to smack things to death with a lock and chain.
• Heroic Mime: Nesterov. Kinda justified, seeing as there are not a lot of friendly characters to interact with.
• Implacable Man: The Man in the Parka who may or may not be Nesterov himself.
• Let's Play: One by Helloween 4545.
• Mental Time Travel: The Mental Echo replays the corpse's last moments and allows Nesterov to avert whatever mistake got them killed.
• Mind Screw: Let's put it this way: three-quarters of the way through the game, you are attacked by a movie.
  • During the mental echos, the crew never comment on being attacked by ice monsters. Makes you wonder just how accurate the main characters perception is.
  • This Thread explains the symbolism very well.
• More Dakka: The submachine gun sprays bullets pretty indiscriminately. At close range, it's a great weapon for dealing a lot of damage in a short time, but expect to go through clips rather quickly.
• Puzzle Boss: The final boss. Neither of you attack each other, but instead play a kind of a game, where you have to hit the spawning monsters with balls of "heat" (presumably saving them this way), and the boss crushes them with his mace. First one to score ten positive points wins the battle.
• Scare Chord: One monster actually seems to cause them when it notices you and when it dies.
• Schizo-Tech: Despite being set in 1981 (maybe, see above), most of your weapons are either of WW2 vintage or older. Justified, as it was common practice for the Soviet Union to stockpile obsolete weapons for use in support roles. See also the earlier Anachronism Stew example.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The entire premise of the game. Nesterov gets the chance to do this after defeating Chronos. Whether it saves his life or simply allows the crew to move on is unclear. Or perhaps it does both.
• Shaky POV Cam
• Ship Level: The entire game is one with the objective of getting safely out of the ship.
• Shout-Out: The fable Nesterov finds excerpts of throughout the ship is actually the short story Danko's Burning Heart, written by Maxim Gorky.
  • Also, in one mental echo, you're required to go into the ship's reactor (labelled "No. 4") and replace a graphite control rod. Now, what significance would a graphite-based nuclear reactor identified as "No. 4" have to a Ukrainian game developer?
  • The game's subtitle is "Sleep of Reason," alluding to the Francisco de Goya Painting "The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters." It fits the game well.
• Standard FPS Guns: Averted; all of the weapons fall into two categories: scavenged melee weapons and slow-firing war rifles (with the exception of the PPSh submachine gun later on). The water cannon added by a patch is also pretty strange by FPS standards.
• Suspicious Videogame Generosity: Runs rampant throughout the game. Because your heat/health gauge will drop accordingly with the outside temperature, there's no way to accumulate health. To make the game winnable, the designers had to put a place where you can warm yourself before each and every fighting sequence. The more heat it gives, the more anxious the player becomes. Subversions do happen from time to time.
• Tech Demo Game: A lot of effort went into the ice physics, that allow you to see entire rooms thaw in real time as they heat up. Every room in the game has a temperature that affects the surroundings and you. Unfortunately, the developers forgot to implement multi-core processor support, so the game can run quite sluggishly on newer systems.
• Too Awesome to Use: The Flare gun. Ammunition for it is extremely rare, but one direct hit with it will cripple most enemy types so you can kill them at your leisure or just watch them slowly burn to death.
• Wham! Episode: The level titled "Fear". Up to that point your main opponents have been undead crew members armed with various weapons, with hallucinations or more supernatural monsters only showing once or twice. Not so far into the level everything goes to hell: good old zombies are replaced with disfigured, symbolic monsters, the ice formations in some rooms look as if they actively invaded the ship, your hallucinations seem to reshape reality in some cases, etc.
• Winged Humanoid: One of the enemy types has moth-like wings.