bro good game,i ran out of food so i had to stasis the rest of the time.
Reviews for "stasis: an interactive haiku of isolation"
This game reminds me of a story that appeared in the now long defunct Epic magazine. It was called Sole Survivor or Lone Survivor (I don't recall which), about a General McCork who commanded a colony ship containing the last of humanity after a global war destroyed Earth. McCork was left alone after his crew were wiped out by alien viruses and impact events. After a few years of isolation he could bear no more and pushed his ship to lightspeed thinking he would turn into energy and perish. Instead he ascended to the infinite and became immortal and alone. Cheered up enough?
This game has an amazing amount of potential. I know that this is just sort of a little one-off game jam thing, but with some work, this game could be amazing. The visual style is really nice to look at, and also somehow fitting. I think the sound could really do with some changes, I think that the kind of style of the game's sound effects are way too whimsical to really be taken seriously, so that should be toned down. And while I'm on the topic of sound, there should be some kind of music playing in the background, something kind of somber and lonely. Something kind of cool you could do with the music, (let's say it's done with a violin since the character mentions it in his notes.) you could have the music sound more out of tune, deranged and experimental the further you get into the game, reflecting on the protagonist's mental state. I felt that the notes/diary entries that the protagonist writes felt random and weird. Instead of the notes becoming more unintelligible as the game progresses, it just kind of flip flops, sometimes he writes gibberish, sometimes he writes nothing, and other times he just writes normal English. The gameplay leaves a lot to be desired. the gameplay loop gets insanely repetitive and mindnumbing at times. There should be little things in the ship that just go wrong and you have to figure out how to fix them, and other things that go wrong that can't be fixed just completely shifting the gameplay, like that gravity thing. (I thought that was a really cool addition) The bottom line is, that there should just be more to do in general. Let's say the protagonist does bring his violin, and when you interact with it, there's like a little mini-game you can do like in the Night In The Woods musical parts, and the more the player plays the violin, the saner the character stays, shown with the notes that he writes. The game has a lot of potential and I would love to see a finished product. Thank you for reading, and have a great day.
esayitch responds:
I thought to add a bunch of things that would make it more sandboxy, more things you can do inside the ship... but not necessarily repair it. The violin via minigame is a great example, or the actual treadmill having some obstacles, adding a basketball hoop for you to shoot the ball.
Another thought I had was something you touched on - having the logs be affected by stuff the player does. For example, if they break the violin or the ball deflates, it would appear in the logs somehow.
In the end the result is what I managed in a few hours on the weekend, not even the whole 48 hours we had for the jam.
In regards to changes that would "gamify" it, I deliberately steered away from those... for example introducing a sanity meter. The reason for this is that I didn't want it to be a game where people are actually doing something that gives them any progression or competition, as the main goal is to get players to feel a futility of sorts, a growing depression or despair that no matter what they do, there is no progress here, merely stuff falling apart... which I did via the text, the gravity, and the food becoming perishable at a certain stage in the game, thus not allowing you to do normal sleep... would have been neat to add more things falling apart, like being unable to enter stasis or the ball being lost, to a point where the only thing you can do is enter stasis and jump to hyperspace between bouts of stasis that take a long time.
I really wanted the player to just go: what the hell am I doing, why am I still in this game?
I'm glad you liked it overall :D and thank you for the detailed comment.
Ironically, I played this game because I was bored. It's safe to safe I played the game for a solid 10 minutes not understanding why it got frontpaged. It hit me the true purpose of this "non-game" after I was bored out of my skull. I mean no offense when I say this is one of the worst and best games I've ever played since it accomplished its goal perfectly of making you feel even more and more hopeless over time. Absolute genius.
I did not enjoy playing this game. That being said, I definitely wasn't meant to and therefore I think the game (or experience, rather) did its job very well. I give it a solid 4.0. It brings up an interesting topic of helplessness a lot of people are currently struggling with due to the effects of the virus. It isn't easy to be told to stay at home with no concrete idea of when things will go back to normal.
I have no criticisms against it being boring. That's the point, after all. You're supposed to feel an longing for something -anything- to happen only to be met with disappointment. It's the idea of limited actions in a very small closed space. The point is that there's no point. There's no goal, except to continue on for the sake of continuing. The journal entries provide a modicum of entertainment for the player, though reading them becomes a goal in itself which I think does lessen the impact of true futility. Without it, however, it would have made this completely unplayable. People would have clicked, played for 15 seconds, and immediately left. So it's a decent trade off.
Personally, I would have liked to see an option to let my character die. After hundreds of years of nothing but stasis and sleeping, I imagine some severe depression might occur. The most fitting way would probably be just to starve. Maybe through an inactivity timer. It wouldn't be obvious but it fits with the theme of being able to do nothing.
On a similar note, perhaps there could be a hatch that leads to outside, and without a proper suit, it would be instant game over... or that's what the game wants you to think. After that option is tried, the player is told the door is jammed and won't open. Would be an interesting take on the false perception of choice, thinking that you at least have the choice to end it all only for even that last hope to be trampled in the end.