Chapter 1
By: Alexander Holmes
How do you develop a feeling of dread in a genre as physically limited as the pure adventure game?
You have only three tools available to you: prose, illustration, and sound.
Stasis does this remarkably well for the size and scope of this indie project. A detailed motion-comic-esque intro cinematic. A fallout inspired text interface. Presenting descriptive, environmental prose to the player upon hovering the mouse over points of interest. Rather than asking the player to click on everything they see with a pre-selected “look” verb.
The prose delivers the anxiety of the situation, as you realize before even the first cutscene plays that you are on board a spaceship that pirates life-support pods from failed space expeditions, experiments on the people inside, and sells their (ideally still-living) bodies for a profit.
Apparently this business wasn't even an illegal activity, as they found new recruits with run of the mill job postings. They even have an HR department!
Where the game first lost me however was in its sound design. Much like Amnesia the Dark Descent, Stasis features a main character who experiences auditory and visual hallucinations. Whispered, incomprehensible conversations. Deep growls in the distance. A woman suddenly screams! Aaah!
The first time I played Amnesia was very recently. 2024 in fact. I played it with my wife, who kept a walkthrough open to help us power through parts of the game that had me too panicked to think about the puzzles.
In every horror game, the experience of fear is one that moves through cycles. The stages of that cycle are Dread > Shock > Panic > and Rest. In games like Amnesia and SOMA, the hallucinations and corruptions are brought on by player actions. Staying in the dark, or looking at the monster. Thus the sound of the game commands your attention, because without it you are leaving yourself vulnerable to a threat you cannot overcome. A sound can shock a player from the dread of what's around the corner into the panic of a chase. A false sound can return you to a state of dread, as you stop trusting your most reliable tool.
Horror, as a genre of video game, is more so about Affective Difficulty than any other genre. The quality of a horror game, as an experience of horror, is in how well it is able to move an audience’s emotional reaction between these four emotional states. How the game is able to move the player into that which it wants the player to feel at any given moment.
In the first hour of Stasis, as a traditional adventure game that doesn't have the freedom of movement, that sudden, contextless sound startles, but the result is neither panic nor dread. There is no way to respond. By the time you hear the sound effect again in that same hour, nothing much has happened.
Whereas the prose is succeeding at the foreboding feelings of dread, the sound effects are giving camp. A slasher film without the spectacle.
That said, when planned rather than procedural, the sounds and visuals worked wonders to shock and worry me.
Despite my lack of initial enthusiasm, the game remained on my computer desktop. Having just finished the first act of the game, escaping the human trafficking portion of the spaceship into a completely different area, I had initially thought that was enough of a taste. But months later, I went back for more.
This next section of the game revealed that this same corporation had been experimenting with full-body human cloning for the sake of developing and selling medical transplant tissue, though unconcerned with the moral questions of making fully sapient human bodies in large vats of nutrient slurry. And as I escaped from the lab into the crew commons and security office, I realized why I was staying.
Though STASIS predates it by many years, this story was reminding me of Mouthwashing. Arguably 2024's horror game of the year, telling a deeply personal and psychological story of corporate greed mixing with individual narcissism to trap a crew of people in the infinite void of space. Down to the desire to make and consume illegally produced moonshine for the sake of personal morale. One lone Deontologist named Paul Hodgeson trying to fight the evils of getting drunk on contraband against a whole community that, as a utilitarian effort, agreed to keep it under wraps. And they could have continued their little corporate sitcom had the karma of live human experimentation not come back to bite them on the ass.
Stasis didn't seem to be telling a story of morality and corruption the way Mouthwashing was very directly about uncovering the crew's unspoken shame. It is a Sad Dad trying to save his family in a clearly morally corrupt and immediately dangerous setting. Despite the genre I find myself in, I was curious how another story like this might turn out. If we'd by any chance get a happy ending this time.
Reducing the value of human bodies to merely a resource to be scavenged, in a future where that has long since become the norm. Transforming families into farms. That is how a new livelihood in the grandeur of space Becomes Horror.
Thank you for reading
Take care of each other
And Stay True