Cryostasis Preview

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However, it's not just the cold you'll battle in Cryostasis. The dead ship features plenty of undead nasties as well - former inhabitants of the vessel who, in the words of the game's developers, "gave in to the cold", and have now become manifestations of elemental cold in themselves. Around them the temperature drops appreciably - and although they're susceptible to heat (it's hinted that there's a heat-generating weapon you'll gradually assemble as the game progresses), most of your fighting will be done with authentic Soviet-era light weapons, such as rifles, shotguns and a Tommy-style machine gun.

Initially, at least, these enemies seemed a bit disappointing - but as the developers led us through the demonstration, subtle things about the different foes started to creep us out a bit. The enemies we saw were all basically human, frozen and mummified, but they retained certain traits that were designed to pick out their original roles in the ship. Repairmen in the ship's engine area sport a pair of welding torches, one grafted into each wrist in the place of their hands. Those left to rot in the brig as the cold infiltrated the ship sport cell bars where their faces should have been - turning their frozen, hollow heads into macabre parodies of prison cells. Their jailers, meanwhile, have keys instead of fingers, which they use to claw at the player.

For the most part, Cryostasis' hero is a fairly normal human being stuck in a horrifying situation - but true to the survival horror roots of the game, your character does have one supernatural ability up his sleeve.

Oh, I spoke too soon - here comes one of them now. He only looks angry because he's forgotten to bring his fabric swatches with him.

Early in the game, you discover that there are some corpses spread around the ship - people who didn't "give in" to the cold, but who were killed either by accident, or by their crewmates, as the insidious frost took over. You can enter the frozen brains of these people and relive their last moments, and can even take action to save them from their fates. In one example, we travelled back to rescue a crew-member by disarming the marauding bad guy who had murdered him. A rather more tongue-in-cheek example saw us rescuing a cook from the frozen sides of beef which fell on him by, er, going into the cows' past and rescuing them from the slaughterhouse. Right.

Along with various sequences where you witness black-and-white echoes of the ship's past as you explore, the developers imply that these incidents will add up to a comprehensive picture of the vessel's fate - a single, momentous, game-spanning puzzle, in essence. In another nod to BioShock, saving crew-members will also contribute to the game's plot and resolution.

Whether those elements can add up to something with BioShock's narrative scope remains to be seen, however. At the moment, Cryostasis is a relatively good-looking first-person survival horror, with the potential to blossom into something with a tense, creepy atmosphere and a great plot. The demo we saw wasn't varied or complex enough to convince us that we're seeing the Russian BioShock - but we're certainly intrigued. If the developer can deliver on its bigger promises, we're certainly open to the potential of finding love in a cold climate.