Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason
| Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Developer(s) | Action Forms |
| Publisher(s) | |
| Distributor(s) | 1C Company |
| Engine | AtmosFear 4 |
| Platform(s) | Microsoft Windows |
| Release | |
| Genre(s) | Psychological horror |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
| Aggregate scores | |
|---|---|
| Aggregator | Score |
| GameRankings | 68.43% |
| Metacritic | 69/100 |
| Review scores | |
| Publication | Score |
| Eurogamer | 6/10 |
| G4 | 4/5 |
| Game Revolution | B+ |
| GameSpot | 8/10 |
| IGN | 6/10 |
Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason (Russian: Анабиоз: Сон разума) is a psychological horror video game developed by Action Forms for Microsoft Windows.
The game story develops with help of a unique system called Mental Echo – the ability to penetrate another character's memory and change the actions taken by that character in the past. This can involve saving people's lives by taking over their bodies in their memories and changing the course of history.
The game, being set in an arctic setting, employs body heat as a health meter – the player must use heat sources (such as lights or stoves) to replenish health. The gameplay is from a first person perspective.
Cryostasis takes place in 1981 on an Arktika-class nuclear-powered icebreaker called the North Wind near the North Pole. The main character, Alexander Nesterov, is a Russian meteorologist who was supposed to board the ship for a lift home after completing a tour of duty at the pole; however he finds it's been shipwrecked since 1968 and its dead crewmen have undergone bizarre metamorphosis. Through the game the character finds fragments of Maxim Gorky's fairy tale The Flaming Heart of Danko, which parallels what happened to the ship and its crew.
The game starts with Alexander approaching the North Wind on a dog sled. The ship's horn sounds, and the ice all around starts to break; he falls down through but the bottom ice is thick enough that he doesn't end up in the water. He then enters the ship by following one of the dogs.
From flashbacks and Mental Echo the ship's tragic past is put together. The captain took a perilous course through the ice, ignoring the warnings of his first officer, who placed his faith in the latest ice-detecting instrumentation, in favour of his own instinct and seagoing experience. The ship collided with an iceberg and suffered significant damage. The first officer reported the captain's mistake when sending a report to the HQ; in return, the HQ responded that the North Wind, which had already been considered long in the tooth, would be decommissioned upon returning to port. The ship's security officer, knowing that the message will break the captain, warned the first officer to not relay it to him. However, trying to take revenge for the captain's disdainful attitude, and hoping for rapid promotion, he did. The demoralized captain took it to his old friend, the chief engineer; however, tired and frustrated, the chief engineer also dismissed him. Whilst the ship was undergoing repairs, it gradually became trapped by the shifting ice. After a few weeks, in an attempt to regain the respect of his crew and to finally break free of the ice, the captain decided to ram the encircling ice at full speed. However, he was wounded during the ramming when thrown off balance, and the ramming attempt was then stopped by both the security officer and the first officer, who threw the ship into full reverse, giving the dangerous "back, emergency" order. As a result of this the engine room caught fire and the nuclear reactor core destabilized; as the crew subsequently began to slowly die from cold, malnutrition and radiation poisoning, the first officer, security officer and chief engineer tried to escape in a helicopter with the wounded Captain, abandoning the doomed ship and the rest of her crew. As the helicopter took off, the ship's nuclear core finally failed, engulfing the ship (and the airborne helicopter, which was directly above it) with a mysterious energy force, turning the ship and its crew into the monstrous, ghostly form encountered by Nesterov.
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