Buried Gem - Cryostasis

I came across this article in Next Gen a little over a month ago previewing Cryostasis, a unfortunately named horror shooter of sorts set in the arctic. I actually had to dig through my Twitter archive to remember what the thing was called. The cool trick is that the player can relieve the last moments of corpses he comes across. It sounds like a much more intense version of the data-logs from games like System Shock 2. In addition to reliving these moments, however, the player can change the past's future through his interactions with the world. My only hope is that this feature makes it into the final game (I'm looking at you STALKER) and it fulfills all my wildest hopes and dreams for gameplay possibilities.

Think about the narrative impact of stepping into the shoes of someone you know is going to die. This person isn't the protagonist, so it's actually not frustrating that you're put in this predicament. Depending on how much info the game gives, you might even know how this person died, giving the player a layer of in-joke foreshadowing meta-info that could color everything they do with those final moments( e.g. "Electric shock, guess I'll try and stay away from light sockets").

If the designers were so inclined they could really inject some heavy philosophy into this mechanic, either taking a nihilist view that your fate is sealed from the outset, or encouraging players to think about how they can impact larger systems even with little time or resources.

One thing that could be cool, but could lead to that live/die success/fail model is if the player could save the lives of the people and resurrect them in the present, giving himself another ally against the [cold, monsters, AI construct ??]. This could result in the endless repetition of trying to get a timed even correct and people saving and loading until they 'won' every subsection of the game, however.

So yeah, Cryostasis, lets keep an eye on it and see if it makes it to store shelves. If not, we could totally rip off that super cool mechanic for one of our own games.

article: http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/preview-cryostasis

http://cryostasis-game.com/