I wanted to like this more, it starts out so well. There's a beautiful retro 3D style that emulates the FMVs of the late 90s when everyone was just so excited to see 3D renders, and you're thrown into this industrial sci-fi horror scenario. It has some nice tweaks on the graphic adventure format, letting you right click to see where every interactable is, and putting all puzzles & items on dedicated zoomed in interaction shots so it's hard to miss the important stuff. And yet, I still wound up in the same rut as the old games: completely unable to understand the game's logic.

"This thermite will eat through anything, EVEN underwater", the game tells me. Fantastic. I've gone on a long quest to assemble the thermite, and finally, it will solve the puzzle I've been stuck on for ages: blasting through the hull of an old ship to grant me access to the next area. Except. It doesn't. The characters continue to gibber about how great the thermite is, but whenever I try and rub it on the hull it stubbornly refuses to work. Elsewhere, I line up the panels in an image puzzle and clone a demonic shrimp. "Perfect," the characters announce. "It's just like the old one. This is exactly what we need." I have no idea why we need this shrimp.

Most of all, it feels like the story just isn't unfolding in a very satisfying way. There are a lot of well written log entries - naturally just lying around everywhere - which tell the story of a doomed drilling operation. At first they're fascinating, but they start to become repetitive without progressing anything. Rather than drawing closer to the point, each one of them reads more or less like "I hate working for Devil Incorporated. They forced my mum to mine asteroids to pay off my medical debt AND they won't let me eat the glowing green slime I found at the bottom of the sea. Well joke's on them, I'm eating it anyway!!!" There's a lot of tantalising world building to do with some sort of demonic religious/corporate overlord that took over the world, but I got the sense that this was set dressing that the game didn't want to explain. It's unfortunate, because it's such a big juicy idea that it totally distracts from the main story. I don't care at all about the magic mushrooms on the sea floor, I want to know about Cayne's Reign!

Alas!

Nothing but praise for Moses, however. He is too pure for this world.

Stasis: Bone Totem is, without a doubt, my favorite horror adventure game. It nearly perfectly lands all of the important bits -- narrative, character moments, environment, and gameplay.

You play as Mac and Charlie, a husband and wife running a salvaging operation. They stumble upon a deep sea oil rig and decide to investigate, as it may give them a way out of their crippling debts. Of course, this is a sci-fi horror game, and everything on the rig is terrible, both man made and not. This set up quickly evolves into a very dense narrative with tons of well done twists and turns -- most of which are excellently foreshadowed through environmental story telling or logs that are optionally available to read.

The character development and overall characterizations in Bone Totem are a huge leap forward from the original Stasis. It's hard to talk about with avoiding spoilers, but I was very pleasantly surprised by how much the game made me care about some rather non-traditional characters. Bone Totem also grappled with quite a bit more philosophy than the original Stasis, though it's not quite as in your face about it as some of my other favorites like Primordia and The Swapper.

The environments you explore in Bone Totem are probably the best I've ever seen in an isometric game. There's excellent and disgusting detail throughout every screen of the game, with lighting that adds a ton to the mood. The sound design and music are all excellent, with the main characters having slightly different variations on the same themes for each section of the game -- a very nice touch. The voice acting is also top notch, making the big moments of the story hit that much harder. I'm very impressed with the presentation for an indie game with a team of this size.

It's tough to land the gameplay in adventure games, but Stasis: Bone Totem delivers here too. By and large, you have your expected set of environmental and item based puzzles, which, other than a small exception or two, are very well done and help you engage with the world. There are a couple of features that really push it to being at the top of the genre, though. First is the accessibility. You can always right click to 'ping' the surroundings, revealing all descriptions and interactable objects on the current screen -- no pixel hunting necessary, if you so choose. There are also optional hints available for the puzzles like many games. Each interactable object has a separate screen that pops up for the puzzle, and all items are used in these screens, which reduces the need to try each item on every object in the environment that happens in many adventure games. The second, and more important feature, is that you are playing as multiple main characters, with inventories that are connected via the 'quantum storage device'. This gives the game a very unique and fun flow, where, if you get stuck with one character, you can switch to another. Each character also has some unique way they can interact with objects or they environment -- breaking things down, combining items, or hacking. This is both nice for variety, and allowing you to have something else to do when you're getting annoyed with a particular puzzle.

Anyway, that's enough gushing about the game. If the game appeals to you at all -- give it a try. You may also come away with a new favorite.

While it is a big upgrade over the previous game and I would certainly like to see what this team does next, a bit more restraint would certainly benefit them. When you find a flayed person in the second "room" of the game and then a...thing roughly 40% through it, there's not much room to escalate to it just sort of bathes in it's own brutality and horror. There is little build up and no real escalation since it already starts you at 9. Some of the puzzles are slightly annoying with interactable points that don't tell you what they are supposed to be (a switch? a button? A slot?) or what prevents you from using them, especially because all the items have to be moved between the three characters which, since that can just happen whenever you want feels a bit pointless. A shared inventory would make just as much sense in the world of the game and alliviate some that tedium. Still, it is a good game after all with an interesting and mostly likeable crew of characters and a weird tale to tell.

Puzzles after puzzles to the point it threw me off immediately! Otherwise, this would be a great experience. There should be a better balance between puzzles and story progression. And most of the puzzles dont make sense either so the dev felt obligatory to make an official walkthrough. The guide itself is very lengthy and wordy, which is as boring as solving the clueless puzzles. More than that, the dev didnt even bother to explain the game mechanics. So i felt lost from the get-go.

I dont want to gatekeep anyone from trying this game. If you love puzzles heavy point and click games, this one might be for you. But if you are someone like me, you would feel sad because this game is a missed opportunity. I still want to experience the story!