Reviews
Stasis Review: Silence, Splatter and Space
An opening shot pans along the length of a brooding, hulking spacecraft, instantaneously conveying a sense of immense space and intense silence in disquieting hues of grey and green.
It sometimes takes me time to acclimatise to the atmosphere of a new game; time to care about my protagonist, to get used to a control scheme, to feel invested in a story. It doesn’t with Stasis. My character, ripped rudely from a stasis sleep, stumbling to his knees and into a puddle of blood and I’m instantly hooked.
What the hell is going on here?
It’s an undeniably epic opening. I don’t know what I was expecting from this, a seemingly budget game, but this isn’t it.
Describing itself as a “2D isometric, point-and-click horror adventure game”, Stasis is not a game I’d typically pick up. Whilst I love horror, and isometric design, and have played a point-and-click or two before in my life, ramming those themes together feels somewhat paradoxical to me. Horror works best when my view is restricted and I can’t see around the corner – what I’d argue is the antithesis of isometric design. I associate point-and-click with adventure, not horror. I was unconvinced as I booted up Steam.
Turns out my disdain was grossly unfair.
You play as John Maracheck, the aforementioned man yanked from stasis on the Groomlake, a looming, tank-like vessel spinning in orbit around Neptune. There’s no-one else around, and no clue as to why you’ve been pulled so abruptly from your artificial slumber.
And then you spot the blood: thick, cloying, inexplicable blood.
Until some contemporary horror games, for the most part Stasis avoids cheap scares, choosing not to unsettle you with big, bold “BOO!”s, but instead by turning the screws slowly and silently as your footfalls echo throughout the Groomlake, the story quietly unravelling through the blood splatters on the ceiling, the corpses littering the deck, the emaciated bodies slumped in medical bays, kept breathing only by wish and wires.
The atmosphere builds slowly, surreptitiously, silently, thickening the dread as you progress — room by room, puzzle by puzzle — through the story.
But it’s the PDAs you discover — the sparkly, green tablets lying scattered around the ship — that will really add flesh to the bones of this tale, and though the temptation to flick through them without fully reading is great — particularly as some PDAs can take several minutes to read to completion — resist the impulse.
Not only is the lion’s share of the story conveyed through those green screens, but several clues and hints are located therein, too. Would they have been more enjoyable to read had they been better paced? More PDA devices to find with less to read on each? Yeah. Probably. But that’s not a reason to skip ‘em, okay?
Much of Stasis’ charm lies in the tale it tells, and I won’t spoil it for you here. But it’s a grim story, one of corporate greed, neglect, and profiteering before people. The environment you traverse is equally grim. Sure, some of it may feel unoriginal — the green palette, the oh-so-spooky environmental creaks and screams — but for the most part, it feels believable, the audio authentic, the setting sincere.
Maracheck’s voice work is mostly relatable, only occasionally falling on the wrong side of clichéd. I care about him; his mission, his family, his state of mind. I share his confusion, his determination to get to the bottom of the mystery. He’s cleverer than I and significantly braver as he twists himself into a drainage pipe to slither into the next room.
That said, there are times when you’re yanked from the immersion by way of a stupidly dark room or a painfully cheap death (although you’re often awarded Steam trophies as compensation for the latter!). It happens often enough that it felt frustrating at times. You’re running through the ship, frantically scouting for clues, but then Maracheck will stumble into a room and you don’t have a Scooby-doo-clue where he is, nor where the hell he’s supposed to go.
I’d throw my mouse all over the screen, desperately seeking a helpful tooltip prompt, but nope, there’s nothing. It means I’m sometimes forced into making him run into the centre of a room before I know it’s safe, just to find out where the hell he was standing. (Check out the image below to see what I mean!)
Most puzzles are clever without being overly challenging, although a handful are, admittedly, maddeningly complicated. At these times, it’s once again difficult to remain immersed when you’re frantically clicking everything in sight and combining ridiculous things in your inventory just to get a clue, get anything, so desperate are you to progress. But a lot of the puzzles are smart enough to make sense, even when some require us to draw on the creative license of its futuristic sci-fi setting to do so.
The pacing, too, is slightly off-kilter. In some spots you’ll get a fire-hose-to-the-fire of exposition, and in others the horrors of the room remain unexplained, and some character interactions feel overly long. It’s a shame, because everything else the game offers you — most notably the stunning design and unsettling score — deserve better than that.
Final Word: Though grim in both tale and terrain, I nonetheless enjoyed my time on the Groomlake. If you’re a horror fan looking for a game that conveys perfectly pitched tension and terror without overwhelming you with complex combat, Stasis is an understated and unsettling experience not to be missed.
There’s a layer of the mythic in everything Cynthia Pelayo writes, whether she’s charting the little-known history of her home city of Chicago or digging deep into the pool of shared stories that’s served humanity since ancient times. Regardless of subject matter or narrative, Pelayo reads like a writer constantly in search of the threads of legend and myth that bind us all together and keep us awake at night.
It Came From Neverland, Pelayo’s latest novel, takes that search and applies it to one of the most famous children’s stories ever conceived, J.M. Barrie’s beloved and oft-adapted tale of the Boy Who Never Grew Up. But this is not just a Peter Pan retelling, or a Peter Pan meta-sequel. Through gorgeous prose, finely drawn characters, and an iron grip on the themes that drive the story, Pelayo crafts It Came From Neverland into one of the year’s must-read genre novels, both a horrifying spin on Peter Pan and a luminous dark fantasy about the search for salvation in a cold, brutal world.
In Pelayo’s version of events, Wendy Darling and her brothers John and Michael really did travel to Neverland when they were children, drawn there by a charismatic and irresistible figure called Peter Pan. But this Neverland is far from the Disney version, and after fighting to survive in that ageless place, the children made their way home and shut Peter Pan out of their lives, refusing to so much as utter his name, lest he find them again.
Flash forward to 1914, where Wendy’s working as a schoolteacher at Marigold House, a London orphanage growing increasingly crowded amid the outbreak of World War I. By day, she teaches and volunteers at a local hospital, reading to the war wounded, and by night, she remembers to check every window latch and keep an eye on every shadow. But lately those shadows seem to behave strangely again. Crows caw all around her. And worst of all, children are disappearing again. Peter Pan is back, and faced with memories of how no one believed her the first time, Wendy prepares to face him one more time.
This is a remarkably well-suited atmosphere for moments of classic, chill-inducing terror, and Pelayo wastes no time weaving a world in which every bird call, every stray thought from the mouth of a child, could be evidence that this monstrous Peter Pan is near. Wendy lives a haunted existence, and as the chaos of war grips London, old fears grip her while new ones fight for position. If you come to this novel looking for something like Stephen King’s IT by way of J.M. Barrie, you’re going to get it, through flashbacks and dark lore and wonderfully well-timed scares, but Pelayo’s not done.
This version of Wendy Darling, through whom we see most of the narrative, cares for children in adulthood because she did not receive the care she needed herself as a child in the aftermath of a traumatic experience. She considers it her duty to listen to them, to protect them, to understand them in a world that still views them not as human beings, but as potential locked up in tiny bodies.
Setting the book in 1914, when young men across Europe were signing up to go and die in a war they didn’t quite understand, underscores this beautifully. Children are grist for the mill in the world of It Came From Neverland, their eager spirits waiting to be crushed by a machine of war and empire and capitalism that will not relent even if an armistice eventually arrives. It’s a wider, more existential layer of horror than the storybook monster, which gets us to open the book in the first place, but the real brilliance at work here is how Pelayo ties it all together.
At the core of all of this, the beating, icy heart of It Came From Neverland‘s horror and its search for meaning amid the narratives of war, children’s fiction, collective memory, and more, Pelayo is most interested in what it really means to never grow up. It means retaining a sense of play, yes, but it also means a refusal to move on, to embrace not just the responsibilities of aging, but the moral burdens of it.
Peter Pan is a monster not because he likes to play, but because he does not consider consequences, mortality, or even the needs and desires of others. The same is true of the leaders of Europe sending young men off to die in a war, and the same is true of leaders now, playing dice with human lives amid the rise and fall of the stock market. To never grow up is to lose something essential about being human, and Pelayo depicts that loss as both existentially terrifying and heartbreaking. That terror and heartbreak drive the novel, but Wendy’s efforts to escape that terror and to mend her broken heart make it fly.
It Came From Neverland is available June 9 wherever books are sold.
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