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.
Reviews
‘The Mouths’ Review: Takashi Shimizu’s Cursed Tree Horror Stumbles at the Finish [Fantasia 2026]
Director Takashi Shimizu’s latest, The Mouths, has a pretty straightforward premise: what if an enormous, threatening tree at the edge of a cemetery contained a killer curse? Touch it, make a wish, and let the horror begin.
As fans of Shimizu’s work know, it’s never quite so straightforward. The Japanese director, best known for the Ju-on films, delights in non-linear narratives and haunting specters. In this capacity, The Mouths more or less adheres to formula.
The screenplay was written by Masahiro Yamaura and adapts Sesuji’s novella A Questionnaire About the Mouth. The source material provides a framing device that opens the film before it is swiftly forgotten, only to return in the film’s closing moments in highly amusing fashion.
In between, the film tells the story of four friends who investigate an urban legend of a cursed tree, including soft-spoken Shota (Rihito Itagaki), sensitive Mirei (Momona Kasahara), outgoing Ann (Ai Yoshikawa), and her boastful boyfriend Tatsuya (Keito Tsuna).
Initially, the action seems straightforward: the four teens drive to the cemetery, discussing what Shota heard about the tree with a brief pause at a convenience store in between. Throughout all of these early scenes, the interaction among the teens hints at a complicated dynamic, including a minor spat between Ann and Tatsuya, and Shota’s brief but meaningful glance at Ann in the rearview mirror. These sequences are regularly interrupted by direct address police interviews as present-day Shota, Tatsuya, and Mirei make ominous declarations about the events of that evening.
The first act works because The Mouths is slowly building tension around what happened. It’s obvious from their statements that things will go awry, but Yamaura’s script teases things out. Even when they arrive at the cemetery, rather than proceed directly to the cursed object, the action pauses so Shota can propose a specific course of action: they will proceed to the tree, individually, in a specific order. The wait for the action to kick in is both tantalizing and agonizing.
First up: Shota, followed by Tatsuya, then Ann. Mirei, meanwhile, becomes increasingly reticent, which alarms the others who have already noted her sensitivity to otherworldly phenomena.
When Ann disappears, the film moves into a new act as the remaining members of the group search for her while seemingly being haunted by both her and the tree. This is where Shimizu’s penchant for ghostly figures lurking in the background and peeking around corners comes to the forefront, including one stand-out moment that leans into the curse’s origin: the visual of a hanged woman with a grotesquely stretched neck.
The middle stretch feels a little too familiar to the director’s work, however, so it’s exciting when the last act upends much of what we thought we knew. There is a reason that the film is called The Mouths: not only are most of these people revealed to be unreliable narrators, but it is revealed that several interactions throughout the film were manipulated by characters with malicious intent. These people are not quite what they seemed.
This revisionist filter on the events of the movie’s first half is provocative and enticing, though the creative team struggles to execute it without devolving into messy confusion. There’s at least one plot beat that should be a massive revelation, but both the visuals and the dialogue render it quite confusing, which robs the moment of some of its power. This is a shame, because the last act is what makes the film stand out from other curse/ghost movies.
The performances of the main four teens are solid, with Itagaki getting to show the most range. Many of the supporting characters, including a pair of frenemies who also become involved in the curse, as well as the detective investigating the case, feel a bit superfluous; the film would have benefitted from cutting back some of these scenes or, alternately, beefing up a few of these roles to justify their inclusion.
The Mouths’ other big element is its sound design. The area around the tree is surrounded by wet mud that slurps and sucks at shoes, while the cursed bark is covered in cicadas, whose distinctive buzz and crunchy shells provide evocative foley.
Overall, The Mouths is a solid but slightly inessential addition to Shimizu’s filmography. For the auteur’s fans, there’s plenty to appreciate, particularly the way the Japanese master sets up scares and pays them off, including good moments in a library and later when the detective is driving. On the other hand, the film’s big reveal is handled so clumsily that its potency is disappointingly muted.
The Mouths is a decent time, but it’s hard to overlook some of its weaknesses.
The Mouths made its North American premiere at the 2026 Fantasia International Film Festival. Release info TBD.
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