STASIS
The best thing I can say about Stasis is that is reminded me of Sanitarium from about 1999. I mean that as high praise. Overall, I think the game is very much worth playing for adventure fans, in spite of some flaws. It was simply so much better in some ways than it had to be, that it made up for the little annoyances.
For example, the animations and videos were very well done, giving the game a top-tier feel in spite of the somewhat dated appearance of the isometric locations. The atmosphere was creepy and suspenseful enough to make up for the somewhat overdone derelict ship horror sci-fi premise. I generally don’t love it when games tell you the story almost entirely by journal entries that you find lying around, but in this case, they are so well written with so few typos or grammatical errors that I actually found them a pleasure to read. They tell a story of developing interpersonal drama between the crew members as things went to hell, but more importantly, they are critical to understanding what is going on, so it’s good that they are so readable. Those logs aren’t voiced, but there are characters talking to you over transmissions who are fully voiced, and that’s done fairly well. I found the atmospheric ambient noises, music, and background transmissions to be much more effective than the voice acting, though.
– Real player with 16.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Isometric Sci-fi Games.
I played through STASIS in basically one sitting. It took around seven hours to complete.
What STASIS basically does is pay homage to various movies like Event Horizon, Pandorum, and Aliens(you will find Easter Eggs in the game demonstrating proof of these influences) while crafting its own fairly well written story. The dark and foreboding atmosphere in STASIS really sets the tone for what was, at least in my opinion, a stellar gaming experience.
Story
The story in STASIS is centered around John Maracheck, who awakens from stasis to find himself alone. His wife and daughter are missing and the place he awakens in seems abandoned. The story in STASIS develops as John searches for his family while also trying to figure out how he even ended up alone and what happened to everybody else on Groom Lake, the space base he now finds himself on.
– Real player with 12.3 hrs in game
POSTAL
I Regret Nothing
POSTAL is one of those games, even after all these years, you can still pick it up and truly appreciate for what it is and how it affected the view of video games back in 1997. Unlike it’s sequel POSTAL 2, this game is extremely dark, (in which HATRED tried to do and then some, but personally found it to try too hard.) Postal is an isometric top-down shooter where your goal is to kill all enemies (or 90% of them) in the map and move onto the next area. Due to what a lot of people believed, you don’t actually have to kill innocent people! Though what’s the fun in that? … It’s not, it’s painful trying to complete the game without killing any innocent people.
– Real player with 51.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Isometric Villain Protagonist Games.
Having played this games series to completion (well, almost: what, you mean to tell me that you actually got all the way through Postal 3?!), I feel that reviewing them all is necessary. This game, however, is going to be difficult to review. It’s not that it’s a badly made game or that I hate it (on the contrary). The problem is that it’s such a disturbing game that I may end up on a watchlist for recommending it. Whatever! Here it goes.
The first installment of the Postal series is of humble origins, provided that your definition of “humble origins” involves being banned in 14 countries, being blacklisted by most major retailers and being mentioned by Senator Joe Lieberman to the Senate as one of the “three worst things in American society” (the other two being Marilyn Manson and Calvin Klein underwear ads). Postal is a game about a guy (the Postal Dude) being bombarded with demonic mental images and voices convincing him to murder society as a whole. Each level is a neighborhood, truckstop, air force base, shopping mart, etc. of innocent people and hostile people (“hostile” being cops, government agents, well-armed vigilantes and other people who are merely trying to stop a madman with weapons from murdering everybody). You are instructed to kill at least 80-90% of the hostile people before progressing to the next level. Unlike the succeeding two games, the only morality choice you’re really given is whether you want to kill only the people trying to kill you or kill everybody.
– Real player with 29.7 hrs in game
STASIS: BONE TOTEM
STASIS: BONE TOTEM is a thrilling and spine-tingling journey into the unknown fathoms of the icy ocean and the terrors that await a family. They will uncover a threat far beyond their wildest dreams.
Salvaging duo, Charlie and Mac scour the ocean for a living. They hit the motherload and come across DEEPSEA 15; A seemingly abandoned Cayne Corporation rig in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
A NEW STORY
Experience a new gruesome narrative with a fresh cast but featuring the same gameplay as STASIS.
Combine items, interact with computers, and solve puzzles while experiencing the gritty atmosphere!
Mac, Charlie, and their Super-Toy Moses will scrape the depths of resilience and descend into a sci-fi horror story that will test their resolve and relationships and push them to the darkest corners of mankind.
FEATURES
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Beautifully rendered isometric backgrounds
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Toggle back and forth between 3 unique characters
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Use an innovative shared inventory system
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Puzzles and story-based gameplay
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Voiced characters
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Explore a world full of rich deep history and lore
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Full motion video cut scenes
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Unique deaths
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Personal ‘self-destruction’ achievements
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Ultrawide screen support
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4k support
Created by the team behind STASIS, CAYNE, and BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION.
Read More: Best Isometric Sci-fi Games.
Blind Boris
This game has alot of potential, but i don’t think this should be presented as a finished product.
Positive:
Theme is awesome and creepy.
Loved the pixel graphics.
Minimal but effective sound design.
And the rest…
Some typos in dialogue.
Hard to tell what you are supposed to do at any given point.
Level design is pretty awkward.
Sometimes you cant use things in your inventory when you need to.
Some guy on youtube already posted a video of a ‘walk up a wall’ bug.
Im on the fence about getting a refund tho because theres a ton of promise here. Hope to see a patch from the devs!
– Real player with 4.4 hrs in game
Very interesting!
I wouldn’t really “recommend” this game to everyone as it doesn’t have a typical appeal like story (I didn’t understand a single thing about the plot), graphics (standard pixel art) or gameplay (incredibly buggy and unpolished).
The only appeal that I can find is its weirdness.
I personally quite like figuring stuff out for myself instead of being told and trust me, this game is happy to hide as many details as possible from the player.
I spent 2/3 of my time restarting various times trying to understand the mechanics of this game and once it all “clicked” I breezed through the game from start to finish with no problems in one attempt, I even skipped a lot of items (optional ones like health and traps that help agaist hazards) since I already figured out how to reach the end.
– Real player with 3.5 hrs in game
SEARCH PARTY: Director’s Cut
Search Party is a great game. It adds on to the original Search Party game which was released via Puppet Combo’s patreon. You may think its short, but it has a lot of secrets. If you feel like playing a fun little horror game
with amazing 2D graphics you should definitely pick this one up. Lum and Torture Star did an amazing job on this one.
– Real player with 8.1 hrs in game
SEARCH PARTY: Directors Cut is a great clock tower style horror game.
Were you play as Claire searching for her missing
8 year old brother Daniel. While looking for him she gets lost in the woods.
Eventually she finds a strange house could Daniel be inside.
now i think this is one of lum’s best games.
– Real player with 6.0 hrs in game
CAYNE
STASIS players will be familiar with this Free To Play addition about a pregnant Hadley who manages to escape from a nightmare birthing procedure. What follows is a top down sci-fi adventure that has more gore than a zombie breakdancing session.
The cutscenes are high-res of Hadley’s escape progress as you solve puzzles, item hunt and find codes to access each area of the facility. Each area uncovered begins with voice acted scenes that are mature & at times sci-fi horrific similar to the movie Alien sometimes the personality of Hadley can come across as dark with some inappropriate humour but to me this should be viewed as the characteristic of Hadley rather than poorly timed scripting. After all, it is a deep sci-fi plot with a controversial horror element so it should have some moments of light mood to break up the heavy plot and, at times, challenging gameplay.
– Real player with 5.1 hrs in game
TL:DR Despite the high production values and it being free, Cayne is an absolute mess to play due to its amateurish game design and pompous writing, which ultimately make it not worth your time.
Both the graphics and the voice acting are extremely polished, with beautiful prerendered backdrops, quality CG cutscenes and overall solid performances by the voice cast, the only real blemish being the main character, whose tone shifts inconsistently, with sudden yells and hoots that are jarring and out of context.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
Dead Estate
I think it speaks to the strength of this game that I got the true ending with a broken run before I unlocked all the characters and I’m taking a break to write this review before going back in again.
Dead Estate is a fun little isometric roguelike akin to an Enter the Gungeon or diamond shaped Isaac. You go in, fight enemies, pick up weapons and items, die to bosses, unlock new stuff, rinse and repeat. I don’t really need to tell you the basics of this kind of game. There are multiple playable characters with their own default weapons, stats and strengths/weaknesses. I will give it to them, once you start heading away from the starting characters they do come up with some pretty unique gimmicks. Gotta say, the one involving money is a personal favorite.
– Real player with 39.0 hrs in game
As someone who really didn’t care for the genres gold standards “Binding of Isaac” and “Gungeon” i just thought that maybe this style wasn’t for me. Then i saw this game and something clicked as i started to play. It was actually fun, not just in the gameplay sense but in how it handles it’s own presentation. Everything is vibrant and colorful being overall very pleasing to look at, the characters and stages all have a level of charm and personal touches that make them stand apart, and the music is fairly simple but charmingly retro and fits very well with the tone of the game. Add to all that a wholesome and strange story that you will continue to discover through multiple runs and you have the recipe for one of the best Twin-Stick Rougelikes in the genre. The game is worth every penny and with the promise of more content to come I honestly cannot recommend this game enough.
– Real player with 27.4 hrs in game
Distrust: Polar Survival
TL;DR: I love arctic survival games - but Distrust: Polar Survival is a lesson in how NOT to make an arctic survival game. Distrust is supposed to be a game about surviving in arctic conditions - yet once you figure out how to manage your resources, you’ll find the biggest challenge is surviving the many bugs like dropped connections and lost inventory.
PROS
I love arctic survival games, where you are not just fighting to survive but where the harsh conditions of the environment itself is killing you. If this doesn’t describe what you enjoy playing, I’d advise you to stop right now and pass on this game.
– Real player with 94.5 hrs in game
Distrust:
“Mayday. . . Can anyone hear us? . . . We need help. . . We’re losing people one after the other. . . HELLLP!” Then . . . silence. That’s when we decided to send a rescue team to our neighbouring Arctic base. But then, as the helicopter approached the base, screams were echoing all around. All we could decrypt on our end was “what is that light?” After that, all communication was cut and there was no sign of the chopper on our radar. I hope the rescue team survived the crash. That’s just the start of Distrust!
*– [Real player with 22.4 hrs in game](http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198003030375)*
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## Fade
Set in a small town in the Mid-west. You are an investigative reporter sent out to document the local happenings of Eastville. Recently, a cult has taken up residency in the town and strange occurrences have prompted locals to pack up and leave. Prior to your arrival, the company you work for had sent out another reporter whom none have heard from in quite some time. You must use your skills to dig deeper into the mystery and reveal what the town is hiding, as well as locate the missing reporter.
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## Utopia Syndrome
**Utopia Syndrome** is an episodic sci-fi, horror-adventure game with elements of mysticism. The first episode, **Wake Up**, focuses on the inhabitants of an underground shelter, struggling to survive against an interloping evil.
#### SYNOPSIS
Do you trust your senses? Do you wonder if they could ever lie to you? What if everything you’ve ever known to be real was a fiction?
Our protagonist awakens in a bleak prison cell. In the reflection of a fractured mirror stares back a haunted, disfigured face. He can’t recall what happened, or how he wound up as a prisoner… only his name. Anhel. He finds a note written by a girl, Mia, pleading for help while warning of an evil that stalks the corridors.
Anhel thinks his way out of the cell, taking him deeper into the twisting bowels of the bunker. He is met by the aftermath of a bloody massacre-only, the corpses are all gone. Indeed, Anhel may well be the only one left alive or dead. As he moves through the darkened corridors and the vacant rooms, Anhel becomes beset by visions. He pieces together the events of the shelter via messages left behind by Mia and the others... but everything turns on its head when he finds the first survivors.
#### GAMEPLAY
Explore the dark labyrinths of an underground shelter, interact with the surrounding world, solve puzzles, and search for clues, inventory items, notes and audio messages that will reveal the lore and the story of the game.
#### CONTROLS
Classic «point-and-click» adventure, with simple and unobtrusive controls that help immerse the player into the atmosphere of the game.
#### GAME CAMERA
Two camera modes: Top-Down и Third-Person.
#### GRAPHICS
Several unique locations consisting of detailed, realistic levels, with modern graphics, visual effects and real-time lighting.
#### SOUND
Realistic environmental sounds and ambient music make up the oppressive atmosphere of the shelter. The characters are voiced by professional actors.
#### KEY FEATURES
* Classic «point-and-click» controls
* Gloomy post-apocalyptic atmosphere
* Detailed 3D graphics
* Real-time lighting and realistic visual effects
* Numerous points of interaction with the environment
* Hidden objects and simple puzzles to solve
* Two camera modes: Top-Down и Third-Person
* The wrong decision by the player could be fatal
* Intimidating cutscenes
* Ambient sound design and music
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