Russian publisher 1C has an enormous line-up for the coming year, but the star performer is undoubtedly icy PC shooter Cryostasis. The game’s developer, the Kiev, Ukraine-based Action Forms, gave us a brief hands-on with the game at KRI, the Russian Game Developers conference. What we saw was a grim, moody shooter, strongly reminiscent of last year’s adventures in Rapture. This time, however, the flashbacks aren’t in the form of tapes and recordings: we actually get to play them.

The central conceit within Cryostasis is that the player-character is able to re-live the final moments of the various corpses he encounters as he explores a ship that’s trapped in the polar icecap. This strange ability manifests itself in brief sequences in which the gamer is able to play through what happened to the deceased – potentially changing the present as the doomed character heads towards their fate. This, along with the desperate need to stay warm by squatting around smoldering coals and fizzing light bulbs, is what sets Cryostasis apart from other shooters. In fact, despite the rifles and machine-guns, this seems to be in another genre entirely: it’s definitely about survival, and there’s plenty of scope for horror.

However, the connection with BioShock comes to light in both the towering horrors that lurk in the depths of the ship, but also in Action Forms’ avowed intention to ‘do things differently’. Despite the Russian accents, they sound a lot like a pre-launch Ken Levine, and their demonstrations have similar esoteric parallels with the early glimpses of BioShock. The question now is whether the low-budget dev team will be able to deliver a suitably polished experience.


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