Infinitap Games

Cryostasis was great. I loved the heat mechanic. I even liked the combat, you had to make every shot count and that made it so much more interesting than if they'd just done a full out corridor shooter.

Grabthehoopka wrote: One of the worst shock videos I've ever seen was camcorder footage of some dumbass with an infected tattoo site in the doctor's office. Initially, you just see a tiny tinge of red, but it's hard to tell cause this guy's back is completely covered in tattoos and he's a rather large fellow to begin with. So the doctor takes his sickle-scalpel thing and cuts this huge, wide incision across it and ends up basically lancing this guy's entire back. Over the span of about 10 seconds, he manages to squeeze like a gallon of pus out of this guy's back. It's equal parts horrifying and impressive. If you're a bad enough dude, you can easily find it on youtube and the like.

Haha, sounds.. fun! If I need a reason to hate myself later, I'll check that out. That's gotta be kind of satisfying actually to accomplish something like that (for the doctor doing the lancing, maybe not for the guy being lanced I wouldn't think so much)...

OK I couldn't help but looking it up as I was typing this. Wow that is NOT a healthy looking color. I'm just glad this didn't seem to be filmed in HD.

Hey, I've never heard of this Cryostasis: Sleep Of Reason
From what I'm reading it sounds interesting, although people have said that it's boring so hahaa

I'd try it out but I can't find it for download anywhere online! I've tried Steam, GMG, GamersGate and GOG yet it's not on any of them! I swear that it was released digitally though from what I'm reading, maybe it's because I'm in the UK though so hahaha. I might get a physical copy and give it a try but I'm not sure if I'd enjoy it or not, I'll read into it more though

Cryostasis is a game with a really good story, but it's marred by some technical issues and divisive shooter mechanics. I didn't mind those parts but a lot of people didn't care for them and the game is fairly slow paced.

That's weird, they must have taken it off the Steam store, because that's where I bought it originally, but I'm not seeing it here on US Steam either. It used to go on sale all the time.

Well like I said maybe it's just not on the UK store or something O:
What's so divisive about the shooting mechanics then if I may ask?

It's not up on the US steam store either now, weird!

The shooting is much slower and clunkier than a lot of games. There's not a lot of shooting, but most of your guns are single shot where you have to stop and reload or chamber a new round after firing, so it's important to hit what you're aiming at the first time. You get some type of machine gun later on, if memory serves me, but it's pretty limited on ammo. I thought that helped make it more like a survival horror than a shooter, but I seem to remember a lot of people felt the shooting parts were sort of tacked on.

Hmmmm yeah I can imagine that those mechanics much frustrate a good number of people yes
Although as long as it has a good story and atmosphere then it's fine to me, I'll probably check it out then! Maybe I'll even get a good few scares from it haha

It has a few jump scares, but it's mostly the thick, thick atmosphere that I like.
That and the flashbacks. You get to relive the last moments of the crew person by person and try to save them by succeeding where they failed. Can't really explain it better than that without spoiling, but it's awesome, basically interactive story-telling and short puzzle-sections at times.
Personally, I really liked the shooting mechanics, because it made you feel vulnerable.
Also, it's one of the few FPS I know where melee combat doesn't just feel like clicking until something falls apart in front of you, no, it's very hefty and deliberate.
I'm a big fan of the game, although I must criticize especially its poor technical optimization, so performance may be an issue for you.
I didn't buy it on Steam, I just got a non-Steam physical version from Amazon, I think.

I remember reading about it and it seems like the kind of game that I would love. I'm a fairly forgiving person, and I consider a game worth playing if it does a few things really, really well, regardless of how flawed it is. So when I see people give a game mediocre scores and say there were good ideas or that they really wish the game was better, I know that I'll usually like it.

Another game I never hear anyone talk about is Cursed Mountain. It was originally released for the Wii, but it was ported to the PC and you can buy a digital copy of it on amazon.com for five bucks. It looks like a last-last generation game, there are fixed camera sections that are awkward with keyboard-based movement (there isn't any controller support, as far as I know), they do that motion-comic still images thing for cutscenes, and it's not especially difficult. However, the story and setting are absolutely fascinating. You play as a mountain climber whose brother goes missing in the Himalayas, and you set out to find him, and walk right into the middle of the buddhist apocalypse. Most of the game is spent through creepy windswept, abandoned Tibetan villages, and eventually up the mountain itself, all while fighting off angry ghosts that suck the life out of everything and weird humanoid animal demons. You fight them off with a blessed climbing axe with holy artifacts strapped to the top, and you heal yourself with incense sticks. They really commit to the story, and all of the traditional Tibetan buddhist lore is well-researched. It's not a fantastic game, and it's not especially scary, but I liked it, and recommend it.

I don't remember off the top of my head, but weren't there some greens and purples in the wreath of flowers at the end of The Coming Storm?

It's actually the end of "The Nightmare Begins", but you are totally right. I guess we've already added all he colors.

Cryostasis and Cursed Mountain sound cool, but I get frustrated easily and I suck at games, so I'm not sure if I could see past the flaws. Maybe I'll give it a chance if I finish my current queues of games although it's pretty long. hahaha

matt wrote:Cryostasis and Cursed Mountain sound cool, but I get frustrated easily and I suck at games, so I'm not sure if I could see past the flaws. Maybe I'll give it a chance if I finish my current queues of games although it's pretty long. hahaha

Actually Cursed Mountain isn't very difficult. First of all, your ranged weapons have unlimited ammo, if you hit a ghost with a melee or a ranged attack it stuns them and makes them stagger backwards so it's fairly easy to create breathing room for yourself and run away, if your health drops below about 1/3, it'll slowly regenerate back up to 1/3 health, if you weaken an enemy enough you can kill them with a simple QTE that heals you, and on top of that they rain healing items on you like blessed mana from the heavens. Incense sticks are the healing item in the game and I finished with like 30 of them in my inventory. I don't know if it's because of bad design, because they were trying to make a "casual" survival horror game for the Wii, or both, but like I said, it's not a terribly difficult game, which for me is a knock against it, but you might like it.


I've been thinking about it quite a bit, and I think my ideal horror game would be something like System Shock 2 or the Metro series, because they appeal to my OCD. I'm a hoarder and a double-checker, and they both have different ammo types and resources to collect, and different things I can fuss over, Metro especially.

With System Shock 2, with the rather unforgiving weapon degradation system, I started out with points in repair and no points in maintenance, so I couldn't improve a weapon's quality, but if it broke, I could repair it back up to a low quality level, for free, so for the first half or so of the game, I went around with 2 pistols and 2 shotguns in my inventory, and I would use one until it broke, and then pull out the spare one. This, of course, involved making sure that I knew the quality level on each one at all times and made sure that they were all loaded, made easier by the fact that you can reload weapons when the clip is full, so I made it a habit to switch between all of them and reload each one every now and then (too often), and overall it worked and made me feel like a pragmatic badass. I don't know, maybe it made me feel like my neurotic and obsessive tendencies would be useful in a survival situation, if you want to get all psycho-analyzing about it.

The Metro series, on the other hand, gave me things I needed to worry about and ways to check each one, which was personally very satisfying. So I made a habit of, every couple minutes, making sure all my weapons were reloaded, charging my battery back up, checking my air, checking my compass, and if I had any pneumatic weapons, make sure they were pumped up all the way. In Metro: Last Light, they took away the check watch button, which made checking your air a little less satisfying, since they changed the display from an analogue watch to a big, easily read nixie tube display, and they made it so it's visible at all times with all weapons, buuuuut, they added the mechanic of your gasmask visor getting dirty and gave you the ability to wipe it off, so they gave me one more thing to fuss about and I forgave them.

So, when I think about things like this I think about how particular, but easily sated my tastes are, and I can't help comparing these mechanics that I like to those baby toys where there's some spinny plastic things over here, a thing that makes a rattly noise over here, some plastic shapes that dangle over there to bat at, and a thing that turns over and there's a mirror on the other side. So, I kind of feel like I'm a big baby and the game devs are just making fancier and only slightly more complex baby toys for me to play with. But, anyway, yes. From a game mechanic standpoint, my dream horror game would consist of several things to fuss over.