Your character wakes up from cryosleep, very confused about the current situation. No one is around, most notably his wife and daughter. He discovers horrific events have unfolded while he was sleeping, but he doesn’t know exactly to what extent. His goal is to find his family. It’s a point-and-click horror game that often shows the horrific aftermath of what happened to the crew that was working on the ship. You will discover these events through reading their journals and seeing the horrible things that happened. There are many shocking scenes, especially as the game unfolds. Be warned if you are sensitive to extreme pain and death.

Here’s what I liked:

Horrific Science Fiction — All of the right elements add up to a horrific experience. The story blends ideas from many different works, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t original. Your main objective is to find and keep your family safe. You’ll find a lot of journals left behind by deceased crew members. As you read through the entries, you can see the events unfold. From their first entries, you get to read about how their work lives are going and even some drama. But the later the entries, you can sense that some become worried or even terrified. It really grabs your attention, so you really can’t wait to find out what happened. The game’s situations you discover are sometimes extreme, and that is where the horror part comes into play. It’s not about jump scares or frightening monsters. It’s about the horror of what can happen and the evil that exists inside people’s hearts.

Dangerously Hopeless — How many ways can you die? In these circumstances, quite a few! If you make a wrong move, it will be game over. There are several situations in which you can do things in the wrong order, or get too curious, and end up watching a cut-scene similar to a “fatality” from Mortal Kombat. If you use certain items on your character, you will also watch these scenes. This character sees so many terrible things and is trapped in space, with very little chance of survival. If you’re able to stomach the scenes and get to the final area, you will witness something you were not prepared for. To me, it’s one of the worst scenes I’ve seen played out in a video game. Not because of any emotional attachment to any character, but because it’s very sudden, and even you will become hopeless like the protagonist.

Save Yourself — It really makes me happy when a game lets you save where you want to. This game doesn’t give much of a reason to replay the entire story, but it does give you a reason to play certain scenes to watch the various deaths and to gain the achievements. If you forgot to make manual saves, you can also go to the chapter selection from the menu. Once you know what you’re doing, you can get through them fairly quickly.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

Some Bad Navigation — When you start the game up, you have to choose a country. The problem? You must do this every time the game loads. You do not have the option to save the setting. There’s also a little problem with the cursor, it moves really fast. You can click the wrong thing by mistake. Luckily, there is an option to slow it down. In the main menu, I just wish I could cycle through the selection instead of using a cursor. There’s a lot of space on the screen that isn’t used, so I’m not sure why I would ever want to drag my cursor around. I’m also still unsure what exactly annoyed me about clicking the B button in the menu; perhaps it was patched, as I no longer see any issue. Also, if you do choose to follow a guide, there are fewer chapters in the Xbox Anniversary Edition. Most of the things you will read online about the achievements will be misleading because the original had a different chapter count. Not the end of the world, but it may cause confusion and more game time to finish everything up.

Dialogue Can’t Be Skipped — There can be some lengthy dialogue sections, one in particular that really annoyed me. You get out of a transport and go into the next room. A bunch of dialogue is played out, and you cannot skip it. Then you walk and are killed by turrets. At least I was, many times. Every single time I died, I was forced to go through the whole dialogue again. I didn’t want to save it right there because I wasn’t sure if I was stuck or not (I couldn’t go back onto the transport). Eventually, I did save after I couldn’t take hearing the story play out there again. I finally managed to figure out what to do, but I still wish I could skip the dialogues, especially when replaying certain chapters.

Wrap-up

While most of the game wasn’t too difficult, there were some challenging puzzles that might make you run to a guide on the internet. The story is pretty good, and the reading of journals was welcome. I really liked not having to worry about fighting things or jump scares. It lets you become engrossed in what’s going on and gives you the freedom to do the puzzles without too much stress. They took the game’s death to a step further by playing them out as a mini cut-scene. While I have some gripes with navigation and the ability to skip dialogues, most of the experience was great. If you’re a fan of point-and-click adventures with a love for sci-fi and horror, you won’t want to pass on this!

Score: Highly Recommended

Stasis was published by Feardemic and developed by THE BROTHERHOOD on Xbox One. It was released on June 26 2025, for $9.99. A copy was provided for review