You wake up out of hypersleep. You probably expected that, though - I mean, the game is called Stasis and it's basically the same thing. But this isn't the ship you were on before, apparently, you've got a bunch of busted ribs, your wife and kid are missing, and wherever you are now...

... something very, very bad has happened.

And that's how our protagonist John Maracheck starts his (mis)adventure onboard the Groomlake, a medical research vessel drifting in orbit around Neptune - conveniently keeping Cayne Corporation's "company interests" outside of Earth's more, you know, scrupulous jurisdiction.

And, uh-oh, those company interests have crawled out of their nutrient vats.

Stasis is a point-and-click sci-fi horror game that mashes up cult-classic genre movies like Alien and Event Horizon with equal parts Dead Space, The Dig, and DOOM, plus a corporate profit margin sub-plot because it's the rules that big budget "experimental" projects in space are always going to go wrong in interesting sorts of ways.

Maybe more so than its source material, though, Stasis is profoundly disturbing. Not even its MATURE 17+ rating from the ESRB for “VIOLENCE, BLOOD AND GORE", "SUGGESTIVE THEMES", and "STRONG LANGUAGE” prepared me for some of the game's imagery and narrative concepts. It's not outrageously gratuitous or anything like that, but there's a lot of... messed up stuff. It's a game that ships human bodies around as "products", and it's definitely a game for adults. You've been warned.

Much of the game's story is told through crew members' PDA entries and email logs, but amidst the escalating catastrophe and confusion on the Groomlake, everybody is a somewhat unreliable narrator, often with agendas of their own - and not all of them exactly according to official protocols - that necessarily influence their perception of ongoing events. Including John.

By the end, you'll have more questions than answers. But that's perhaps the whole point (and the setup for a sequel).

Progressing through the Groomlake is mostly a matter of solving puzzles, spanning a range of complexity from "oh, that's obvious" to "I DON'T EVEN", and you have to pay close attention to the things around you or you could miss something important. The solution to a puzzle in one location, for example, might be in a totally different location, and some inventory items are very easily passed by the first, second, and millionth time around. Because the game is also very linear, that means if you get stuck, you get super-duper stuck - but lots of things in the game can be used to kill John if you're frustrated, so that's an option too.

Visually, Stasis is absolutely astounding. The grimy decks and bulkheads of the Groomlake, recently (and suddenly) redecorated in every shade of intestinal red, are as expertly and extravagantly realised as anything you'd see in a triple-A game - a phenomenal accomplishment by one-man design team, Chris Bischoff. Seriously, this is sci-fi horror at its most spectacular.

The voice acting is mostly very solid, with South African bad guy Dr Malan claiming much of the slimelight, and the sound effects will keep your blood pressure dialled up to the max with ambient whispers, occasional shrieks, and WHY ARE THERE CHILDREN TALKING OUT OF THE WALLS. Music by Mark Morgan (Fallout, Planescape: Torment) is a bonus extra, the tension-setting, minor key intro sequence being my personal favourite of the mix.

Disclaimer: I pledged $5 to the Stasis Kickstarter campaign. I also pledged $5 to the Banner Saga Kickstarter campaign, and I hated that game.