At last night's press event for the 1C Company's upcoming titles, the publisher showed off a very early but playable build of Cryostasis, a newly revealed first person shooter with some interesting gameplay mechanics. Developed by Action Forms, the game takes place on a Russian ship (the dev team researched real ships to make their enviroments more realistic) that is caught in a frozen state. The one level demo showed off some of the interesting gameplay features of Cryostasis which as the title suggests does involve a lot of cold weather.

Your health bar isn't based on the normal first person shooter design. Cryostasis makes the health bar a "hot or cold" bar. The warmer you are, the healthier you are. You can keep warm through various methods in the game; through the heat given by electricity (light bulbs for example) or through heated rooms. Some heat sources can raise your health to its maximum but other less powerful heat sources only advance your health to less than the full amount. Of course if you stray too far from a heated area you health slowly goes down and you find yourself frozen to death.

Temperture changes are not your only problem in Cryostasis. You also have enemies that you have to deal with that want to either shoot you or carve you up. In one section of the demo level we faced off against a monster that was very hard to get a beat on since his movement tended to be very twitchly and all over the place. Our bolt action rifle found it very hard to get a target even if the monster was right in front of our sight.

While it's not explained why you have this ability in the game, your character in Cryostasis has an extra ability of his own; a way to enter the mind of a recently killed person and then relive the last few minutes of its life. You are not on rails for these sequences, either. You can actually interact and even change events in the recent past. If you manage to change some small but critical item (opening a door when it was originally closed, for example) you can get some bonuses and access to places that would orginally be closed to you. We were told there is a rather funny Easter Egg planned for the game. At one point you find a side of beef. If you use your temporal powers on it you enter the mind of the cow where the side of beef came from.

Visually the game is looking really good with some very impressive dynamic lighting effects and especially with the snow, ice and frost visuals. You may never feel warm again after seening the extremely frozen landscape of the Russian vessel with the wind, snow and ice all looking terrific.

It's still early days for Cryostasis and the game is still a ways off (the official fact sheet states that it's due out by the end of 2007 but we were told it's more likely a 2008 game). Will the cold effects and the temporal looking back powers be gimmicks or will they really be a solid gameplay item? We will be keeping an eye out on Cryostasis in the months ahead.

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