Kriophobia is a mostly well-made indie fixed camera survival horror game that attempts to integrate more systems-led gameplay, but trips up on aesthetic, collision and gameplay design issues. The story moves along at a decent pace, but there's no stand-out characters and very few unexpected beats. Worth a play, if you're a fan of the genre.
The game takes its time to introduce the cast and the initial setting, with some decent acting and dialogue. There's also some really nice snow effects that sell the environment and the oncoming storm that kicks off the story.
Unfortunately, the majority of the rest of the game takes place in the dark corridors and rooms of an underground bunker. You'll be equipped with a number of torches throughout the game to operate as illumination and weapons, but the majority of your screen will always be filled with a murky, dark grey mass.
This means that much of the game lacks interesting visuals, and clear landmarks are scarce. The torches are used for gameplay purposes (revealing clues to puzzles, defending against some enemy types) but the lack of illumination really hurts the overall visual appeal of the game.
The environments are nicely modelled, but with some exceptions later in the bunker, mostly uninspired. I do like the prop modelling, however, and a lot of credit has to go to the graphic design - the menus and icons look very nice and are very usable, with quite a lot of effort gone into making document props, which is cool...!
The maps in the game are beautifully made (as document props), but are missing the functionality that helps with a lot of survival horror games, where they can also act as checklists and guides. Credit to the team for reserving a button that summons and dismisses the maps menu, however.
Other than lighting, there's two other major systems integrated into the survival horror gameplay of Kriophobia - weapon/tool durability and cold mechanics.
Tools also act as weapons in this game, which means that the game's keys (mostly for optional areas) are also used to deal with enemies and static mine objects. These tools have durability rating, which means use as a key or weapon can cause the tool to degrade and eventually break, vanishing from your inventory. The game has a variety of ways to resupply you with tools in the field, however, some of which require you to engage further with story foreshadowing. Initially, I wasn't really a fan of this, but on my second playthrough I had to acknowledge that this system works pretty well, adding some tension and making the player think strategically about how they want to approach optional puzzles and combat.
Somewhat less successful is the temperature management system, where the main character can find her body temperature dropping in cold or freezing conditions, to the point where the player character can contract hypothermia and die. This sounds interesting - and indeed has been implemented successfully in a variety of games like The Long Dark and DayZ. However, this game does not allow you to build your own fire. There's no systemic flexibility, and you're required to either use an item to warm yourself or return to the heater in your safe room. As the game environments get colder, you'll find yourself rubberbanding back to the nearest heater and the game takes on the tone of an endless series of fetch quets. It's been a while since I played it, but I think Penumbra handled this mechanic better.
The game has some nicely deigned puzzles and though some of the solutions were a bit obscure, none of them really dipped into moon logic - within the context of the game, they mostly made sense and rewarded reasonable lateral thinking.
The game employs a nice stylistic trick where dark areas of the screen are overlayed with a 'hand-shaded' texture, attempting to give the project a 'sketched' quality. Unfortunately it adds little to the asethetic, as for outside of some hand-painted cave areas, the game relies on UV mapped realtime 3D backgrounds.
Friendly NPCs are well-modelled with some decent character, but are never given camera angles to show off the designs. Enemy designs range from the functional to the incoherant, with no particuarly interesting silhouettes (a big issue given the lighting). There's some nice internal details - a mutated human with a spiral as a new face - but for the most part the designs are just blobs.
The worst is the first enemy you encounter, the most common enemy in the game - a brown grub that crawls on the ground and alternately leaps or spits at you. You couldn't create a less compelling visual design, but you'll encounter them everywhere.
'Boss' creatures are blobs with some limbs sticking out (maybe one big hand). It seems as though the design team didn't account properly for their size, however, as the patrolling bosses will regularily clip through walls and occasionally just teleport into rooms. Thankfully, while this is annoying, it mostly doesn't affect the majority of your gameplay.
The animation is accomplished well, but with no stand-out moments. More complex cutscenes are performed with motion comics, which is a smart choice for an indie game! These animations are a little static, however, and could have done with a little more parallax and camera movement to make them a little more lively. At the moment these sequences can feel a little cold and analytical. Shout out to a sequence set in an elevator, however, that worked pretty well.
The audio is competant, no complaints. Controls are mostly solid, though some of the camera transitions are going to cause some trouble with cam-relative controls, with opposing angles on doors and inside rooms, causing the player to two-step back and forth across the camera zone borders.
The story is fairly predictable, with no wild emotional swings or standout characters, setpieces or dialogue - but it's delivered at a good pace and remains reasonably motivating for a survival horror game.
I'm not sure this game is worth €13.99, but there's plenty of content in here, with some interesting systemic swings. If a late-Soviet survival horror sounds good to you, I'd say take a shot! (...ideally on sale!)
And if fixed multicam games sound like your thing, check out the [url=https://steamcommunity.com/groups/fixedcamera]Fixed Camera Appreciation Society[/url], a Steam Group and Discord server dedicated to cinematic adventures with a very particuar perspective!
