Weekly Update 103
Welcome back to Seth Oberlender’s weekly update blog! I am Seth Oberlender and I am going to be an author. I am not one yet but I am still trying. I have not found an agent to represent my work but who knows; I could find them tomorrow.
I want to talk about science fiction horror. I love Sci-Fi Horror, always have. Alien, Pandorum, Sunshine, and more I have not seen but know of and want to see. I just played a Sci-Fi Horror video game and thought you should know about it.
Stasis is a science fiction horror, point-and-click adventure game released in 2015 by publisher/developer THE BROTHERHOOD. Here is the thing about Stasis… it is so, so good. Every trope you can think of when it comes to Sci-Fi Horror is in the game; cloning gone wrong, mutant super soldiers, derelict space ships, rampant maybe sentient fungus, mega corporations exploiting the common man, robots, unethical experiments, and several trigger warnings I won’t go into (this game goes to some wild places). It was legitimately terrifying and fun to explore the Groomlake, but not just for the gross biomasses and broken machines.
The story of Stasis asks a similar question that every Sci-Fi Horror art asks; How far is too far for science? The Groomlake is an old deep space oil frigate that was modified by the evil (yes, straight up evil) Cayne Corporation to do fringe studies where no laws could tell them to stop. The result is some very crazy visuals and even more shocking testimonies from the crew and scientists aboard the doomed ship. The horror is not actually in what they are doing, but in how it works! The antagonist of the game reveals that through the dark experiments and downright evil-scientist level theories they have successfully cured most human conditions, including cancer. I find this very interesting to explore in a game because the question becomes very understandable.
The question of ethics is not the main focus of the game, but more of a large omnipresent theme as you traverse the dying ship. There is also the more real horror of losing control of your situation through John, the player character. He and his wife and child were placed under cryosleep (a sort of suspended animation) to go on vacation, but John is awoken from stasis on the Groomlake. The ship found theirs and captured it, taking the sleeping humans and labeling them “products” to be used for testing. And that’s just how the game starts. I recommend the game to anyone who likes Sci-Fi Horror, but don’t be afraid to use a walk through for it. I am not used to playing point-and-click adventure games so I would have abandoned the game the first time I had to combine a crowbar and a caution tape unprompted.
Alright, well, time to get back to work. Life persists and so do I! See you next week.
