Sci-fi and space horror Horror puzzle Horror escape

STASIS: BONE TOTEM

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Salvage an abandoned oil rig and find what is buried beneath it.

Platforms: PC, Mac, PlayStation, Xbox, Switch
Stores: Steam, Epic, GOG
Price: Paid
Rated: Very Positive on Steam (93% of 2,689 reviews); 85 on Metacritic; rated M by the ESRB (blood and gore, strong language, violence) and PEGI 18
Length: about 11 to 12 hours
Players: 1
Made by: The Brotherhood
Released: 2023

On GOG: one of the GOG horror games.

No. 14 of the horror games about human experiments · No. 10 of the mutant horror games · No. 7 of the ocean horror games · No. 13 of the toy horror games · No. 11 of the laboratory horror games

Get it on Steam GOG Epic Games Store PlayStation Store (PS5 and PS4)Xbox Nintendo eShop

What frightens A salvage couple boards an abandoned oil rig in the Pacific, finds a flayed corpse and goes down into an underwater lab full of experiments, fungus eating through embalmed bodies and mutated things in the vents. A wrong puzzle answer can end in a grisly death scene.
Content: blood and gore, body horror, violent death scenes, strong language.

STASIS: BONE TOTEM is an isometric horror point-and-click adventure from The Brotherhood. Salvagers Mac and Charlie and their robot bear Moses find an abandoned oil rig in the Pacific and descend into a lab on the sea floor, trapped there and solving puzzles as they uncover what the Cayne Corporation hid.

About STASIS: BONE TOTEM

STASIS: BONE TOTEM is the latest game in The Brotherhood's STASIS anthology: a new story and new characters with the same isometric point-and-click play as STASIS and CAYNE. The Brotherhood released it on PC and Mac in May 2023, and Feardemic brought it to PlayStation, Xbox and Switch in March 2024. The music is by Mark Morgan.

Mac and Charlie are a married couple who make their living salvaging from the ocean, and they are still grieving their daughter. Sailing through a storm, they find DEEPSEA 15, a Cayne Corporation oil rig that seems abandoned apart from a flayed corpse. Below it lies a research lab that might hold valuable salvage. When their submersible fails, they are trapped down there, and the only way out is to keep going. With them is Moses, their daughter's Super-Toy, a small electronic bear.

You play all three and switch between them at any time. They are soon split up and stay apart for most of the game, talking by radio and passing items through a shared quantum backpack. Each has a skill: Mac is strong enough to bend and tear things apart, Charlie stitches items together, and Moses fits into tight spaces. Puzzles take several steps, such as repairing a diving suit after rerouting power, and a ping shows every spot you can use, so there is little pixel hunting. Much of the story and some puzzle clues sit in PDAs, each holding a run of diary entries and messages from the people who worked there.

The horror is in what the lab holds: embalmed bodies with fungus turning their flesh to mush, biomechanical machines, mutated creatures in the vents, and something ancient further down. More than 40 rendered cutscenes carry the story, and solving a puzzle the wrong way can get a character killed in a grisly one. It is a slow, reading-heavy adventure rather than a chase. It suits fans of the first STASIS, of SOMA's sea-floor dread and of the old isometric horror adventures, and players who do not mind a lot of text.

How to play STASIS: BONE TOTEM

Buy it on Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store, the PlayStation Store, the Xbox store or the Nintendo eShop. A free demo is on Steam.
Click to move your character and examine everything in each isometric room; the ping shows what you can interact with.
Pick up items and combine them in your inventory to solve problems.
Switch between Mac, Charlie and Moses, and send items between them through the shared backpack.
Read the PDAs and terminals for codes and clues to the puzzles.

Screenshots

An isometric incinerator room strewn with scrap, a giant chained claw over a blue-lit grate and a furnace glowing orange

A man in a dark morgue of round body drawers, inspecting an embalmed corpse with fungus growing through it

A diver with a headlamp on a metal platform in dark green water beneath a red and yellow crane

A puzzle at a bone altar: three skull-topped totems, a red rune button and empty sockets under a large skull

Inspecting a broken android on the sand, its chest torn open and leaking green fluid, with warning labels around it

A green terminal showing the personal log of a Cayne maintenance worker about repairing a diving suit

A figure before a jammed escape capsule bulging with strange yellow growths in a dark, wrecked corridor

Tips

Read the PDAs through; a few entries hold puzzle clues, and skipping them can leave you stuck.
When one character is blocked, switch to another; what they find often moves the first one on.
Read the item descriptions, which change with the character holding them and hint at what to do.
If you think you have used everything, go back to rooms you have seen: some spots only appear after something happens elsewhere.