Horror films have been one of the most prolific film genres for many decades now. One of the key underlying reasons are the extremely low costs: not many break the bank, but very few fail outright, and sudden successes earning 1000X their budgets encourage many more to try their luck.

Over on RMN, the genre had also been consistently popular, since it's the easiest genre to make in rmk without making an actual JRPG. On the not-so-bright side, it means a short range re-used for all eternity:: something nhubi, Kylaila and other veteran reviewers can tell you all about. Psychostasis, though, was developed by Red_Nova, a developer far more known for his story-driven RPGs, and who approached the project with intent to innovate. It has a cool name, too (reminiscent of the underrated Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason). Will that be enough to overcome the 2-month development time, and make it worthwhile on its own?

Storyline

Psychostasis begins at 628 Redwood Drive, the place where the protagonist, Kyle Crane, apparently used to live, yet now doesn’t remember (though he's thankfully not a "true" amnesiac), and so he arrives there in the evening, in the car he stole from his adopted parents. As he walks on, he encounters a strange woman named Eva, who rarely responds to what he says, but seems ill at ease with his presence. She does reluctantly agree to let him see the house, which is practically ruined from neglect; Kyle is shocked at how she can leave here, there’s an argument of sorts, but Kyle soon gives up, and it’s settled when Eva leaves you to wait in a room and look around, while she supposedly goes off to cook. The next cutscene will trigger only after you read all the room’s description, so you do have some time to get familiar with it. Said description is fine, occasionally with pretty good humour, like the laundry basket description (which also serves to foreshadow one of the plot turns). There’s some weird sentence structure at times, like newspaper’s “Seeing as the killings only occur in the area, police have advised citizens to stay away from the vicinity.” but on the whole it’s fine. In terms of building suspense, however, it doesn’t really work: you know what’s going to happen, and reading about stuff being covered in dust and such, is mildly curious but no more, and doesn’t help to give you insight into a disturbed mind, or anything else that could raise tension.



Notably, the (adopted) parents in question are never brought up again, even though their existence has some really interesting implications for the bad ending.

Granted, there’s one early attempt to play with the expectations, as there’s ghostly stuff going on when you try to examine the mirror. Kyle’s head hurts, you’re given a grey screen for a while, and once he is fine, the mirror ends up broken. I assumed that this was just the introduction of some supernatural goings-on, which would become stronger over time. Yet, I was wrong: Kyle simply proceeded to search for Eva and get knocked out once he discovers a machete in her room (the scripted cutscene where it happens actually does work, because of how sudden it is.) Now, even though the pit where he wakes up does not look real at all (I actually thought he ended up in Eva’s dreamscape at first) and in spite of the regularly-breaking mirrors and the doors with broken locks (made famous by Silent Hill), the story is grounded in the real world, and the mirror stuff is purely a mechanic with no story basis (see Gameplay.) I use the term "real world" loosely here, because it’s the place where the Dualphage malarkey is real: said bacteria manages to shut down a person’s consciousness through emitting an electric pulse, and then manages to rot (presumably, inside the body/brain, yet without affecting other tissues at all) in order to create an conductive substrate. The end result is some perpetual loop that allows for the transfer of someone’s else consciousness. You can sort of see which biological concepts it draws from, yet the end result is still RE-level bullshit. You find the notes explaining it, along with a few others, inside the Redwood Elementary School, where they were apparently lying untouched since 1999 or so (when the game takes place in 2008). They’re joined by the 4 vials of an unnamed Chemical Compound, which are scattered completely randomly around, in order to get you to check every room. Even better, these vials contain 1 ml of liquid each (which is essentially equivalent to drops at the bottom).

The school, by the way, is the time when Kyle makes the first truly dumb decision on his own: immediately after escaping from the house, he does not choose to call the police then and there, even so he actually wanted to do it a lot earlier, when the worst thing he suspected Eva of was living in a decaying house. Instead, he decides to head to the Redwood School on his own. Of course, he didn’t consider that Eva will soon discover he took the map, and so will try to check at school. Then again, perhaps he simply thought that the difference in speed between a car and a human would give him more than enough of a head-start. Essentially, either the school is close by, in which case Kyle is a total idiot, or it’s a good distance away, which gives Eva a running speed of 50 mph or so. Stupidly, it’s actually possible to run outside of the school and straight to the car immediately after encountering Eva again, yet you would still not be allowed to open it. I actually tried doing this with Eva chasing me to see if anything would happen: nothing did, and Kyle got slashed to death while standing next to his lifeline. An alternate ending at this point would’ve been cool.

The game passes the halfway point there, and you get a couple twists, that are not particularly surprising. I guessed the first one from the logs about several minutes before it happened, and another I half-expected to happen a lot earlier. You’re still left with the emotional undertone, which is good, at least until you remember about all the other dead people in the pit. You should do that, because Kyle totally won’t and the focus of the entire story changes afterwards, in a way that wouldn’t have been bad on its own, but is brimming with unexplored potential that had all gone to waste. The instigators of the trouble are pure one-dimensional evil, and not even the slightest attempt is made to try and ascribe higher motives to their actions. As a result, they’re completely unbelievable: if it was possible to twirl moustaches from beyond the grave, they would have. Then, given that the consciousness transfer was meant to be that of, by all means, a highly intelligent person, there was ground for all the sorts of Jekyll and Hyde stuff that never really appears.

Lastly, the endings. There are two of them, decided by a choice at the end, though the second option is only possible if you collect everything at school. They’re essentially a straight-up good and bad ending, and there’s no attempt to make the choice compelling or difficult, (i.e. Standstill Girl or even Delusions of Duty) even though there was certainly room in the storyline to do so (just recall the dead people early on.) Both endings have a little bit of good dialogue, but that’s it: they’re literally extremely brief (though the good one is slightly longer) and will immediately send you to the same, unwelcoming main menu with no credits or the like.

There are some spelling errors I found, but it doesn’t really matter that much:



Gameplay

This is actually the area where most interesting designs are, at least relative to the RPGMaker horror standards. The first of these are the mirrors, which act here as single-use checkpoints: choosing “Yes” on “Stare into the Mirror?” question lets you save, but also breaks the mirror. Thus, it’s no longer enough to just know where the mirror checkpoints are: you also need to judge your current condition and know when to use them. It would’ve been good if mirrors other than the cabinets also worked: just seeing a wooden cabinet standing randomly in the school toilets (on two whole occasions) is rather ridiculous.

Another thing is that Eva can be spawned randomly in any room of the house or school, which is signified through a nervous exhaling letting you know it’s best to try your luck elsewhere. Of course, she has to appear during the key plot points, and if you have to find a certain something in a room but you’ve exited it too early, then she’ll also appear near the entrance in the next area, so that you’ll have to turn back. She’s nearly always standing with her back turned to the doorway, and thus to the player, as well, which gives them a good chance to leave undetected. The almost serene look she has while doing so can be quite disturbing on its own, like the time when you enter the room with bloodied machete and she’s standing right next to it, her expression still unchanged. Speaking of machetes and such, it’s still there, and still results in the same dialogue, even after she was supposed to have taken it, though you cannot have it regardless. This being traditional rmk horror, you’re not allowed to pick up any weapon, even when something looks quite useful for that purpose. In that sand pit early on, there’s a good shovel still lying around, and it can be examined, but not actually used in melee, even though Eva is a flesh-and-blood human being and not some impregnable monster. Moreover, you actually can sort of use melee weapons in the ending encounter, so why not earlier? Sure, maybe shovel is not a good enough weapon, but then what about this?



I can see a knife there too, so why don’t you take it?

So, you’ve got the chases here, which are a little less arbitrary than most, in that Eva actually can follow you from room to room a couple of times, though she eventually loses track, after about two rooms or so. It does give you a shock the first time, if you’re used to doors being absolute and impregnable barriers, like they so often are in our engine. Another good idea is that bandages are not insta-heal, and it actually takes Kyle about 5 seconds of standing still to apply it properly. Consequently, it also means that using them during actual chases is suicide. The game is so short that by the time you get used to these quirks, it’s nearly over, before the boredom can set in. It still means that the final encounter is rather anticlimactic, though, in spite of the good music choice, since you’re already used to everything and there’s plenty of room for manoeuvre.

Aesthetics (art, design and sound)

Let’s cover the good parts first. The menu screen is plain, but passable. The custom portraits are nice, and they express emotions like smiles, or the tears flowing, as well. There are still some weird details here, like Eva’s line eyebrows regularly drawn over her hair. Said hair is also so grey I honestly thought Eva was supposed to be more of an old woman character type, until the plot told me otherwise. Then, some of Ace’s thought bubbles are used well enough during cutscenes, and there are some actions too, like the characters looking around nervously before certain phrases. And like I said before, Kyle's bandage animation is also good. The soundtrack all comes from freesound.org and the survival horror music pack, but it’s all done effectively: chase music does make early chases tense, the final one is quite disturbing, etc. There are not a whole lot of sound effects around, and they’re competent, but don’t really stand out. One exception are squelching footstep sounds are present during the early transitions, though no such sounds are present during actual gameplay, which is a shame, as they wouldn’t have gone amiss when the music is often not present at all. Coming back to the cave, for instance, plunges you into silence.

However, that all mainly gets overshadowed by the mapping. Red_Nova freely admits it was never his strong suit, and it’s especially notable here. The Redwood driveway early on has all the trees to the sides clumped together into solid walls, and this decision also robs the later escape from it of tension, since you only have to run in a completely straight line. In the picture above, you can also see that the driveway is cut off by the grass in a weird diagonal pattern, the way no road ever got overgrown. The sand pit, like I said before, doesn’t really look real, and the mansion is passable by comparison. The school gets the worst of it, though: it has no reception area and such, and so the (obviously unlocked) front door at the end of a long path fenced off from both sides opens immediately into the corridors. The classrooms only have four rows of desks, teacher’s desk and chairs: no cabinets, no black or white boards, nothing to give them personality.

Conclusion

Psychostasis is not a total loss, and does have a few ideas you could use if you're also designing “abandoned mansion/school/junkyard avoidance based rmk horror N345”. Even with the limited development time, it's superior to the interminably boring original Afterlife, or the ridiculous After Man. Nevertheless, it still has other, better games on this website to compete with, like Indra’s Subject or ZeldaAssassin's Immortal; both unquestionably superior genre entries.