Homeostasis is a retro survival horror FPS, developed by Gasimo and Saas. You are on a lonely mission: exploring an icy terrain, finding abandoned research sites, picking up where the others left off and recovering data. All the while you are trying to avoid cabin fever and paranoia getting to you.
This review is spoiler free, don’t worry 🙂
A desolate, arctic adventure
After a short introduction, you start the game out in the Machine, an off-road vehicle designed for the Arctic. It’s immediately clear that you are dependent on your mechanical ally from this point on. It gives you heat, it gets you from point A to point B faster, it helps you navigate with its built-in radar, it has a nifty arm extension on top and you can save your game in there. Coming with the Machine is its remote, that allows you to do two things: find the Machine (by pinging it, like a radar) and control the arm extension.
While your ally is quite the practical thing, its functionalities come at multiple costs, namely fuel and engine usage. The Machine has 500 units of fuel that gets depleted quickly, if you use every feature simultaneously. Luckily, you will encounter gas canisters and refuel stations to handle any fuel problems you got. But you can also overheat the engine by running it for too long. If that happens, you have to get out into the freezing cold to vent out the Machine using its side panel.
Besides the remote, your starting loadout also contains a flashlight. Your “inventory” only allows for 4 items at a time, so it’s a “things you carry in your hand” situation rather than a general inventory with a bunch of items. And while you can drop items, you can’t drop the remote, so in reality you only have 3 slots to carry stuff. But it adds to the desperate and claustrophobic atmosphere. You’ll be juggling what to keep in your hand from time to time.
You get a map inside the Machine, but it’s an old-school paper one, so don’t expect a little “here you are” blip. Most of the time you will be exploring the hardcore way and guesstimating where you are. The previous team left a few red beacons to help you navigate. There are also a special green colored ones, which you can actually take to set your own waypoints. The Machine’s radar picks up on these.
As a stress mechanic, you will also get a thermometer in the lower left corner to let you know when you will freeze to death. Managing the Machine’s fuel and engine and your own temperature is just enough to keep you anxious while scrambling around in the dark cold unknown trying to find pieces of a puzzle or your next path.
Has its problems, but still lovable
The game is a bit janky. I experienced quite a lot of clipthroughs. Some animations behaved a bit weird. At one point I even managed to get stuck inside the Machine by stopping it on a tilted terrain, which in turn made it impossible to leave the cockpit. Surprisingly the mouse was insanely sensitive in my case, even when set to 0, not sure what happened there. But none of these come in the way of enjoying the experience.
What does come in the way is the fact that it’s super hard to see what’s happening. I very quickly gave up after my first few tries. Eventually, my go-to strategy was just to abuse the save/load system to find my way again and again. I imagine making it hard to see was the point, to get me to feel lost. But I think there’s got to be a more balanced way to do this, to make it a little bit more approachable to explore the area.
The whole game is around 3-5 hours (depending on how many times you lose your way), so storywise there’s not much to unfold here. But what is there is pretty solid. You even get a nice plot twist and two endings. Or at least that’s how many I found, there might be more.
Conclusion
I’m very torn on Homeostatis. On one hand it’s got the vibes and the story, it has the immersion down, but on the other hand, there are some problems that take it down a few notches. Still, I feel like it was a nice adventure with some interesting puzzles, management mechanics and great sound effects. I loved the arctic dieselpunk vibes. You can almost feel the cold while roaming around. So, if you don’t mind getting lost (and possibly frustrated) due not being able to see the environment clearly, it’s worth to play it.
