CAYNE

 

Genre:   Horror Adventure  

Developer & Publisher:    The Brotherhood            

Released:   January 2017             

Requirements (minimum):

  • OS: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 @ 2.2GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ @ 2.8 GHz
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM
  • Graphics: GeForce 240 GT or Radeon HD 6570 – 1024 MB (1 gig)
  • DirectX: Version 9.0c
  • Storage: 6 GB available space
  • Additional Notes: Integrated Video card not recommended.

 

 

By flotsam

 

CAYNE

The Brotherhood

What do you do after STASIS while crowdfunding your next game? Design a short little return to the STASIS universe, using a new graphics engine, then let people have it for free. Really.

You can read my review of STASIS here. If you weren’t sure whether STASIS would be for you, well, CAYNE gives you a chance to see, for whatever it costs you to access a download.

It is the same grisly, gruesome isometric environment, and the tone is set right up front. Hadley is in a shiny hospital, about to terminate a pregnancy. Next thing she wakes up somewhere completely alien, much more pregnant, and with a monstrous being and a giant machine about to harvest her uterus. The scalpel to hand seems like a good way to start taking control.

The objective is to get out of wherever she is. It is a dark, dystopian mad scientist sort of place. 

Hadley is great. Pregnant and barefoot, scared but determined. She is where she is, it has be dealt with, so she gets on with it. She isn’t a super heroine, far from it, but she behaves heroically by just pushing on. There is a touch of Ripley about her.

Very early on she starts conversing with a voice she can hear, someone who also doesn’t know where he is or what has happened. He helps draw her on, and the conversations with him provide the vehicle for finding out a lot more about what makes Hadley tick. They can be poignant, introspective, mundane. Just not being alone makes a difference.

Especially in this place.

There is blood, there is gore. Clearly there were horrific experiments. Something not human might still be alive. Hadley learns about these things through PDAs she accesses as she progresses through the facility. Information in the PDAs also sheds light on Hadley’s place in things. There is quite a lot of reading, but none of it should be avoided.

The reading also contains a lot of information you will need to progress. Some is obvious, some not so. I backtracked and reread some PDAs more than once, especially when trying to solve the last puzzle. Backtracking between locations is necessary anyway, but read carefully.

Be warned; it tells of grim things, less than wholesome predilections, sexual behaviour and can be profane. Among other things. Ditto the scenes, and some events portrayed.

As with STASIS, puzzling is a blend of out and out puzzles and inventory utilisation. As with STASIS, it isn’t brain bustingly hard, but nor is it all straightforward. Some inventory combinations eluded me, but they often do. By and large I had an objective, and generally an idea of what to do. It was working out how I needed to figure out.

I did die once, but I am not sure if it could have been avoided. It may have been a necessary trigger for being able to determine the way forward. I will have to replay to know. However I didn’t die through the sort of misadventures that beset me in STASIS. That doesn’t appear to be a characteristic of CAYNE; indeed, two explosions at least should have killed me, but didn’t.

The game is point and click driven, and you can save whenever you like. There is no action element, in the sense that you have to do things quickly or you fail/die. There is some great action though, delivered through some excellent cutscenes. You can’t skip dialogue should you want to read along with the subtitles, but the voice acting is excellent so why would you? It took about five hours.

Hadley’s story is an involved one, and for me a compelling one, and the ending is the type of ending it demanded. If you have played STASIS, it will give food for thought about how events fit together. If you haven’t, it will give food for thought anyway.

For me, CAYNE was preaching to the converted. I loved it.

I played on:

OS: Windows 10, 64 Bit

Processor: Intel i7-6700 4GHz

RAM: 32GB GDDR5

Video card: AMD Radeon RX 470 8192MB

 

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