Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason puts you at the Arctic Circle, drifting Russian North Pole station Pole 21. The main character, Alexander Nesterov, is a meteorologist, incidentally caught inside an old nuclear ice-breaker North Wind, frozen in the ice desert for decades.

The Titan of steel, once desperately struggling for its life and freedom, capitulated to the dark and ominous power of the eternal Cold. With his bare hands, improvised means and World War I and II era historically accurate bolt-action rifles and machineguns, Nesterov has to fight the spawn of the Cryostasis - the undead former crewmen which under some strange metamorphosis had not only lost their natural looks, but the very right to rest in peace. Nesterovs mission is to investigate the mystery of the ships captain death or, as it may well be, a murder, that caused the entire tragedy.Cryostasis appears to be something more than just a thrilling game. It is a kind of interactive crossbreed of a detective story and a horror novel. But unlike the regular book, the reader (in our case the player) here is able to contribute to the story and even affect its outcome.

Due to the characters ability to penetrate the memory and take control over the bodies of the participants of dramatic events (the system of Mental Echo), the player gets not only what every book detective would dream about the ability to travel to the past and eyewitness the crime scene, but also what every book reader sometimes desires avoid the predetermined course of actions by a chance to participate in the story and change its end as the player wants!