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CRYPTOBIOSIS

Cryptobiosis is an experimental narrative game set in China’s Hengshui model. As a god’s-eye playtester in a high school simulation, you step into the running exercise scene, trace and remember ignored lives under hyper-regulated campus management, complete your exam, and rank worldwide.

Steam Page
Release
November 17, 2025
257 days ago
Steam Reviews
Mixed12 reviews50.0%

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About the Game

Project Overview

“Cryptobiosis” is a secondary-school admissions interview electronic stress-testing system jointly developed by Gaoyuan Panoptic Incubation Experimental School and Hengshu Electronics Technology Co., Ltd. since 2003.

Built around key factors such as information interaction, time management, and rule compliance, the project is intended to support future evaluations of students’ overall adaptability. The project is currently in a closed internal test phase, with internal testers split into two main groups running in parallel.

This page provides the test program for PC-based simulation public testers. You may run the program on your own computer to help us refine process stability, text content, and mechanic details. A stable internet connection is required throughout.

▮ integrity:mismatch | route:store/about_this_game | issuer:ECHO1991 | action:replace:intro-block | scope:1 | ts:2004-09-17T08:42:05Z | checksum:prev=9b72… new=d1f7… | note:public_disclosure ▮

Echo-1991

We are a non-profit, interdisciplinary investigation group formed by graduates of this school and its partner schools. The content below is not published by the project owners—it is text we temporarily took over and replaced. The build currently downloadable on Steam is also our “modified” version. We have no partnership with the project owners, and we oppose their plan to push Cryptobiosis into large-scale admissions use.

In this intervention, we have only modified surface-level text. We do not alter your interaction, scoring, uploading, or ranking flow. Our goal is to present real information to the public.

Intensive Running Exercise

The Cryptobiosis system uses the running exercise scene as its primary entry point. This scene contains dozens of interactive NPCs. The original NPCs were distorted, commercially generated figures created by the company.

We have replaced them with first-person accounts based on real interviews and oral histories, attempting to reveal subtle individual stories often ignored by mainstream narratives. The total text volume is approximately 300,000 Chinese characters. Please find them—and read their accounts.

While reading, watch for the spotlights in the scene. Close the reading window before an NPC is illuminated to avoid the beam. Different NPCs have different “life” values. If an NPC is illuminated too many times, they will be judged “dead,” and you will be unable to read any further text from them. We are working on ways to break this module.

As your reading progress unlocks, each NPC’s appearance will change accordingly. All visual assets have been replaced by us.

The Exam

After meeting the required conditions, you may choose to enter the system’s final assessment phase. This is a complete large-scale test including multiple-choice, short-answer, and writing sections. The original exam was designed to evaluate testers’ familiarity with the system, collect test data, and serve as a selection basis for official safety officers once the system is deployed at scale. We have modified the exam content to be highly relevant to the NPCs and the system (without affecting the safety officer selection ranking). Remember what you have observed and read—once you begin the exam, you cannot go back.

After you submit, the session ends. Your answers and related game data will be automatically sent to the “Examiner,” and your save data will be deleted. The “Examiner” will manually grade each player’s submission.

The “Examiner” will periodically upload scores to a real website and publish a global ranking. You may enter your own information to look up your record.