
Screenshots

Watch trailer on Steam ↗CRYPTOBIOSIS
陈高远狠活工作室 · Published by 高远全景育成实验学校, 恒枢电子科技有限公司 · Official site ↗
Mixed — 46% positive (13 reviews) · 17 achievements
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
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.
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Price history
Adventure, Indie, Simulation, Strategy · 2025 · More £5 - £15 games
Step into the intense world of Cryptobiosis, where you playtest life in China’s Hengshui high school. Navigate through exams and hidden stories under strict campus rules, all while unraveling the mysteries of this simulation.
About this 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.

System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i3-2100 / AMD FX-6300
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti / AMD Radeon R7 260X
- DirectX: Version 11
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 4 GB available space
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows XP
- Processor: Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4 GHz
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra / ATI Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition
- Network: Broadband Internet connection
- Storage: 80 GB available space
Supported Languages
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
The English version of Cryptobiosis is now live
Cryptobiosis is an experimental narrative game set against China’s “Hengshui model” of education. You play as an operator inside a high-school digital simulation system, stepping into the oral histories of 30 people who lived through that regime. In the end, you must complete your own exam—graded personally by the creator—before your results are ranked alongside players worldwide. The “Hengshui model” is a widely imitated, exam-driven high-school system in China that treats the Gaokao (the national college entrance exam) score as the single overriding goal. It runs on minute-by-minute scheduling, combined with militarized, closed-campus management. Through frequent tests, constant rankings, and relentless drill-based practice, students are kept in what’s framed as their most “efficient” state. For the English release, I didn’t choose a direct translation of the Chinese title Panoptic Exam. Instead, I named the game after a biological term: cryptobiosis—a state in which an organism, faced with extremely hostile conditions, reduces its metabolism, activity, and even “desire” to the bare minimum, waiting until the environment becomes survivable again. To me, that mirrors what many of the people I interviewed described. In order to survive a hyper-regulated, highly optimized school environment, they learned to suppress desire, emotion, and thought—forcing themselves into a minimal, low-power mode. Only after graduation do they begin to search for themselves again, slowly thawing and returning from that cryptobiotic state.Read full article on Community Announcements (陈高远狠活工作室)AnnouncementsOfficial
《全景测验》考试分数全球排行榜已更新2025.12.3
经过昨日的直播阅卷打分后已将部分考生的分数及排名计算后录入游戏官网的排行榜,欢迎访问官网www.gpieschool.com 查分(点击导航栏“全景测验系统”,在下拉菜单中点击“成绩排名”,官网需使用魔法)。 未来将不定期直播批阅试卷及更新题库,如遇bug导致做题失败请反馈给我,同时可自行对照试题(主菜单界面会有你的试卷截图)手动做题后发我文档。Read full article on Community Announcements (陈高远狠活工作室)






