Pause Cutscenes Using Nyrna: How It Works

Nyrna is a nifty little program that will suspend the game of your choosing. By using it, you can use it to suspend a cutscene, effectively pausing it.

Here is to get it working:

1. Download Nyrna from its download page.
2. Install it and follow the instructions.
3. Make sure Nyrna is opened with administrator rights (Right-click icon, run as administrator. Restart the program if already opened).
4. Start the game with cutscenes you want to pause.
5. Go into the options of Nyrna (cog window on the top right).
6. If you are pausing cutscenes to tab out, enable the option “Minimize / restore windows”. If you are pausing cutscenes for other reasons (more time to read, attending to children, …), make sure it’s disabled.
7. Scroll down and press the plus key below “App specific hotkeys”.
8. Select the game you opened in step 3 from the list, then select the hotkey for pausing/unpausing cutscenes. Use a hotkey that you don’t need inside the game you are running.

   If you are tabbing out of the game, also make sure it’s not a key you need to use often in your other windows. Nyrna overwrites the functionality of keys outside of the game as well. I first tried using the backspace key as a hotkey to tab out and reply to emails. Not the smartest idea unless you never typo.

9. All done! You should now be able to pause cutscenes whenever you want.

Does Nyrna Work on Every Game?

Unfortunately you can’t use Nyrna to pause cutscenes in every game, but it does work on the majority of games I tried. First of all, make sure you are running the program in administrator mode (see step 3 above). This will increase compatibility a lot, but not to 100%. Some games resist suspension, some games will keep running the cutscene even while suspended.

There is also a slight chance that the game will crash, so make sure to save often. On the games I tested, I suspended and resuspended them several hundred of times and crashed twice. Once was by stress-testing the program, the other was random.

Considering a large part of my tests were on Kingdom Come: Deliverance, not the most stable game and resource-heavy, I would say Nyrna is quite stable. But there is still some level of risk, so it’s better for me to be upfront about it.

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