Imagine: you are alone in a small wooden house, with no one around, just your own land, abandoned barns and hundreds of kilometers of forest around.
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I open my eyes, it’s already daylight outside. I get up from the bed, cover it with a blanket adorned with traditional Khokhloma patterns, admire my unique dresser with porcelain dishes, and go downstairs for breakfast. Along the way, I look at the icon with candles and thank God before I eat.
Below, stand a stove and a table, on which await me a samovar, a cherry pie and cabbage pirojki. However, for some reason I can’t taste these, I can only take the food and throw it against the wooden wall.
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There is no television, let alone a computer, so I go out out of boredom and immediately hear the chirping of birds and crickets. On the ground, I meet an empty well, an old barn, and only one living creature – a bull, looking sadly somewhere in the distance.
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This is what the game “Loneliness Simulator in a Russian Village” from Russian indie developer Flex Entertainment looks like, released on Steam on April 9, 2021. There are no monsters (except rats in abandoned houses) , no complicated storyline or quests – just an abandoned village in an unknown Russian province and the chance to feel its atmosphere as a unique inhabitant.
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« Before, there was a lot of life here, but the lack of jobs, entertainment and more generally of all perspectives pushed young people first, then everyone else, to leave.. You are the only one not to have traded the vast fields, dense forests and morning swims in the river against a desk job and a boring life in an eight-man anthill panel floors. In terms of gameplay, this is a classic walking simulator in a setting recognizable for people from of the CIS », explains the developer on the game’s page on Steam.
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The only goal is to explore your own property, study the inscriptions on the walls of abandoned buildings or walk through a dense summer forest, crossing bogs, rivers and small wooden bridges. If you turn up the volume to the maximum, you may not feel like you are alone in the village, as you will constantly hear footsteps and crackles.
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You can also, like your old neighbors, try to escape to the city, but here the protagonist will be faced with a problem – the forest seems to be endless, and the lack of a map seriously hinders your return home.
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Steam players complain that the game lacks action – you can’t get on the stove, as is customary in Russia, drink vodka, or take a steam bath in the banya (Russian sauna). However, the developers have just not promised entertainment, but only a total immersion in the atmosphere of the abandoned Russian countryside.
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« The author of the game highlights and raises the very relevant and hot topic of the extinction of the Russian countryside in our country, as well as the problem of loneliness and disconnection between people, inability and unwillingness to overcome these obstacles by man himself ”, reflects philosophically in his comment the player with the pseudonym “krtdn”.
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“Loneliness simulator in a Russian village” is available on Steam, in Russian only, for the very modest sum of 59 rubles (0.66 euro).
In this other post, we introduced you to another similar video game, placing the player in a depressing suburb of Russia.
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