Gaming In The Russian Cosmos, Part Two
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Sitting in a grey-panelled ultra-functional meeting room at 1C's headquarters in central Moscow, I asked one Russian games boss why games from the region were noticeably different to Western titles and he laughed, replying (Russian developers all want to make a new Fallout!) And you can see what he means, because Russian games do have something of a grim outlook: what better to capture that than a sequel, spiritual or otherwise, to the greatest of the post-apocalyptic RPGs?
It's only one trend with Russian game design, of course - the others being unforgiving simulation, World War II from the Russian perspective, and fresh takes on tired fantasy tropes - but it is the one that somehow seems to have best captured both our imaginations, and those of the people who comment on CIS region games from within those countries. And the post-Soviet realm does inspire that kind of imagination, too. Even in my brief time in the Russia I saw an incredible catalogue of ruins and dereliction, all sitting alongside the shiny new capitalist heartland. It was not a new concept to me. When I interviewed Ukrainian developer Anton Bolshakov, the creative lead on Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl he told me: (Splinters of Soviet Empire are plentiful in Ukraine forgotten productions, catacombs, neglected military facilities and so on. Even our office is located at an ex-military factory with no more active production. When walking around such areas you can't but think how the time froze at this place of man-made catastrophe. Logically, it struck us as a cool game setting to explore.)
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We've seen games such as Cryostasis, King's Bounty, Men Of War, Perimeter, Boiling Point, Space Rangers 2, and Pathologic turn up and cause something of a stir. These games aren't revolutions in any classic sense there's no genre-slamming Half-Life or World Of Warcraft in there - but the methods and themes are nevertheless intriguingly different, and refreshingly bold. Pathologic was a particularly profound experience for one RPS writer - tapping into those themes of bleakness that I mentioned before - and the strangeness of the experience certainly rang a few bells with the huge number of people who read the Pathologic article in the weeks after we posted it. It looks like the Ice Pick team, they who made Pathologic, intend to return to similar weird terrain in their upcoming game, Tension.
For my own part, I was inspired by my time playing Stalker, and I still return to it now and then. Stalker's influences, which I've banged on about before just here, are clear: Chernobyl and Russian hard science fiction. But in game-design terms there was something else going on too: unmitigated ambition. The idea that there was no reason why GSC shouldn't try to make a living world shooter, years before any Western dev studio was attempting such a feat. The CIS country development houses are aiming high, and even when they fall far short of their target - I'm looking at you, Boiling Point - they still create interesting experiences. Immaturity is bringing forth creativity. It's usually the young that start garage bands, and by the same token it's often the young game design teams who create the unexpected experiences. You can see a certain psyche pushing its way through. Adolescent battle-fantasies they might be, but they're as fresh and aggressive in their execution as anything the rest of the world is offering.
