“Nothing awaits you. Just a broken radio, loneliness, and endless snow.” That’s how Ilia Mazo, the brains behind It’s Winter, introduces potential gamers to his sport on Steam. That’s fairly blunt, even for a Muscovite—however he additionally isn’t far off the mark.

At the daring worth of $9.99, you’ll get a sport intentionally devoid of plot, goal, or characters. It’s a sandbox re-creation of a lonely evening spent in (and round) a khrushchyovka: one of many ugly, prefab complexes synonymous with mass housing in the united states. It’s a piece of “post-Soviet sad 3D,” he tells me, a form of immersive train in melancholy.

Step into the footwear of your Soviet self, and also you’ll discover practically the whole lot’s interactive. The radio—must you handle to get it working—blares out a mixture of industrial ambiance and Russian chanting. It’s Mazo singing. Despite a self-confessed lack of musical expertise, he has composed and launched three albums interwoven all through the sport.

And that’s not all. There’s additionally a brief movie, a poetry anthology, and an animated flipbook, every extra sinister than the final. From my very own middling expertise with the area, none of this content material provides any indication to setting. “You could be in Vyborg,” a Russian good friend tells me, “You could be in Vladivostok, or you could be anywhere in between.”

That’s form of the purpose, I assume. Uniformity is the scar left by the period’s architectural apparatchiks. (Mazo, considerably sheepishly, later confesses that the block is a clone of a good friend’s residence in Petrozavodsk.)

So there’s a smattering of ’60s-era furnishings, a fridge stocked with meals, and a bathe to maintain you occupied. Look in the best locations, and also you’ll even discover a number of disturbing clues as to the form of state you’re in, mentally. It isn’t good. A half-eaten field of antidepressants, stashed underneath the sink. Notes to self, scrawled by hand in spidery Cyrillic.

For an indie vignette, this stage of element is absurd—you possibly can rummage by way of your neighbor’s trash for indications about his life, or you possibly can hold it easy and microwave a tomato. If you’re something like myself, although, you’ll shortly tire of mucking round inside. The actual draw lies in heading out into the evening, and exploring the neighborhood in all its dystopian glory.

That’s about all It’s Winter affords—and, when you’re into that form of factor, it hits the nail on the top. Playgrounds, stairwells, shopfronts … every scene is extra derelict and miserable than the final. It’s spoil porn at its most primal—snapshots of a world that was, for therefore lengthy, sealed off from Western eyes.

According to the sport’s military of native followers, it’s the actual deal. “It’s a very accurate representation of a typical Russian house, on a typical Russian street,” claims one participant. “If you’re from a First World country, play this game. Play it, embrace its atmosphere, and be happy that you weren’t born into this cold, lifeless ghetto.”

That’s form of the important thing to appreciating It’s Winter; it ought to rightly be seen as a murals relatively than a sport, a fleeting expertise with life within the frozen north. According to inner statistics, even the extra ardent followers maxed out at about two hours of gameplay. (There are at all times outliers, although: One participant had clocked up a dedicated 36.three hours.)

It’s Winter may be a bit of recherché, however it’s not the primary of its sort. Walking sims, as they’re considerably pejoratively recognized, are usually light-hearted and weird, like Dan Golding’s Untitled Goose Game. They will also be heavy-hitting: Take Mary Flanagan’s [domestic], a reconstruction of a home hearth that the writer skilled as a baby. Or That Dragon, Cancer, an autobiographical sport that recounts a father or mother’s expertise watching as an toddler son battles with the eponymous illness. It’s Winter sits squarely in the course of these two camps—it’s undoubtedly not that deep, however it does provide some alternative for contemplation.