What is it with eastern European developers games being so unique, painful and yet appealing and inventive?
Where does those themes and atmospheres are coming from?
Is it the effect of the fall of Soviet regimes? Perhaps the pain and uncertainty people endured?
Whatever the reason, very few western developers ever managed to capture the same essence. Or creat the same atmosphere.
12 Comments
I dont see the point of that name, you woudnt call god of war a greece simulator, i would call south european setting maybe (i just player stalker and disco elysium idk the rest)
Pathologic 2 is an absolute masterpiece, I’m always suprised that it didn’t sell more and isn’t more widely known.
People write best about what they know, and East Europeans know about suffering. Also fiction is mostly about conflict, put those two together and EE is the best for this sort of stuff as we know suffering better than the west (and it’s more recent for us). Also less emphasis on capitalism (for now), resulting less in games that are just money printers (like in the west) and more about innovation and art.
Having said that, there’s great games that came from the West as well, anything by Chris Avallone, for example. Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines, too. Antichamber is crazy inventive, as another example. Paper, Please, too, and so on…
This war of mine, the GOAT!
Does the Metro series count? It has this bleak, decaying atmospheric feel to it as well.
Cryostasis is a clunky but amazing game. It’s a shame it’s not available anymore.
TBH, both over-generalizing and cherrypicking here.
There were plenty of games of all sorts, with sierra-like comedic point-and-click adventure games as probably the biggest genre.
PS2-era of Japanese horror games alone provided us with more pain, twists and wierdness than entire eastern-European gamedev industry ever could.
I Eastern Europe we just call them a Life Simulators.
Ooh, you should absolutely play Indika then. This is the pinnacle of Slavic suffering genre.
Deadwood got me super hard and I think it might be in this list as well 😁
I’ll use this post as an opportunity to let everyone know that S.T.A.L.K.E.R Anomaly is a standalone mod that anyone can play for free without owning any of the original trilogy (you should tho they amazing)
It is legit the most fun you can have for free imo.
Darkwood is also out there.