Disco Elysium-inspired RPG Hollow Home is a memory of Mariupol from before Russia's invasion

rockpapershotgun.com:

The Ukrainian city of Mariupol came under heavy bombardment during the opening months of Russia's invasion in 2022, a programme of artillery and air strikes that damaged or destroyed the majority of residential buildings and has killed or dispossessed thousands of people. It has now been occupied by Russia for almost two years, during which, as reported by the Associated Press, Russia has demolished, rebuilt and renamed much of the city, overwriting its Ukrainian heritage.

The Disco Elysium-inspired RPG Hollow Home is a memory of Mariupol from just before the war - not a 1:1 recreation, but a collection of details, colours, personalities and some familiar buildings, painstakingly amassed and offered up in the face of erasure. Speaking to me during a very brief demo at Digital Dragons in Poland this year, artist Anastasia Hlyniana called my attention to the plants jutting from old car tyres around the game's isometric map, which she says are a common sight in Mariupol.

Hollow Home began development in 2022, just after Mariupol's occupation, and is partly based on journalistic coverage of the invasion, though its characters and story are fictional. It unfolds over 30 in-game days, beginning shortly before Russia's vicious attack, and casts you as 14-year-old Maksym, who must survive and help others to survive. There's no combat in Hollow Home, and apparently, no direct or "graphic" representation of violence. Instead, the game explores the impact of the war on civilians, and the decline of individual neighbourhoods as residents are killed or flee the city.

Hollow Home's pen-and-paper-style role-playing and splashy, graphic novel colours are immediately reminiscent of ZA/UM's game, but the English writing is relatively straight-laced and reverential, as you might expect given that the devastation of Mariupol is both a lived reality and still unfolding. "It's our perspective on what happened, and also we want to tell the story of the people, and how the city has