Stumble and dance through a bleak post-Soviet city in this excellent new first-person explorer
What are you doing later? Bit of a night out in a bleak post-Soviet city, maybe? Drink? Dance? Drugs? Pet giant rats? Chat with a back-alley cyborg tech? Catch a poetry reading? Have a blood pressure test? Contemplate your empty existence? Eat a kebab? All this and more awaits you with Neyasnoe, the new first-person explorer from the creators of It's Winter. While It's Winter had you so bored and lonely you might cook egg on toast only to flush it down the toilet, here you're surrounded by life, and I'm not sure that's much more comfort.
Neyasnoe is set around separate districts of an unknown city. You start way in the suburbs, a loose scattering of Brutalist blocks and squat houses. Follow the lights and you might find yourself at typical places: a kebab shop; a bus station kiosk; a nightclub which throbs with music and dance and chat and booze; a clinic; an underground waiting room for purpose unknown; just normal things. So go explore, talk with people, smoke cigarettes, steal drinks, buy food, take drugs, mess with devices, pet giant rats, and see what else lurks in the night.
You move through different districts of the city across Neyasnoe, venturing into poetry readings and bookshops and sports fields and more, with the only obvious objective in each level being to find the point or story beat which will send you to the next. Yes, I'm being vague on purpose.
Like with It's Winter, it takes time to figure out what Neyasnoe even is. What are its rules? What am I doing? Why? Wait why do I have stats, and what do they mean? Why can I do all these things? What changes if I do this or that? Does anything? Is this person telling the truth? I still don't have all the answers, and that's a good feeling.
Neyasnoe conjures a
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