“Nothing awaits you. Just a broken radio, loneliness, and endless snow.” That’s how Ilia Mazo, the brains behind It’s Winter, introduces potential players to his game on Steam. That’s pretty blunt, even for a Muscovite—but he also isn’t far off the mark.
At the daring price of $9.99, you’ll get a game deliberately devoid of plot, purpose, or characters. It’s a sandbox re-creation of a lonely night spent in (and around) a khrushchyovka: one of the ugly, prefab complexes synonymous with mass housing in the USSR. It’s a work of “post-Soviet sad 3D,” he tells me, a sort of immersive exercise in melancholy.
Step into the shoes of your Soviet self, and you’ll find nearly everything’s interactive. The radio—should you manage to get it working—blares out a mix of industrial ambiance and Russian chanting. It’s Mazo singing. Despite a self-confessed lack of musical talent, he has composed and released three albums interwoven throughout the game.
And that’s not all. There’s also a short film, a poetry anthology, and an animated flipbook, each more sinister than the last. From my own middling experience with the region, none of this content gives any indication to setting. “You could be in Vyborg,” a Russian friend tells me, “You could be in Vladivostok, or you could be anywhere in between.”
That’s sort of the point, I guess. Uniformity is the scar left by the era’s architectural apparatchiks. (Mazo, somewhat sheepishly, later confesses that the block is a clone of a friend’s home in Petrozavodsk.)
