35MM

I have a soft spot for games built by a single person who clearly has something to say, even when the craft falls short of the vision. 35MM sits squarely in that category. Sergey Noskov set out to make a first-person narrative walk through a depopulated Russia, and the mood he conjures in the open countryside and fog-soaked forests is genuinely affecting. There is a stillness here that most post-apocalyptic games actively avoid. The soundtrack is sparse and melancholy in the right way, ambient noise carrying most of the emotional weight where dialogue stays deliberately quiet. The premise follows two men, your protagonist Petrovich and a largely silent companion, making their way through deserted towns and fields toward a distant city. Lore arrives in fragments: scavenged notes, photographs, flashbacks, and the occasional overheard monologue from survivors you cross paths with. The picture that forms, of an Ebola-like epidemic that erased both population and social order, is more resonant than the game ever fully earns through its writing. The English localization has persistent translation issues that blunt emotional moments, which is a real shame given how much the story relies on atmosphere to compensate for its restrained dialogue. On the mechanics side, 35MM tries to layer a survival system on top of the exploration. You collect food, first aid kits, and batteries for your flashlight, and carry both a knife (for cutting roped doors) and an axe (for breaking down obstacles). In practice, supplies are almost never necessary; the hunger and health systems feel like scaffolding left in from a more ambitious design. A vision-blur effect tied to your hunger status gets overused to the point of becoming irritating rather than immersive. The sparse puzzle sequences, item hunts across large areas with almost no guidance, and a handful of QTE combat moments round things out. The QTEs are unreliable, the gun combat is brief and poorly communicated, and the invisible walls that fence off the environment contradict the open feeling the level design is trying to sell. None of it is catastrophic for a game you can complete in three to four hours, but none of it disappears into the background the way a good walking-sim's roughness should. What keeps 35MM from being a simple skip is the handful of things Noskov genuinely gets right. The environmental design, ransacked houses, fog over fields, a secret underground facility late in the game, builds a convincing sense of a place that was lived in and then abruptly abandoned. The four different endings tied to choices made throughout the journey give you reason to pay attention to the quiet moments. And there is a metro dream sequence near the midpoint that players consistently single out as the best five minutes in the game, the kind of tonal left-turn that reminds you a real creative instinct is at work here, even when the execution wavers. If you can sit with its pace and forgive a one-person budget, 35MM has a melancholy signal worth tuning into.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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