Lenin - The Lion

I went in expecting a charming but slight RPG Maker curiosity and came out genuinely moved. Lenin - The Lion is a puzzle-adventure built entirely around dialogue, item use, and choices, with zero battles or leveling. The top-down pixel world echoes SNES and Game Boy Color classics in layout, but the emotional register is closer to personal memoir. You play as Lenin, a young albino lion ostracized by his village, bullied at school, and abandoned by his mother's understanding. The game shifts between a drab, unwelcoming waking world and four bizarre ethereal realms, each one mapping loosely onto psychological states. The writing is earnest and unpolished in places, which is worth knowing upfront, but the honesty underneath it makes the rough edges easy to forgive. What makes the design genuinely interesting is how the mechanics echo the themes. There are no morality meters or karma scores. Your choices do not brand Lenin as good or evil. They simply change which future scenes you reach, which NPC conversations unlock, and which endings play out for each area. The single save slot is the real commitment mechanic: you live with what you chose. Lenin's backpack functions as his inventory menu, which means losing it mid-game cuts off your access to items until you track it down again. That is not a bug, it is a deliberate design move, and it lands. The standout element, the one that will stay with me longest, is the discman tucked inside that backpack. Scattered across both worlds are collectible CDs that unlock tracks from an original soundtrack of over 30 compositions. Hunting for them is optional, but it turns the music into a reward, something earned rather than ambient wallpaper. The soundtrack itself ranges from soft and melancholic to quietly strange, and it fits the game's dreamlike zones with real care. Paired with illustrated cutscenes that appear at key story beats, the whole thing has a handmade warmth that polished productions often sand away. The caveats are real though. Some players have reported minor lag on certain hardware configurations, and the English writing has inconsistencies that solo development at this scale makes inevitable. Controller support is only partial, with the menu requiring mouse input, which will bother some. The pacing in the early village sections is slow, and the game trusts you to stay curious without a lot of mechanical escalation. If you need forward momentum delivered by combat loops or experience bars, you will check out quickly. But if you can settle into a slower register, one where the texture of place and the weight of small decisions carry the experience, what waits deeper in is worth the patience. Lornyon built this alone over more than two years, and that context shapes how you receive it. This is not a game made to fill a market gap. It is a game made because someone needed to make it, about depression, about difference, about whether kindness survives the world that tries to stamp it out. The Steam community has responded with genuine warmth, and that reception feels earned.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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