Athanasy

I went into Athanasy expecting another competent dystopian text-game and came out the other side genuinely shaken, which is not a feeling I take lightly. Wirion is a small indie team from Russia, and the fingerprints of a genuinely obsessive creative vision are all over this thing: the worldbuilding, the art, the commissioned original score that the press kit calls 'blood music' with complete sincerity. It earns that claim. The City has no sunlight, no horizon, no name worth speaking aloud, and the sound design makes sure you feel every gram of that absence. You play as Josiah Kaviani, a mathematician who is brilliant, profoundly isolated, and about to have his careful gray routine dismantled. The plot pivots around a secret buried inside the City itself: a runaway nano-surgery experiment that produces athanasy, a contagious and unwanted immortality that rotted the entire complex from within and forced its permanent sealing from the surface world. The game withholds this picture deliberately, parceling it out across nine distinct endings so that repeat playthroughs feel like investigative sessions rather than chores. Each choice you make, whether to conform, betray, resist, or capitulate, funnels Josiah toward a different shade of grim. None of the endings are happy. The designers made that a creative principle, not an oversight, and the consistency of that commitment is what makes the whole thing land. The visual style is hand-drawn and dense, leaning into body-horror and biotech imagery in ways that reviewers compared to the aesthetic sensibilities of Cronenberg and Giger. For a Ren'Py visual novel with a file size barely over 200MB, the art pulls weight far above its weight class. Individual scene transitions carry real discomfort. The cast around Josiah, particularly Polyanna, who comes across as socially gifted in ways that read as suspicious well before the plot justifies the suspicion, is written with enough moral gray that the relationship dynamics feel lived-in rather than functional. The friction point, and it is a real one, is replay structure. Getting all nine endings requires re-reading significant passages you have already seen. There is a skip function, so it is not punishing in the mechanical sense, but the story branches are not radically divergent enough in their early sections that reconstituted reads feel fresh. Players who want to see every outcome will notice the repetition. The other honest caveat: this is a dialogue-heavy text experience with minimal interactive elements. If you want something to do with your hands beyond clicking forward, look somewhere else. If you want something to do with your brain and your gut, this is the room. Athanasy sits in the narrow shelf of visual novels that earns the label 'literary' without self-congratulation. The biopunk subgenre framing is specific and strange in the best way, closer to early-career Paul Di Filippo or Harrison than to the chrome-and-neon cyberpunk mainstream. The roughly five-to-ten hour runtime is exactly right. It knows when to end, which is rarer than it sounds. Community reception on Steam settled at 97% positive across several hundred reviews, which for a text game with no marketing budget is the kind of organic signal I trust more than a press blitz.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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