Call each NEW YEAR

I've spent time trying to understand what Call each NEW YEAR actually wants to be, and the honest answer is: it's a micro visual novel from Full Down Games that puts you through a series of choices during a New Year's Eve party, with the declared goal of testing whether you can survive the night. The premise has a certain lo-fi charm - holiday chaos, branching decisions, multiple endings depending on how you navigate the evening - and the developer's own description pitches it as a party simulator with arcade-hard difficulty and irreverent humour rooted in the complexity of older games. That last claim is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The reality here is barebones. The Steam page is almost entirely in Russian, the game lists only one supported language, and there is no evidence of any English localisation. If you don't read Russian, the choice-based structure collapses immediately - visual novels live and die on their text, and locked-out players are not getting the intended experience regardless of how many endings the game theoretically contains. That is not a minor caveat; it is a wall. For players who can read the language, what's on offer appears to be a short, meme-inflected adventure with deliberately rough presentation - what the developer calls "innovative GBLH textures" and "honest HD". These are not technical boasts; they read as a wink at the janky, self-aware aesthetic that pockets of the Russian indie scene embraced around 2017 and 2018. The humour, the retro difficulty framing, and the collectible card angle all point to a game made for a specific, small audience that finds comedy in the gap between ambition and execution. If you are in that audience, you probably already know who you are. The multiple-endings structure is the only real mechanical hook, and without review data or community testimony beyond four total Steam votes, there is no way to know whether those endings reward replay or exist mainly as a checklist. The total playtime sits comfortably in the sub-five-hour bracket, possibly far shorter. That is fine for a casual visual novel if the writing earns it - but without accessibility for most western players, the question of whether the writing earns it is essentially unanswerable from the outside. I have a soft spot for the small, strange, hand-assembled things that appear on Steam with no fanfare and almost no audience. Call each NEW YEAR has that energy. But soft spots do not translate to recommendations. The language barrier is real, the production is deliberately minimal, and the player community is essentially nonexistent. Treat it as a cultural artefact of a particular moment in Russian indie development rather than a game you should spend any serious time on.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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