KLETKA

My first instinct after a few hours with KLETKA was to call it a Lethal Company clone and move on. That instinct was wrong. Where that game frames dread in corporate bureaucracy, KLETKA roots itself in something stranger and heavier: a post-Soviet surrealism that feels genuinely authored. The Gigakhrushchevka, an infinitely restructuring megabuilding styled after Soviet-era residential blocks, is not just a backdrop. It is a worldview rendered in concrete, rust, and procedurally generated dread. Each floor remixes industrial basements, prison wings, and collapsed housing into a labyrinth that feels purposefully oppressive rather than randomly assembled. The central mechanic is the thing that makes KLETKA worth your time. The elevator, the Kletka itself, is a semi-organic biomechanical creature you are forced to maintain as both captor and lifeline. Players must scavenge fuel, repair its systems, and, when resources run dry, feed it meat. Enemy meat, ideally. Teammate meat, if you are being pragmatic. That single design decision reframes every scavenging run as a negotiation between survival and sacrifice. The team of up to six can split into scavengers sweeping floors, defenders holding corridors, and one unlucky soul managing the elevator's hunger meter back at the cage. Communication matters here in a way that feels earned rather than mandatory, because the cost of silence is someone getting randomly consumed. Layered on top of that is the Samosbor, a floor-wiping anomaly that triggers without warning beyond a siren. When it fires, everyone drops what they are holding and sprints. The first time it catches your group mid-loot, scattering supplies and teammates in a blind panic, you will understand why so many players report it as their strongest memory of the game. It punishes greed with elegant brutality. The campaign runs 100 floors deep with a final encounter at the bottom, and an endless mode opens up after that for groups who want to keep descending. Runs are self-contained with knowledge-based progression rather than persistent stats, so dying teaches rather than punishes in a compound way. Resurrection bottles collected from floors let downed teammates be revived at scattered machines, but the detour always costs time and tests whether the group's cooperation holds under pressure. The sound design deserves to be called out specifically. The mechanical groaning of the elevator, the distant structural rumble of the Gigastructure, the way the Samosbor siren cuts through ambient noise are all doing real atmospheric heavy lifting. This is not a game that relies on jump scares. The dread is architectural and acoustic. Visually it leans into 3D pixel aesthetics with flickering industrial lighting that hides movement just enough to keep everyone slightly paranoid without obscuring the layout. The developers have been consistently active post-launch, upgrading to Unreal Engine 5.7, adding new anomalous floors like Lenin, Red Square, and Parable, and patching the netcode issues that troubled early builds. There are still balance complaints around certain biomes feeling loot-starved, and solo play is noticeably harder to tune for since the design breathes in groups. Playing alone is possible but the game clearly was not built with you in mind if you go in that way. For co-op horror fans who can reliably fill a lobby, KLETKA earns its Very Positive reception. For solo players or those without a regular group, the value proposition is narrower. The Workshop support, crossplay, and active development pipeline give it longevity that most small-team co-op horror releases never reach.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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