Kujlevka

I went in expecting a quirky sci-fi novelty and walked out thinking about Gogol. Kujlevka is a point-and-click narrative adventure built almost entirely around conversation and choice, set in a decaying Russian village in 1992 where a flying saucer has just demolished the local chairman's house. You play as Valery, a 65-year-old collective farm headmaster confined to a wheelchair after a sniper's bullet found his spine. Your job is to sit at your desk, receive visitors, and use a TV interface to select three words that communicate humanity's intentions to the aliens sitting in the wreckage next door. That word-selection mechanic, where you combine terms and nudge a probability triangle to chase or avoid Critical Events, is the spine of the daytime gameplay loop. It sounds dry. In practice it has an odd, low-stakes god-game pull: you can play cooperative gatekeeper, or you can quietly sabotage requests to see what cracks open. The game splits its time between those desk-bound daytime sequences and a series of surreal dream episodes that are structurally and tonally their own thing. The dreams are where Kujlevka earns its weirdness budget: you ride a space train full of living skeletons, queue for Soviet-era food rations while your friends offer contradictory advice, share a cigarette with a horseshoe crab whose life you once saved, and at one point sit down for a chat with Stalin. A recurring figure called That One guides you through each dream, nudging you back toward waking up. These sequences are more physically interactive than the desk scenes, involving item-fetching and light environmental puzzles, with a skip option if you get stuck so you're never hard-blocked. The three advisors who visit you daily, Vasily, Stepan, and Klim, each represent a different ideological posture toward the aliens, and their bickering captures early-90s post-Soviet confusion better than any dry history lesson could. Community reviews describe the tone as "very Gogol-like" - sad and unsettling underneath the laughs, with the alien premise functioning as a lens on a society that had no idea what to do with its sudden freedom. The voice acting is entirely in Russian, which adds authenticity but means non-Russian players miss some of the cultural texture in the delivery. English text is provided throughout. A small soundtrack blending Russian folk music with ambient sound does solid atmospheric work without overstaying its welcome. The criticisms are real and worth naming. The daytime sequences can drag because meaningful decisions arrive infrequently, and it's not always legible which choices actually constitute the pivotal ones. Ending variety exists but is narrower than the premise implies, with the most consequential forks concentrated in the final episodes. Linux players have reported crashes in the native build, and there have been cloud save sync issues on Steam Deck under Proton. The runtime is short, finishing in a few hours, which is honestly its own form of quality control: the pacing problems that exist never get the chance to sour the whole experience. It also walked away from 2023 with a Best Original Game award, which feels right for something this genuinely strange. If you want fast action or a branching RPG with deep systemic choices, Kujlevka will frustrate you. If you like narrative adventures that use an absurd setup to say something real, and you're comfortable with a game that is mostly watching and listening rather than doing, this is one of the more memorable short-session adventures around. It's a debut from a two-person student team, and the ambition-to-budget ratio is remarkable.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Kujlevka.