Leningrad

I went in expecting almost nothing and came out genuinely curious about the world Under Three had sketched here. Leningrad is a short text-based visual novel set inside a colossal autonomous underwater city-fortress, the last refuge for thousands of survivors after a cataclysm swallowed the surface world. You wake up in what amounts to a narcological dispensary, memory gone, and are handed command of the entire vessel. The Soviet aesthetic is lean but intentional, and there is something quietly affecting about the idea that bureaucratic routine continues even at the bottom of a drowned planet. All interaction happens through mouse clicks on an on-board computer interface, which doubles as the game's primary visual motif. There are no action sequences, no inventory puzzles, no stat screens to juggle. What you get are branching dialogue and situation prompts that accumulate toward one of two endings, each shaped by the choices you commit to. The weight of those choices is real enough moment to moment, even if the overall runtime sits closer to a single long session than a proper campaign. Players who tagged the game on Steam reached for words like "lore-rich," "political sim," and "conspiracy," which tells you something useful: the writing reaches further than the playtime might suggest, and there are threads here about power, survival, and ideological inheritance that the game is clearly interested in, even if it can only tug on them before the credits roll. The honest friction is exactly what you would expect from a one-person micro-release. The review pool on Steam is thin enough (19 reviews, sitting at roughly 68 percent positive) that patterns are hard to read with confidence, and at least one community post flags a softlock bug that can trap saves in an unwinnable loop. The writing quality in English is functional but occasionally rough around the edges, the kind of translated texture that can charm or irritate depending on your tolerance for it. The soundtrack and the 2D interface art do punch above the budget, though. There is a moodiness to the sound design that earns its apocalypse setting in a way the prose alone does not always manage. Who is this for? Readers who loved Sunless Sea's sense of a drowned world and want something they can finish before midnight, players who enjoy the political intrigue end of choose-your-own-adventure fiction, or anyone with a soft spot for small games that clearly had a specific vision and followed it to the end. At its price point, the commitment asked of you is minimal. The payoff is modest but genuine, and I will always defend a game that knows what it is and does not try to be more.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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