TYPICAL RUSSIAN QUARANTINE

My first impression when loading this up was that somebody had a genuinely funny idea in the spring of 2020 and shipped it before anyone could talk them out of it. That is both the charm and the ceiling of TYPICAL RUSSIAN QUARANTINE. Developer Labanov put out what appears to be a solo-made, voxel-rendered wave shooter built around a very specific cultural joke: Russian lockdown rules were, shall we say, loosely observed, and the barbecue crowd became a minor meme. Petya, your everyman protagonist, just wanted buckwheat. Instead he gets a street full of skewer-brandishing aggressors and a gun. The absurdist premise lands, at least for the first few minutes. The core loop is a straightforward wave-defense setup. Enemies come at you in escalating numbers, you shoot them, you collect money from each kill, and you funnel that cash into a weapon upgrade shop or into boosting Petya's movement speed. There is no elaborate skill tree, no branching path, no secondary objective system. The voxel art style is described by the developer as eye-pleasing, and it does have a blocky, low-poly tidiness to it, though it reads more like an earnest game jam entry than a polished commercial release. The weapons roster is the primary variable here: swapping to a new gun or tightening your current one is the closest thing the game has to a progression hook. The honest concern, and it is a significant one, is depth. With no Steam reviews to draw from after several years on the platform, and zero critical coverage, the silence speaks. This is a game that appears to have been played by very few people and discussed by fewer. The wave-shooter genre has a high floor of expectation in 2024, and TYPICAL RUSSIAN QUARANTINE was assembled quickly, under quarantine, with limited resources. The movement upgrade is the only non-weapon stat to invest in, which means the mid-game plateau arrives early and does not really resolve. Once you have a handle on the enemy patterns, there is little friction left to push against. Who is this actually for? Players with a soft spot for lockdown-era cultural artifacts, gamers who enjoy mechanically simple voxel shooters without demanding a long tail, or anyone who wants to spend an hour or two on something genuinely unserious. It is not a hidden gem in the sense of concealed depth waiting to be discovered. It is closer to a time capsule from a specific, strange moment in early 2020, made by one person who thought the kebab meme was funny enough to build a game around. On that narrow terms, it is honest and unpretentious. If you need your wave shooters to have roguelite runs, leaderboards, or co-op lobbies, this is not the title. If you are the kind of player who can appreciate a small, handmade thing for exactly what it is and no more, there is a quiet, slightly ridiculous thirty-to-sixty minutes here that will not offend you.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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