When I Was Young

I have a soft spot for small teams swinging at heavy subjects, and When I Was Young swings hard. WallRus Group, a Russian indie outfit, picked one of the most cinematically charged conflicts in modern history and built a 2D side-scrolling action game around it - nine chapters, pixel jungles, underground tunnels, and war-torn city streets that feel genuinely handcrafted rather than asset-flipped. The premise is personal: your brother went missing in action during the Vietnam War, and you enlist to find him. It is a thin hook by CRPG standards, but the game uses it with enough restraint that the story stays grounded rather than melodramatic. The pixel art is the first thing that earns goodwill. The 1960s aesthetic is worn with care - period-appropriate visual noise, environments that shift between lush jungle canopy, claustrophobic tunnel segments, and street-level firefights. The soundtrack is a genuine highlight, moody and era-conscious enough that WallRus released it as a separate DLC of 14 tracks, which tells you something about the confidence behind it. If soundscape matters to you - and for me it always does - this game has one worth sitting with. Combat is where the experience gets complicated. The shooting mechanics are detailed enough to create meaningful moment-to-moment decisions, and enemy AI shifts depending on the time of day, which is a clever layer that most games at this budget skip entirely. The trap variety across the nine chapters keeps environments from feeling repetitive. But player complaints about control responsiveness are consistent and hard to dismiss - inputs that feel slightly behind your intention will punish you in a game that is already positioned as a difficult, hardcore experience. The training segment early on has specifically frustrated a number of players enough to abandon the run before the actual campaign opens up. If you clear that hurdle, the game opens. If you do not, it will feel like a wall. The writing has translation roughness that surfaces at inopportune moments - mid-story beats where grammar pulls you out of the atmosphere the visuals and music have worked to build. For a game leaning on its narrative as a differentiator, that friction is a real cost. The developers have been responsive to bug reports post-launch, which is worth noting for a small team, but the localization issues are structural rather than patchable. At roughly seven hours for a full playthrough, When I Was Young knows its length. It does not overstay. The nine chapters give it enough structure to feel like a complete journey rather than a demo stretched thin. For players who can extend good faith through a steep early difficulty curve and imperfect translation, there is a genuinely atmospheric little game here - one that cares about its subject, respects pixel craft, and has a soundtrack that earns its own file size. For anyone whose tolerance for slippery controls is low, the friction may outweigh the payoff before the story gets its footing.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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