"What's the difference between helplessness and despair?"

This is a fantastic Russian doomer simulator that really conveys a sense of meaninglessness and inevitability - it's as much an atmospheric piece of existentialist art as a game. Although you can do more or less whatever you want and take as long as you like about it, at the same time there is actually nothing to do. You can smoke, drink, take drugs, watch plastic bags in the wind, talk to people, go to a bar or a show, buy a kebab, stand at the edge of a rooftop rocking back and forward and making onlookers uncomfortable, and... that's about it. You can do any of these things for as long as you want but you never get any acknowledgement for it or progress anything. I'm not sure if the lack of Steam achievements for this game was a deliberate design choice but it couldn't be more apt. There's no heroism in this game apart from the heroic will to continue existing and pushing on in this hopeless and goal-less world that isn't going anywhere or moving towards anything. This is STALKER if the Zone never appeared. The only thing you can't really do is leave. Your loneliness stat keeps rising and the longest and most meaningful conversation you have is with a taxi driver on the way home at the end of the night. The only remedy for this comes not from within the game but within the player - you have to assert for yourself that any given activity is worth doing for its own sake and for your own reasons or the world will crush you under its weight. Grey and dreary small-town despair drips from every pore of this thing, but it's somehow oddly beautiful too. It's low-poly but that really suits the mood and the lighting is excellent too. I only wish there was more of it, though no doubt I'll replay it and look for things I've missed in the gloom. It's like playing a Russian adaptation of a Celine novel; if you're an introspective person and especially if you can see beauty in melancholy and desolation, I wholeheartedly recommend it. Bonus points for a dedicated cigarette button.