One of the most interesting and unique games I've played in a long time. It's very difficult to describe what this game is or how it works in traditional video game vocabulary, but if I were to try and reduce it I would probably land on calling it "the Dark Souls of walking simulators", while of course meaning this in the best possible way.

On the surface, it's a story about battling plague in a very strange, struggling little community in the middle of nowhere, but everything is a bit off in that "David Lynch" way, where characters (most of whom are pretty interesting) speak in esoteric mysteries and traditional medical knowledge exists alongside odd steppe culture that has a magical realist bent to it.

Calling it a "walking simulator" is also maybe a little disingenuous since it does feature some more common video game mechanics, including combat (though it's usually not a good idea to engage in it) and survival gauges that track health, hunger, immunity, etc. The difference is that managing these gauges, rather than enhancing some other game formula--such as the survival modes in some Fallout games--these meters sort of ARE the game. It's not a game about making sure your hunger meter stays low so much as it is a game about sometimes not being sure where your next meal is coming from; it's not a game about watching your infection gauge so much as it is one about wondering how you'll be able to buy new clothing to protect yourself; a game about having the means to diagnose disease but lacking the means to treat or cure it--or vice-versa. You've got 5 fires and one bucket.

It's also interesting to see such survival mechanics where you are not in the middle of the wilderness. Instead you're in a town where you're one of the few people equipped to help against an epidemic, but no one really believes that you can help--you're just some bum off the train, not a hero. Thousands of people will die regardless of your efforts, and you're only human; because of this, the town is slow to assist you. In a way, it's rather lonely.

Some reviews have called this a pain simulator and that's sort of accurate, except I would have chosen the word "struggle" rather than pain. The game is constantly difficult, leaving you nervous as to what will develop in the upcoming days, floundering for the materials you need to do your job or solve the town's mystery, and the game punishes failure harshly. That said, the game is rarely annoying and the situations it leaves you in all like they can be overcome. The present is always manageable and you almost always know what you can do at any given moment--it's worrying about the future that makes the game feel so dreadful. But it's hard not to want to press through that dread, be it because you want to help the people of the town or just to learn more about it.

I wish I could get more people to play this game, but it feels like a difficult game to recommend (yet recommend it I do, of course). It's hard to say how many people want to play a game that makes you struggle in a way that is decidedly different than how games USUALLY make players struggle. What I think is important to point out is that the struggle is frictionless. The game WORKS in a way that similar "struggle" games don't because it's not tedium that it forces upon the player. The game is painful, sure, and not fun to play, but neither is it irritating or tiresome.

I've barely scratched the surface of what makes the game so interesting; it feels important without itself presuming that it's important, and that's why I hope more people will give it a chance.