It’s February 23, 2022. You’re Max, an ordinary boy whose parents have left town for the weekend, and you’ve woken up late for school. You don’t seem too worried about it as you head to the stove to make sausage and egg for your breakfas♈t. You know the old lady in the flat next door will berate you for skipping school again, but you don’t care. Little do you know that this will be the last normal day of your life.
“We’re not doing a fun game,” says Ivan Titov, the PR represenmaritative for , an RPG inspired by the Russian i🐲nvasion of Mariupol. “It’s a way for us to remind people about [the invasion], to get more attention to it, and to remind you about all the horrible things that happened and that still happen right next to you.”
Despite the seriousness of its setting, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hollow Home looks beautiful. Plenty of design cues have been taken from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disco Elysium in terms of both aesthetics and mechanics, from the isometric view, to the hand painted textures, to the dialogue options and skill checks, although the latter work slightly differently. Instead of dice rolls, it appears that Maksym has eight skills that he can level up in order to access new dialog options with thꦬe people of the besieged city. There’s also a friendship mechanic which will allow you to get closer to the people whose quests you complete. But there won’t be time to do them all.
Hollow Home changes every night. Once you’ve spent your action points for a day, you can do no morღe and must sleep. At night, however, the invasion rolls on. You wake up to a new city. Buildings may have been destroyed, routes opened up by shelling, and NPCs disappeared or replaced by ghosts if the worst has happened. It sounds harrowing, but it was the reality for hundreds of little Maksyms last year, and continues now in some parts of the country.
Twigames consulted with a journalist on the events of the invasion, spending several months collating information based on over 600 documents, from checking the weather every day, to knowing on which day electricity ♐was cut off, and when ATMs stopped working. They also used stories 🧸from the personal diaries of Mariupol citizens who experienced the invasion firsthand.
Dev𝓀eloper and founder of Twigames Valerii Minenko says that the six-person development team used some of their own experiences in the game too, although he feels the events in Kiev weren’t nearly as cruel as those in Mariupol. In fact, he and the team came up with the idea to make a game about the invasion when they evacuated their offices in Ukraine’s capital.
Minenko explains that more than half the team rented a big house in the Carpathian Mountains during the worst of the shelling, and the idea came to them there. Two months spent living with your colleagues is a strange way to begin development of a game, but when the topic is so personal, m♉aybe it helps to be experiencing that familial displacement together. It was around this time that news organisations and social media campaigns weren’t sure whether Russian citizens knew anything about the invasion, or if government propaganda was keeping them in the dark.
“When the invasion started, there was an opinion that people in Russia didn't know what's going on here [in Ukraine] because they didn’t try to stop it. There was the idea that you should show it to them somehow, explain it to them.”
That’s what Hollow Home aims to do. Maksym must survive for 30 days in the city when the full game is released in 2025 (albeit with a demo coming much sooner), equating to around 20 hours of gameplay across three chapters, each set in a different region ofthe city. His decisions will change and shape the city, will dictate the fate of his friends, and will undoubtedly affect the player greatly too. This isn’t a game you play for fun, it’s a🍬 game that will likely be equal parts historical text and exploration of grief. Every element of the game has been thoroughly researched, everything happens exactly how it did in Mariupol, with one difference: you. Your Maksym will make decisions that affect others, you’ll be able to save some people but not everyone, and you’ll be able to experience the invasion through the eyes of a young child.