Kujlevka Review

Set in Russia 1992, take control of Valery Potikhonchenkov, a 65-year-old Russian who fought in the war and was impaired from a bullet in the spine. After a UFO that seems to grant wishes crashes into his house, it'll be up to him to create relations between this extraterrestrial species and humanity.

Kujlevka is a narrative-driven adventure, and as such, you'll spend practically all of your time sitting in your wheelchair at the desk and listening to people converse. Your three friends, Vasily, Stepan, and Klim, will give their opinions on every matter, and it'll be up to you to decide how best to communicate with the aliens in accordance to who you agree with.

To talk with the UFO, you'll need to use your TV to select three words from a selection and get your desired outcome alongside a triangle that you can interact with to sway your words to get different likelihoods for getting a Critical Event, successfully translating your words, or even getting some new ones. That said, after several playthroughs, I don't really know what critical events do and what the point of getting new words is, as normal events don't affect much which ending you get.

Despite that, however, being able to choose which kind of translation you give the aliens is fun. You often get to decide whether you will help the people that want to have their wishes fulfilled or give them an unfavourable outcome, which gives a fun sense of playing God that you don't often get in games.

The story veers into crucial decisions that could affect the outcome of the world, and so you need to start choosing wisely. Although they don't affect the story all that much in the long run — with the most pivotal choices being in the final episodes — your decisions can unlock different endings for you to choose from. Your agency in Kujlevka isn't as much as I'd wished it would be, but the story is funny and enjoyable all the same.

The gameplay can be a bit slow at times, as your decisions can oftentimes be far and few in between, but considering you can finish this game in just a few hours, it isn't detrimental to the overall enjoyability of the experience.

The philosophical ideologies and themes are omnipresent in Kujlevka, but the game doesn't forget to let you have fun every once in a while by dropping funny comments and interesting scenes. Although I enjoyed sitting at my desk making decisions on who to help with the UFO, my favourite parts were the dream sequences that Valery has, where you'll speak to an entity called That One. Not only were these the most gameplay-heavy segments, but they also showed off the graphical design phenomenally, as Kujlevka failed to meet the expectations set by the opening scene.

All in all, I can safely recommend Kujlevka if you're ready to sit back and let the story unfold while having few gameplay segments.