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In Soviet Russia, walking simulates you! Ahaha… wait,no, hang on. In S-soviet Russia, uh… You scare ghosts! Argh, no wait uh… i-in Soviet R-russia…
I had no idea what Kholat was when I turned it on. After an opening cinematic that seemed to last forever that went along the lines of “something-something dead bodies are turning up in the USSR,” you are dropped into an abandoned town surrounded by endless snow. At first, I was completely confused. Did I miss something? Did I have an objective? What was I supposed to be doing here? I walked around for about ten minutes before finally getting frustrated and looking at some of the comments on Steam. When I got to one that read “No tutorial […] No direction No guide” I understood that wandering around clueless was exactly what I was supposed to be doing and once you know that you aren’t supposed to know it’s not a bad game.
For starters, it’s a beautiful game. Snow blows in the wind, the environment is greatly detailed and what’s better is that it is extremely optimized. It ran without the slightest hint of framerate drop. Even my laptop fans which usually spin madly in graphic intensive games, didn’t have to work too hard to keep up with this one.
There’s a trick to it all though–the game is a bit of a walking simulator, so there’s nothing else going on in the game to increase resource useage. Now, normally I hate walking simulators on principle. There are only a few that I can put up with and generally I prefer them to be on the shorter side of things. Kholat though is an open-world walking simulator which dices things up a bit.
After Act I, you get handed two things; a map and compass. There’s no HUD, no quest log, no happy little markers telling you where to go and certainly no marker on your map telling you where you are. It’s a good thing I got my orienteering badge in Boy Scouts, because you’ll need to use your orienteering skills if you want to be able to navigate yourself in Kholat without getting lost after a minute of walking.
Kholat is at least worth Tier 2. The game is pleasantly fun in spite of being in the “Horror” genre. Because it’s just a walking simulator, you don’t have to stress out about managing ammunition, health kits and other limited resources like in other Horror games. Likewise, you know you’ll never need to do any combat so you don’t need to worry about that as well. I wouldn’t want all my spooky games to be like Kholat, but as it stands, this one is worth trying out on a quiet day where you just feel like strolling through Russia. At night. On Batman’s night off.
