Artania Demo

Although since the Cold War ended it’s no longer such a big concern, nuclear fallout was almost a daily fear for people around the world, given the fact that the world’s biggest superpowers were practically daring each other to start launching nukes. Hence, it’s no wonder that we have so many movies and video games that tackle the subject and try to show us how a post-nuclear world would look like.

Artania is an upcoming adventure game that puts you in the role of a nuclear war survivor as he is trying to find others like him and maybe understand what happened before the world was destroyed. Granted, the game can barely be classified as a beta at this point, given the fact that it has so many shortcomings, but the underlying idea is certainly worth pursuing if the developers keep working on it.

As the name clearly implies, the action takes place in the Republic of Artania, which is part of the Soviet Union. You start in the middle of a field as your character follows a railroad and comes across a locomotive and a shack, where something shady appears to have happened. Thus, your goal is to investigate the location and take a few important decisions that apparently affect the course of the story.

Since this is just a demo meant to show you a piece of the final product, it cannot be judged too harshly, but then again it’s difficult not to say a thing or two about the gameplay mechanics. Your character cannot sprint, jump or crouch, so you are stuck moving at a snail’s pace through an environment that’s as barren and boring as it can get. There’s actually no interface to speak of, given the fact that the only thing that lets you know whether you can interact with an object or not is a small change in the crosshair’s size.

To make matters even worse, the game is voice acted in English, but the text is in Russian for some reason, which is a bad thing when you need to make choices. As for the graphics, the landscape looks more like a desolate plain with the occasional tree than a post-nuclear world, so we can only hope that things are better later on in the story as you get to visit more locations.

Artania is not much to look at right now, especially in terms of level design, interface and gameplay mechanics. The developers promise a lot more than what can be seen in the demo, so maybe things are going to be different once the full version is released.