Citizens! We live in times of unprecedented danger! We are beset on all sides by traitors and saboteurs. Reactionaries whisper treason in dimly lit rooms. Their mouths spew poison and lies that eat away at the foundations of the worker-peasant revolution, at the root of the world revolution itself.
And, worst of all, no one gave me a desk big enough to deal with it.
What Awaits, Aleksey? is a clever mystery/puzzle game that caters to all my specific obsessions. It’s a Stasi simulator, more or less—you are Aleksey Lutomski, a recent hire at the security service of a fictional 20th-century communist state, tasked with identifying the members of an underground cell of dissidents who are going around saying mean things about the motherland.
For the most part, this means obsessing over the tidiness of your desk. It is no longer World War 2 and you are not Stierlitz. You are not kicking in doors and taking down fascist spies with a Tokarev. It is 1970: the socialist sixth of the Earth has settled into bleary stagnation. The enemies of the state are disaffected academics and you fight them by going through their mail.
So, each day, you sit behind your desk and open a new sachet of evidence—little bits and pieces of info that you can assemble to identify members of the underground, anti-state KNOT network. You decode ciphered letters, pore over covert photos, listen to wiretapped conversations, all to piece together a picture of who each member of the conspiracy is, attaching codenames to real names and photos and sending them off for verification at the end of the day.
In what I’ve played, the game walks a nice balance, difficulty-wise. There comes a point where you’ve amassed enough data to be damn-near certain about a person’s identity. At others, I’ve made leaps of logic to figure someone out a little early. Further still, I’ve made leaps of logic that did not pan out, and duly got chewed out by my socialist superiors when I came into work the next day.
I’ve played around an hour of the game so far, and it’s all quite pleasingly difficult and even more pleasingly physical. WAA makes full use of its 1970s setting to burden your creaking desk with tools that are all fantastically mechanical and corporeal. Your personal enigma machine is a fat mechanical calculator in copper and brass, your tape recorder is a chunk of brown plastic.
All this gear vies with ever-increasing stacks of paper for space on your desk as you try to zero in on the clues that might lead you to uncover the conspirators’ identities while disregarding the red herrings (though you can, fortunately, send stuff on your desk to the phantom zone when you’re done using it).
I suspect it’s all leading to a Papers, Please-esque choice where I can elect to throw in with the conspirators or stay loyal to the motherland. I think I can guess which way will net me a good ending, but look, I’ll sign up with whichever side promises to get me a larger desk.
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