We’re in a golden age for incredibly weird games from Eastern Europe. There’s Indika, the one where you play a nun who chats with Satan. There’s Militsioner, the one where you explore a town presided over by a 100-story-tall cop. There’s HROT, the FPS about socialist Czechoslovakia. And now there’s One-Eyed Likho, a horror/puzzle game about two old men on a quest to figure out what ‘evil’ is all about.
The old men in question are a village smith and a village tailor, and you play the role of the former. Off into the woods you go on a quest for Likho, one of the approximately 867 different embodiments of evil that Slavic mythology keeps on hand.
This is, mostly, a puzzle game where most puzzles can be answered by setting things on fire, but it’s stranger than a dry recitation of its individual parts would suggest. Entirely in black and white and dipping into an aspect ratio I can describe only as ‘asphyxiating’ in spots, the game feels like someone sat down and marathoned a load of silent Oleksandr Dovzhenko films before deciding to try to make an Amnesia game.
It’s not an especially complex thing. You proceed mostly forward, explore limited open spaces for knick-knacks to insert into knick-knack-shaped holes, and sometimes light and toss matches in order to illuminate your surroundings or set your surroundings on fire, thereby clearing blocked pathways.
But it’s the ever-askew narrative that keeps you pressing ahead, which is undoubtedly why the puzzles never get so taxing as to obstruct it. You’re in the woods, now a house, now a shipwreck-strewn shore, now an open grave that keeps dragging you further and further beneath the Earth, all the while the aged smith you play as murmurs to himself in Russian about Biblical figures and the fundamental hopelessness of his life, which are the precise things the Russian language was designed to be used to murmur about.
The Pathologic influence bleeds through at every angle. It’s dreamy horror rather than explicit gore or constant fleeing. Though once you actually encounter Likho there is some gore. Heads do get pulled off. That counts as gore.
Not to worry, though, the head in question continues to chat and chortle at you, beckoning you to follow it to the freedom of a distant tsardom as it rolls gaily away. I gotta admit, I’m eager to keep following it. Maybe it’s leading me to a final answer about what the hell this ‘evil’ stuff is all about.
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