Kholat

First of all, I really liked the game. It has a somehow unusual approach and a wonderful atmosphere. If you like exploration, this game is for you! Pro: The game has a very polished look, cool weather effects and nice graphics, that help to create a very good atmosphere. Controls are precise and I experienced no bugs at all. The idea, to let the player find its own way via map an compass is really cool and sometimes very challenging, especially when you have to run from a scripted event and loose your orientation (your position is not shown on the map!). There are a lot of things to discover in the area you have to explore, that provide you with further information about the background. Besides some encounters with the "entities", there is not much more to do than collecting the needed diary pages. which may sound a bit boring in the first place, but it is absolutely not. In fact, the whole exploration area is very diversified with a lot of unique landmarks that are fun to explore. If you like exploring or you like geocaching, this game is definitely for you. Contra: The entities are neither frightening nor challenging. If you encounter one of them, you either are far enough away to simply outrun it or it surprises you around a corner, which leads to instant death. The bad news is: you only save at camps or at the last found note / diary page. If you die, you are sometimes set back a very long distance, that you have to walk again. This gets worse if you die multiple times and have to walk the same way again and again. What really made me angry are some locations, where the map designers clearly present you obstacles just to redirect you to a much longer and more time-consuming route. This design is ok for broken bridges or the likes, but there are sometimes steps of 0,5m height, that you just can't pass, because your character lacks the ability to jump. Last but not least the story is not very rewarding and provides no real answers to the initial questions.

Kholat has suffered some negative reviews, mainly due to a tedious "enemy" mechanic in the game, but it's actually a lovely walking sim mystery. Kholat immerses the player in a graphically stunning winter landscape, complete with textured sounds and a chilling soundtrack. The task: locate clues to piece together the story, in the form of journal entries, articles, Soviet reports and some very nice Sean Bean narration. It's peaceful, surreal, and features some nice touches of magic and weird psychology to keep a player on their toes. I enjoyed this enormously, and it took me about 5 hrs to find everything and finish the final Act of the story. Does it have an annoying enemy mechanic? A little bit. But it's also a mechanic that is easy to learn, and once you do the "shadows" cease to be any serious concern. You learn to find stuff in an area to save your game so as to not lose progress before trying dangerous routes. Basically, don't let the orange mist catch you, and don't let rocks fall on your head. It's really not that difficult, just takes a few minutes to get the hang of. So don't let the negative reviews scare you off. Kholat is an excellent addition to a game library for players who also enjoyed Kona, Someday You'll Return, SOMA, Deliver Us The Moon, Through the Woods, the Vanishing of Ethan Carter, or Firewatch. It isn't quite as sophisticated as some of those titles, and it certainly is not survival horror (there's no crafting element, and no hiding/sneaking mechanics). But players who like these other titles should definitely give Kholat a chance.

I expected there to be a realistic investigation, interesting characters, maybe some backstory, flashbacks, etc. in the game. There is nothing of that. No kind of realism whatsoever. You just look for single pages that are all over the map. The game is just an empty map where you go from the point A to the point B and pick pages that complete the story. It looks almost like an unfinished project. I lost all the interest right at the beginning of the game when I was spoonfed that it were all monsters who were to blame for the disappearence of the students. That should be maybe somewhere at the end of the game as a resolution and not at the beginning. The real explanation would be also preferable but in that case they would have to put some more work into the story. So they killed all the thrill of gradation and joy of discovery in a game that should be all just about that. What is there to left? Wandering around in the dark with a compass and a map, collecting notes about the history of these disappeared students and finding these monsters hives. I did not care anymore. Yes it has nice atmosphere but without any driving force it is just a boring walking that you want to have over as soon as possible. There are more issues like no Russian audio in a story that takes place is in USSR, impossibility to save the game whenever you want, the fact it is all in the dark and therefore you can't really enjoy even the enviroment very much, despite it being a so called open world map you have very limited possibilites how to get to your desired location, you have to travel on the predetermined trails, you can't even jump or climb. There simply are not that many interesting things.

Kholat hooked me on the premise that one would be in the middle of nowhere, navigating the wild, having a hard time knowing where one is; all whilst telling a compelling story. I couldn't be more wrong. If you don't care about graphics, just play Miasmata instead. The game looks absolutely great. Between a minimal UI, exhaustion effects, contextual fog and just overall crispness in the scenery there is nothing to complain about. The sound design is good. Sean Bean's narration is a joy. The atmosphere sounds are passable. The crescendos the game pulls feel a bit hammy, but that's about the worst of it. Design wise though, the game is just not good. First off, key elements are not explained. This includes the map never centering on new locations (despite them being marked), explaining which way is north on the rather odd compass, tents only allowing you to save if you saved somewhere else, optional journals being mandatory one-time save points and the light phobic 'monster' getting enraged when you shine light on him. Secondly, half the map is empty corridors and a significant amount of them are one way. The threatening 'monster' that appears has extremely basic AI, and death will only follow from it cheekily spawning on top of you rather than it outsmarting you. Thirdly, a lot of the story is pointless. A lot of journal entries amount to nothing more than 'scientists built a bad thing' or 'the hikers were happy'. A lot of scenic moments amount to nothing more than 'here's a spooky thing, now it falls apart, now run away'. Easily 60% of this content could have been scrapped and the story would have not have become any worse because of it.

I remember when I first had the chance to look at Kholat. I thought it'd be this incredible journey. It has a great starting premise of a real-life mystery and even Sean Bean narrating... and it is by far one of the lamest walking sims I've ever played. I'm not saying this as someone opposed to the genre either. I loved Dear Esther, Apsulov was an outstandingly good time even though its minimal gameplay gimmicks didn't hold up under scrutiny, and The Stanley Parable is one of the best examples of what this medium can accomplish. Kholat is nowhere close to that. Kholat is... watching paint dry, expecting something interesting to happen at some point, and then when it finally dries, exclaiming "Wait, that's it??" I appreciate the artistry of the audio-visual work but they're in service to a nothing-burger that I just can't recommend to anyone.