The Peresmeshnik

I'm going to be very honest with you. I played this game for the first time in 2021 and since then it has been stuck in my head. Most notably I developed a bizarre fixation on the character Oborev. I am infatuated with him and sometimes make up romantic scenarios involving him. I have no idea what about this game came off as so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ romantic to me back then but it stuck with me. At least once a few months I remember this game and imagine whole scenes inserting myself in the story and whatnot. Constantly, for the past 5 years I kid you not. Also when I have to come up with a russian male name I am 99% likely to say Oborev. I highly recommend this game. Changed my life for real.

The Peresmeshnik is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game. This Choose-Your-Own-Adventure e-book diverts from the usual high school anime club dropout fan-fiction about the authors imaginary girlfriend and instead opts for a Russian nautical theme, because Russia is famous for having such a great navy. Anyway there's a horror theme (beyond just finding out you're on a Russian made boat), and the author didn't even bother with generated pictures of his imaginary anime girlfriend, so it's just text. Hammering home the point this isn't a game. Yes, I'm aware text adventures used to exist, but this is no Zork, it's just an e-book with a couple of different badly written endings. Visual novels/e-books…

An interesting text based adventure with different choices giving different endings. The story has elements of "The Thing" and Lovecraft. The game doesn’t allow you to save but each run is very short and so you don’t need to save. Its a free and so worth playing.

Boring.

This game is not meant to be a long story, no. It's meant to be an adventure! AHOY YOUR ON THE PEREMESHNIK! Different outcomes are gonna be in this game. Me and my brother played it together (solo). But we enjoyed this game even though it only took an hour we enjoyed it so much! Quite funny too.

The game got me hooked