Kryva Hora is a stealth action and survival horror game set in 1987 Chernobyl, just after the tragic nuclear explosion. Presented as if through the lens of found footage, explore secret military facilities to discover what occurred in the labs, and what horrors lie within.
Kryva Hora is a survival horror in the vein of games such as Outlast and Amnesia where you have to progress your way through labs, managing your resources and stealthily avoiding or fleeing from monsters. What differentiates this game from its predecessors however is that this game takes place within several smaller maps that are procedurally generated rather than one large curated map. The intent of this is to add more replay value into the game and the idea is certainly sound for this kind of game. How this translates to the final release remains to be seen.
In the demo, you begin by exploring a town and attempting to piece together your equipment to gain access to the facility. This includes scavenging batteries for your flashlight, radiation poisoning antidotes, and a Dosimeter before venturing forward. Exploring the compound will lead you to find clues about what happened to the people and decipher codes to unlock progress, all while managing your radioactivity exposure and batteries. Microphone capability is set to be included however it didn’t seem to be working for me while I played, though you can also emulate this with a button press for talking on the radio and attempting to scare monsters.
This is very much a demo as the sound balancing and enemy AI are very spotty and inconsistent. Plus while my PC is above the recommended specs I was still running into several issues with stuttering and frame drops, though fortunately no bugs which I was happy to see. As previously stated though this is a demo and on their Q&A thread on Steam the developers have taken note of the enemy AI issues and plan to patch it.
With regards to generative AI, the two games this developer has released previously do include some generated assets. This demo does not appear to use any, though there are numerous reused assets and the voice on the other end of the radio seems to be a text-to-speech program. As a demo that’s a proof of concept, I feel as though this is fine as long as it’s not included in the final build of the game.
The developers are set to launch a Kickstarter for Kryva Hora sometime in the near future, although no date is set as of yet. This is definitely an ambitious project for a new studio with only two games behind them and I am slightly worried that they’re biting off more than they can chew with multiplayer, Twitch integration, hard more, optional permadeath, and microphone features all being advertised in their trailer. If they’re able to pull it off however I can see it being an interesting game to either watch or play and could see some great popularity.
There are some good bones here but what comes of Kryva Hora remains to be seen. I for one will certainly be keeping an eye on this game.
Developer: WOMBEX Games
Publisher: WOMBEX Games
Platform: PC (Steam)
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