Heart Of Altai

A nice virtual park/museum about Altai nature and history. Clearly a passion project of a small dev team. I was surprised by how much developers managed to cramp into those semi-open locations. The game is linear (you go from one location to the next), but there are a suprising amount of densely packed content in said locations. That, along with the ambient music/sounds, creatures running around, etc., makes it so the world doesn't feel empty nor too small. Apart from walking around, you can talk to NPCs, read journals, search for collectibles and solve some light puzzles. Every dialogue is voiced, which was a nice surprise. There are couple of interesting mechanics, such as being able to take a picture and save it inside your phone's gallery (which is even tied to some quests) and being able to switch between 2 characters, who can perform different actions in the world. The game is nicely optimized, although it comes at a great cost of visual fidelity. Low-quality textures and models along with low draw distances/LODs really mess up how good the game could've looked and come off very "potato"-looking. There are also a number of UI-related bugs (text being cropped, dialogue window not closing, etc.), but those hopefully get hotfixed soon. The game IS an early-access title, so I expect some QoL changes and bugfixes to come out in the near future. Overall, if you're interested in a foreign culture of Altai people and it's nature and you don't mind a little jank from time to time, I would say go for it, especially at that price.

Красивые пейзажи, приятная музыка и спокойный геймплей. Идеально, чтобы расслабиться и насладиться природой. Не для тех, кто ищет экшен, но если хочется уединения и умиротворения — точно стоит попробовать.

Beautiful game setting, steeped in ancient cultural history.