The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/Ie-A0PT3cAM?si=nB8-NCNfnW_1lO50


What are video game fundamentals? If there was a list of definitive components that every game, irrespective of scope and genre, must include, what’s on the list? We can all think of a list of necessary pieces in a movie - there needs to be some sort of setting, some kind of action, a change of state. Maybe there are characters, plots and subplots, questions and answers. It depends on your definition of story. But for a video game, that list doesn’t immediately spring to mind, and a lot of things we might believe are fundamental to the medium are absent in hugely important and acclaimed titles. At the most basic level, the game software must be functional, the game itself should be readable, appropriately paced, appropriately balanced, and offer something to keep the player engaged. I think my list is pretty reasonable but actually implementing these fundamentals is far easier said than done. Massive modern studios with gigantic budgets regularly fail to achieve some of these basic necessities, so when I came across this Polish tactics game from 1999 my expectations were fairly low.

Gorky 17 opens as a trio of NATO soldiers are deployed by boat to a small, nameless town in eastern Poland. Unlike any other operation NATO forces are deployed to, neither Trangtine nor Ovitz had been briefed on what’s happening in the town, or what they’ve been sent there to actually do. The only member of the group with any prior knowledge is Captain Cole Sullivan, our main character and the guy to which the stuff happens to. On the riverbank Sullivan keys everyone into what’s going on in this town. Whatever is happening is apparently so horrendous that the Russian government decided to bomb their own people to keep the secret and hoped destruction was enough to contain whatever was going on in Gorky. They failed, and the first NATO task force sent to Poland was woefully unprepared for what they would find. How exactly three more unprepared soldiers are supposed to do anything their predecessors couldn’t is unclear, but this whole scenario is set up surprisingly competently. It’s succinct and interesting without leaning too much on established works like similarly apocalyptic games I’ve played in the past. The backdrop of this scene is also wonderfully realised! The pre-rendered backgrounds in Gorky 17 are fabulously detailed - front to back - and the way the perspective of certain objects change depending on where the battle is supposed to be is also really cool to see.

Each battle has its own unique pre-rendered background and arrangement of obstacles since every fight is scripted - there are no random encounters. Most of the time, the fight is preceded by a short movie introducing the threat, followed by a brief conversation between the player’s party members, which is the only time Ovitz and Trangtine get any real characterisation. And they are reasonably unhappy with their circumstances each time. I think it’s a little crass to have the French character act cowardly and the Polish character screaming about demons almost every time an enemy shows up. Early on that’d be fine, but Trangtine’s insistence that this time it’s over. This is the one. The road ends here. Doesn’t really land after the crew dispatches a truckload of monsters over the course of the game. And they get increasingly proficient at it as they get deeper into the town. The tactics maps come in a variety of perspectives and sizes, but are all essentially a grid on which pieces move and attack. The player and the CPU take their turns sequentially, with the player and their opponent’s characters regaining movement points at the start of each turn. Healing and attacking cannot be done by the same character in a single turn, but changing items, passing items to another character, and turning in place are free. The direction a model is facing actually matters, with damage bonuses awarded for landing hits on the side or the rear of the model, which I didn’t notice for an embarrassingly long time. Sometimes I’d see the little “+ 4” appear on the damage roll but for some reason it took multiple hours of playing the game to figure out what was causing it. I also took way too long to start using the defence stance to reduce incoming damage. The game isn’t complicated - so there really doesn’t need to be a tutorial - I just missed this really obvious mechanic so let’s just ignore moments where I might leave a character in a dumb position when the option to keep them safer was right in front of me. At least attacking enemies was something I got to grips with quickly. Most attacks can only target tiles in line with the one the attacker is standing on. So a crowbar will allow the character to attack a one tile range in 4 directions, and similarly the pistol attack will only be able to damage enemies in those same 4 directions. Explosive weapons and the rifle are different, though, and this is where the interesting skill-expressive part of this design comes in. Positioning your characters at a diagonal to where most enemies can reach means that the enemy won’t be able to use its attacks. Not being attacked is good, I think, so learning where and how to do this is really important given how rare healing feels - which is something we’ll get into shortly. Where this gets funny is when the large enemies start showing up. This enemy takes up a 3x3 space on the grid, but it can only attack from the centre tile. So if you chase it into a corner somehow, you can position your team in such a way that it can’t move or attack. If this were possible with every enemy in the game I think I’d really dislike it, but figuring out I could do this and just scraping by with many of my characters ready to keel over from any attack was undeniably great. The regular encounters are engaging puzzles too. None of the player’s team may ever die - not even the temporary buddies that join up on occasion - and there is a finite quantity of healing items and weapon ammunition available in the game, so you can’t just run into every encounter blasting anything that moves and face-tanking the enemies’ attacks since there’s no way to know where the next item stash is, if there’s even one coming at all.

Since the fights are all scripted, resource caches could be placed strategically to prevent the player from ever getting too strong or too comfortable. Multiple fights will pass where the enemies are capable of dealing over 30 damage to characters with around 100 health each attack, and a little pile of food and tape is the only way to recover that damage for the foreseeable future. I found this to be an effective tone setter; these guys are way out of their depth with no idea what lies around the next corner, and the player gets to share in that experience. It does make some of the things Ovitz says seem strangely out of place. And the flippancy of defenceless characters like Anna goes completely against the tone of desperately succeeding against all odds that the scarcity of resources in the game is going for. Anna is literally not allowed to swing the same crowbar everyone else uses, but somehow she’s survived the town without as much as a scratch on her up to this point. Mechanically, I like the extra challenge she provides but the writing for her character is a little bizarre. Plus, since she’s not really a member of the team, her level-ups are entirely useless. Characters gain experience in battle whenever they deal damage to an enemy, eventually culminating in a personal level up or a weapon skill level up. Personal stats include Max HP, Luck, Accuracy, Counter Attack Chance, and Calmness. For whatever reason there’s a walk range stat in the stats menu that can never be increased. I think there’s a single character in the game who can’t walk the full 4 tiles when they first show up, but their time in the team was so short I don’t even remember levelling them up. Whenever a character gains a personal level, the player is given 5 points to allocate to whichever stats they’d like. Putting points into HP only increases the maximum it can reach, it doesn’t heal them the extra health right away, and each point put in only increases that total by one which isn’t overly impactful. Luck increases the chances of some extra benefit occurring, but as far as I could tell it only affects certain weapons or gives accuracy buffs which don’t matter. The main trio can get to 100% accuracy really fast, which makes that whole thing kind of redundant. I’m confused as to why there’s an accuracy stat at all, honestly. Resources are already very limited so the starting accuracy couldn’t be any lower. The player needs damage to land in order to win fights, so levelling the whole crew to 100% accuracy as soon as possible makes more sense than risking what little ammo you have to misses. Counter attack is a clunky, unintuitive effect that I don’t really like. When a character is attacked there’s a chance they can trigger a counter attack. The counter attack must use whichever weapon the character already had equipped, so if the last thing Trangtine did was heal someone and end the turn empty-handed, his counter attack would have to be performed with his fists. Some weapons, like the flamethrower the player gets access to fairly early on, don’t use finite ammunition, instead opting for a cool-down timer that usually lasts about 3 turns. So if a counter attack triggers while the defending character has one of these weapons in hand, they can’t actually do anything. You just have to right click in the middle of the enemy turn sometimes. Calmness is also very strange. Whenever a character takes damage, they lose some HP and 1 point of calmness. If their calmness drops to zero they become enraged, gaining a damage buff on their next attack and… That’s it. So it’s all up-side. Why can you level this? To make the enrage happen later? If there was a negative associated with enraging then I never came across it and the vast majority of these stats appeared completely inconsequential as a result. Fortunately, they aren’t what I found to be the most compelling parts of Gorky 17.

Gorky 17 took just under 9 hours for me to finish but that time breezed by. Health and damage values are balanced to an amazing precision, no fight ever took more than a few minutes to resolve, and the exploration segments are small but densely packed, allowing the player to thoroughly search them in a relatively short period of time but still offering a bunch of optional challenges and additional resources. For a game released in 1999, Gorky 17 had no technical quirks or issues running on Windows 10. The pre-rendered movies are a little strange - especially in the OBS preview window, it looks like each row of pixels is followed by a black row to try and increase the total resolution. It reads fine but I’ve never seen anything like it before. Or maybe I have but because it was displayed on a CRT I couldn’t tell. I’d say the game adheres to our readability criteria from earlier successfully; the 3D models are distinct from the pre-rendered backgrounds and it’s clear what’s happening and why almost all of the time. How the Grandma enemy selects targets is a bit mysterious, and the encounter where all of the enemies suddenly have a seething hatred for an information kiosk is unlike anything else in the game. And the big tentacle starfish nailed to the wall is deeply confusing. But basically every other enemy does what it looks like it’ll do. Garcia has his gatling gun arm so the player knows he’s going to shoot them. Smoke Rider has 2 rocket launchers, so spread out to minimise explosion damage. The enemy variety is high so things never get repetitive, and the regularity to which new weapons are given to the player makes pushing deeper into the town rewarding. The laser rifle is cool and a great way to singe your teammates. I am genuinely impressed that this relatively small studio in a country with generally limited game development resources was able to develop a game so fundamentally solid.

Metropolis Software was founded in Warsaw in 1992 by Adrian Chmielarz and Grzegorz Miechowski. Chmielarz led the studio to create a handful of adventure games between ‘93 and ‘98 prior to the development of Gorky 17, with titles like Teenagent and The Prince and the Coward seeing niche success. Gorky was the studio’s first delve into tactics gameplay, and reviews from the time enjoyed the unique blend of strategy and survival horror. This caption in this NextGen magazine review of the game is so quaint and sort of cute. Not only were tactics games present and popular during the 90s - X-Com predates Gorky by nearly 5 years - but in 2015 Chmielarz listed Vandal Hearts as an explicit inspiration in a Twitter post. Gorky 17 did okay financially, but during the production of Metropolis’ next games Archangel and the highly anticipated Witcher adaptation, Cmhielarz left the company over creative differences. He would go onto found People Can Fly which saw early success with Painkiller while Metropolis and Miechowski developed a pair of sequels to Gorky before releasing Infernal to critical and financial indifference. CD Projekt would acquire Metropolis in 2008 and close the studio down a year later. Metropolis Software staff have gone on to lead rather impressive careers, all things considered. People Can Fly were eventually folded into Epic Games’ stable of studios, with Chmielarz leaving again to found The Astronauts who would release The Vanishing of Ethan Carter to great commercial success. After CD Projekt closed Metropolis in 2009, Miechowski and a few of the remaining staff created 11 Bit Studios, the studio responsible for This War of Mine and the Frostpunk games. I don’t know what makes Warsaw such a hotbed for quality video games but it seems worth investigating, and the city seems worthy of exploring too.

The city in Gorky 17 is equally full of secrets and details, with layers of structure and objects forming a depth that pre-rendered backgrounds have to work to achieve. In most cases, the environments are rich and fantastically realised, but there are a few that look like hidden object screens. The museum basement especially. There’s a whole ass galley down there. And this lower basement room has statues in it that would’ve been really difficult to get to the museum. But if you click on the taxidermied ostrich you get a hint for the next puzzle or something. I really enjoy the character models, though. The texture work on the characters is exactly to my taste, and look at those jagged edges and shifting pixels. I’m also a big fan of the variety of monster designs. There are plenty of insectoids and tentacle monsters, there’s a xenomorph enemy and the Predator makes an appearance here and there, but my favourites are the ones that seem sort of humanoid but have massive chunks of metal or concrete integrated into their bodies. This is kind of a spoiler so if you don’t want to know the origins of the monsters then I think now is the best time to dip and come back after playing the game, but these creatures are supposed to be mutated humans, and the ones that have metal and concrete pieces seem like they transformed by melting and reassembled with pieces of the stuff around them stuck inside their new shape. Like these guys with the iron blocks for hands were working in a mill when they transformed. I find a few of the designs to be a bit beyond whatever an extreme mutation could turn a person into. The Smoke Rider looks cool but how could this possibly have been a person? Or three people? Or two people and a dog? The game never shows anyone transforming, which is a shame, because there’s one hell of an opportunity but it happens off screen.

Within a moment of landing on the shore, Trangtine discovers the sickly green bodies of two of the first NATO team sent in. They hadn’t made it very far, but the remaining three members were nowhere to be seen. Determined to complete the mission, Sullivan decided the team would push on. Seconds later, the team runs into Wasilij Dobrovsky, an ex-Russian soldier who had somehow survived the chaos in the town alone and unarmed. Dobrovsky tags along for the time being but upon leading the squad to the nearby sewer entrance, he decides to leave and go back to solo survival mode. Flimsy storytelling but sure, they needed a team slot for the one surviving member of the first NATO team to join up. Joan McFadden had been hiding in a cavity in the sewer. Her team had been woefully unprepared and never found anything of interest as they desperately tried to survive the horrors they found in the town. McFadden joins the crew for the museum portion which is when the player learns that the monsters are actually the mutated residents of the town. How it’s being done isn’t explained, just that the townspeople are somehow all monsters now. The squad also runs into a nameless “Nato Captain” who tells Sullivan that his orders are to pull out of the town and a helicopter is en route to the roof of the museum for extraction. The helicopter never arrives and Sullivan decides to push on to their original objective anyway, suspecting the person who had told him to go to the roof had been an imposter. McFadden gets jumped by an invisible monster and is left to die on the street outside the museum. And nobody really makes an attempt to do anything about it. Either this is some really heartless characterisation, something else is going on, or the writer really needed to get McFadden off the team and couldn’t think of any other way. Not long later, Anna shows up and the team gets into a confrontation with a Russian commander who has come to clean up whatever he can. Clearly, Sullivan and the boys were on the right track and after gaining entry to the local hotel the player finally stumbles into the mysterious laboratory. This facility had been transferred to this town from Gorky 17 after causing the first disaster, and now it was wreaking havoc yet again. The Russian commander’s here. And then Sullivan’s actual boss shows up. And look, it’s Dobrovsky again. As the squad gets deeper and deeper into the lab, the stress or something else starts to take hold of Ovitz and Trangtine. They become much more relaxed and ready to fight the horrors they’ve been killing all game, but their casual attitudes came at a rather sinister time. After reactivating the facility’s power, Sullivan is finally able to access the digital file storage machine and learn what the secret of Gorky 17 really is. Except not really. Everyone lines up to tell Sullivan what’s going on. So it’s teleportation. But it activates a gene that causes people to mutate into mindless alien monsters and start killing each other. And it’s viral? Somehow? It radiates out of people who haven’t transformed yet, or who have? Iunno. I think this gene is nationalism, or a genetic predisposition to nationalism at least. Yeltsin’s Russia was moving rapidly away from communism at the time, hoping to integrate Russia into liberal international politics but also appealing to former communists by specifically focusing on improving the standings of the Russian public on a global level. In a speech to parliament in October 1992, Yeltsin said he wanted “to ensure favourable foreign conditions for the success of the political and economic reforms that have been started” referring to the country’s transition to the Western style liberal economy. This transition wasn’t popular, but Yeltsin’s nationalist rhetoric did manage to convince some in the former USSR, and many in ex-Soviet states - as well as those who might have remained outside of Russia after the conclusion of the Second World War - to put stake into their “ethnic identity”. As a Polish studio, I would think it likely that this “ethnic awakening” occupied a lot of Metropolis Software’s daily lives and would absolutely weigh upon the minds of somebody writing fiction at the time. Whether this was an intended reading of the game is hard to determine, but isn’t it so cool that games can reflect stuff like this? With a little digging, some deeper meaning can be uncovered. Isn’t that fun and interesting?

So Gorky 17 has it all: solid gameplay, rich and stylish visuals, an intriguing narrative, and the program works well on modern hardware considering it was released almost 30 years ago. It moves briskly through challenges and concepts, but gives the player plenty of time to catch their breath and soak in the details. There aren’t many more things a game can be, and the fact the relatively inexperienced Metropolis Software were capable of producing Gorky 17 is a real triumph. It’s cheap on Steam and even cheaper on GoG so it’s absolutely worth picking up to play for yourself. I’ll be moving onto something new; a game that’s been on the horizon for over four years.