Kholat

 

Kholat is supposedly highly influenced by a true story of so called Dylatov Incident where in a group of experienced mountineers went missing on their expedition and their bodies turned up in gruesome unexplainable ways.

In this game I'm not even sure who you play as, I don't think you're playing as one of these people from the real story, but instead you're someone who goes in to try to figure out what happened? I don't really know, the narrative and plot is very sparse and hard to follow.

Kholat starts off with absolutely zero narrative or direction, really. You get a few short digitally drawn pictures with a brief talking about the incident, and then you suddenly start playing the game, at a train station, walking around in some village. From the moment you start playing, you're already lost and confused, and you're not even on the mountain yet! I think the devs purposefully tried to make the game as confusing and feeling of being lost as possible because even from the very beginning I had to wander around aimlessly for a good 20 mins before I could even find how to progress onto the actual mountain.

Once you make it onto the mountain you find your first campsite, where you get a compass and map, and this is the only sense of direction you have in the entire game. You get a journal and a tiny 'tutorial' trying to tell you what to do, it tells you about your flashlight, it hints that turning off your flashlight makes you harder to spot, it mentions something about "Setting your destination before travelling" which initially had me super confused because the map says 'Press A to set destination" but I was spamming it like crazy and it does nothing - Turns out later in the game you unlock additional campsites, and what this really means is when you rest at a campsite, you can fast travel to the other campsites youve unlocked by pressing A, thats it.

So being very bewildered and not knowing what to do, I kind of just aimlessly wandered around in the winter mountains for an hour or two. If the game wants to be a sort of simulation of what the real event was, I guess this is pretty close. Completely confused and lost, wandering around in the freezing tundra, hearing crying wolves and frostbitten wind blaring against my eardrums, its pretty immersive and the graphics are well done.

But quickly I ran into frustration, I suddenly kept running into these orange monsters which would spot me and instantly annihilate me. The thing is, theres no way to manually save in this game. The game only saves when you pickup these Pages, or discover a campsite. So for a good hour or two, the game only saved when I picked up some random page, and I would go running around for 20 mins, then suddenly run into one of these monsters, die instantly, and then would have to reload at my previous save. It was just so stupid, It felt so bad having walked around aimlessly for 20 mins only to turn a corner and instantly die, then have to do it all over again, try to memorize where I went. I was about ready to uninstall the game and just giveup on it cause I thought the save system was so awful. Like why does a game like this need to be so punishing and waste your fucking time like that? Why cant I just wake up somewhere nearby, not be forced to reload a previous save way back? It adds nothing to the game but frustration and takes you out of the immersion.

Since the game has such sparse direction, what I really did was basically accidentally keep running into the hardest most endgame part of the map. So yeah, barely knowing what I'm doing, not knowing what to look for, made this a really sour introduction to the experience.

But regardless, I pushed on. I then realized that it only saves when you pickup these pages, which is something inspired by Slender games or some shit which isn't a good sign really, but it became my perogitive to find these pages, if only to save the game more often.

At this point I realized maybe if I turn off my flashlight the monsters wont find me as easliy, and yeah, it really does. If you have your flashlight on, its like the monsters instantly find you, then turn from this black shadow, into this bright orange and chase after you - But if you just never turn your flashlight on, they barely find you unless youre pressed right up against them. So for the rest of the game I never turned my flashlight back on, its a super bright snowy mountain anyway so the flashlight is just pointless and gets you killed.

From here I realied on the top left of the map screen is a list of coordinates, and these are the main objectives. So I started on the first coordinate and tried to work my way down.

This is the real bulk of the game, the map system tries to be very realistic, to where you cant even tell where you are with any sort of indicator, except for the markings you get on your map when finding various things, or coming across coordinates scribbled on rocks that tell you where you are. At first I didnt know what these coordinates meant, I thought it was trying to tell me secrets or something, Thats because even the compass in the game is obscure in the fact that its not even in english, the North and South is in Russian, so for like the first half of the game I mistakenly had North and South mixed up and was going all the wrong ways.. Surprisingly it didn't really screw me up that much, as I was steadily making progress accidentally stumbling upon some of these main page objectives, but still it was shocking that I had it wrong for so long.

So everytime you get a page, or campsite, or find major points of interest, your map does update and you can use these icons to try to figure out where you are. From there you have to try to plan out a mental image of which direction to move towards to try to make it to the next major coordinate. This in its self is a pretty fun and engrossing task, making you really feel like youre stuck in this mountain trying to find your way around, using a map and compass old fashioned like you may have to in real life. Few other games are this realistic and brutal and without direction, its an interesting change of pace. Because the game is also sort of 'open world' in that there isn't a linear progression at all, you start at a campsite in the middle, and from there you can go to the list of objectives in any order you want, and its a big sprawling huge mountain wasteland you have to discover and explore without handholding.

That's about the bulk of the game, constantly opening the map and compass, trying to find the next main objective, there are notes that you can find that arent a part of the main ones, these serve for additional flavour text but more importantly also give you saves, so I was extra careful to try to find these.

It's a short game, about 4-5 hours, and you don't come across threats or monsters all too often, you go through a few caves here and there which are pretty spooky, and one major complaint is when you do come across a monster, its like they spawn directly right in your fucking face barely giving you any time to react before you die, so its really imperitive you try to find as many saves as possible because its super frustrating randomly dying and then losing 30 mins of wandering around like a jackass.

But yeah I think another major complaint I have is that it never really actually felt like I was discovering or playing the actual Dylatov Pass incident. You never find any of the bodies of the original people from the real story, and it seems the logs and plot you do discover is more about some secret government operation or something like that, it wasn't all that fascinating and probably the weakest part of the story. At times your main character mumbles some shit to himself but its kinda just cryptic bullshit. I can imagine a much better and intense way the story could have been done, like for example if you were playing as one of the people from the original expedition, in the beginning youre with your friends, then some crazy shit happens and your friends start disappearing or you break off from the group, then you start finding their bodies and you know, just more things about the actual original story. I didn't feel like much of this games plot had anything to do with the details of the actual Dylatov pass story, which is so bizarre because the game is supposed to be based on it. Maybe it would be too disrepsectful to the family of the decased or something thats why they didnt do it, I dont know, but it would have been way better. You never really discover anything shocking or alarming, you kinda just wander around and find pages, then at one point go into a military bunker for a few minutes just to find another page, then after you find all the pages you kinda just walk back to the beginning and the game ends..its super anticlimactic and almost has nothing to do with the actual story that its based on, I feel its a total missed opportunity. The game is still worth playing, and decent, for the way it captures perhaps some of how it may have felt to be one of those people lost on that mountain, with the total lack of direction, even in the beginning of the game it sets you up to expect zero direction, relying on your compass and map to try to make sense of the harsh land around you, but the game could have definitely been better, maybe less emphesis overall on finding pages like its a Slender clone or something, and also the story and plot could have been more directly similar to the actual real story, also the save system sucks.

6/10