Samozbor: Rebellion (Steam, 2018)
Between Nikita Kryukov's work and this, I think I'm on the road towards some kinda accidental Russian indie VN fixation. That said, this one's certainly a lot more uh, eclectic than either of the Milk Bags.
Okay let's just get this out of the way now, this game's a bit of a mess.
The initial setup revolves around a tea party set up by the lead developer of the VN itself alongside the self-inserts of the rest of the dev team (or so I'm assuming? the credits are all in Russian so idk) that eventually devolves into all of them inserting themselves into the VN, or at least some of them. A couple of them just do not appear again after it gets to the VN in the VN, speaking of which, let's get to that!
This internal VN centers around a presumably schizophrenic middle-aged Siberian revolutionary(???) that managed to kidnap the president of the Russian federation(????) and now holds him ransom somewhere™ while hosting an anime arc ass tournament with what are mostly figments of his imagination revolving around what I honest to god assumed was just a big euphemism for masturbation. But there's quite a bit to suggest it might not be? But it still gets uncomfortably close to feeling like it??
That's all well and good, but do they have pronouns?
It's hard to tell how much of this was even meant to be examined this way, any kind of way, really. It's just so insular and contained in its own in-jokes and references to what I'm presuming is the Russian indie scene? It makes for a really murky, uncomfortable vibe regardless cuz outside of basically everyone shitting on Nikolai, there's not much else going on aside from his imaginary friends dying in gross ways with no clear rhyme or reason.
Now that we're all set on the plot, now's a good time to mention this VN's completely linear, no choices needed, baby, not that I can imagine what kind of choices you could want to make besides quitting while you're ahead.
The UI and presentation is probably the most interesting part of the whole thing, everyone's only got a single portrait that shakes and zooms depending on the gravity of the situation like cardboard cut-outs, it's actually kinda neat.
The text is also accompanied by keyboard clicks The Silver Case style, but instead of being clinical and cold (and a typewriter), all dialogue from the previous chunk gets spilled all over the screen and lingers for a bit. It almost feels thematically intentional given how much of a mess this is to read through, I haven't even mentioned the English translation, it's practically Hong Kong 97-tier.
Good ending. This feels like it came from some alternate reality where ZUN was Russian and got really into Fight Club. And frequenting 4chan. I bring him up specifically because the dev has multiple games that seem to revolve or spin off of each other extended-universe style, 2 characters even appear in this one specifically just to bail and go off to do their own thing. They span different genres too, all presumably running off the Godot engine considering how obsessed this game is with it.
Regardless, this was certainly another odd one. I'll really need to get to something at least a little more traditional next time, yeesh.
Steam