Disco Elysium-inspired RPG Hollow Home is a memory of Mariupol from before Russia's invasion

“We want to tell the story of the people, and how the city has changed.”

TheDisco Elysium-inspiredRPGHollow Homeis a memory of Mariupol from just before the war - not a 1:1 recreation, but a collection of details, colours, personalities and some familiar buildings, painstakingly amassed and offered up in the face of erasure. Speaking to me during a very brief demo at Digital Dragons in Poland this year, artist Anastasia Hlyniana called my attention to the plants jutting from old car tyres around the game’s isometric map, which she says are a common sight in Mariupol.

Hollow Home’s pen-and-paper-style role-playing and splashy, graphic novel colours are immediately reminiscent of ZA/UM’s game, but the English writing is relatively straight-laced and reverential, as you might expect given that the devastation of Mariupol is both a lived reality and still unfolding. “It’s our perspective on what happened, and also we want to tell the story of the people, and how the city has changed,” Hlyniana summarised.

Maksym gets a limited supply of action points each day, which you’ll use to perform skills such as cooking and first aid, based on character traits such as Sociability and Handiness. During the opening, pre-war section of the game, however, these points are reserved for more innocent activities: clambering onto a roof to fix a satellite dish, telling fibs about why you’re ditching school, beating your friend’s high score at the arcade, and trying to chase away a bullying older boy. In the course of these teenage antics, you’ll meet and map out a community of shopkeepers, car mechanics, nosy neighbours and local layabouts, all speculating about reports of troops massing on the border.

“Some places will be destroyed, some new places will arrive, like shelters, volunteer centres,” Hlyniana explained. “Some people will die, some new people will come, and the game has several endings. We aim to have about 24 hours of gameplay, and it will contain about three districts of the city, so it will be one big, typical Ukrainian city.”