When browsing upcoming games a few weeks ago, Kholat caught my attention because, frankly, it reminded me a little bit of the STALKER games which I admire so much. I had also never heard of the Dyatlov Pass Incident, which if you check Wikipedia (not directly linked here due to some gruesome imagery), is one of those fascinating, yet certainly tragic, unexplained events. In brief, a group of nine capable students set out to explore the Ural Mountains, but they never came back. Rescuers eventually found their bodies, but multiple pieces of evidence suggested something very strange, possibly supernatural, occurred here. The specific location of the incident is said to have been on the eastern side of the Kholat Syakhl, hence the name of this game.
So in Khotlat, your character (who remains without a face, name, or voice) sets out to discover what happened. You begin at a small, apparently abandoned train yard with the wind howling and the snow covered trees shaking about as yet more snow continues to fall. You have no map, objectives, or any tutorial messages, it’s up to you to explore. Shortly, you’ll find the correct path and it’s then that the real adventure begins. You come across a tent and discover a flashlight, compass, and a map of the area. The map is marked with nine coordinates, nothing more. You can walk, crouch, sprint for a short period, zoom in, toggle your flashlight, look at your compass and map, and pickup various articles and diary entries as you discover them. That’s all there is to the game, which might sound mundane or uninteresting, but the atmosphere and compelling nature of Kholat take it the “rest of the way,” as I’ll describe.
Reaching all nine locations will take you all over this massive area. The only fast travel you can do is by finding camp sites, i.e. a single tent with a fire. Once found, these locations are marked on your map and you can instantly fast travel between camp sites which really helps, and I’m glad the devs included this. Camp sites are also save points, as are the various notes and other text or narrated messages you will find. These messages are left by some of the students or an explorer who was here before you, or are documents and newspaper articles that I will avoid spoiling here. When found, these locations are marked on your map too, which is really helpful in keeping your bearings straight. I actually did not find the compass very useful (perhaps I was using it wrong), but I did get lost or turned around in Kholat on many occasions. Only once or twice was I so turned around that I burned ten or fifteen minutes trying to get ‘unstuck,’ and sure, at times I wondered if there might have been a better way to design this gameplay element. But then I also reasoned that, getting lost or not always being certain of where you are at (like you are in most every other game) was probably intentional — in the real Dyatlov Pass Incident, the students also got lost and off course due to the persistent high winds, snow, and darkness. So for the player to experience similar stints of being disoriented I think is appropriate.
These bouts of being lost and disoriented are actually a benefit to the game then, and do a great deal to bolster the sense of fear and doubt, and dread for that matter, that is pervasive. I only encountered a literal handful (three to five) ‘jump scares,’ but it was the rare moment that I ever felt comfortable or safe while exploring the snow-covered terrain. Some respite comes in entering caves or dilapidated buildings, but these moments of relative peace are brief and, well, have their own comfort issues, too. Expect to encounter ‘them,’ these shadowy beings whose footprints you often see forming close by before you even see them — it’s unsettling because you have no defense other than to dash away if you’re detected. My first few deaths in the game were at the hands of their attacks and I questioned if the inclusion of these unstoppable (yet avoidable, to be sure) enemies was a good idea or not. Honestly, nearly five hours later after completing Kholat, I’m still not sure if they were a good inclusion to the gameplay design or not, I will say I do not think they were necessary as far as the game would have still been just as compelling without them.
Dying in Kholat is a pretty rare occurrence thankfully, and really only comes from these creatures’ hands, a long fall, maybe a falling rock, and little else. There is no health meter or need to sleep or eat (actually there is no HUD at all), those extraneous elements are not a factor here. This again in some ways might make the game too simplistic for some, but I did not mind at all. I was glued to my screen while navigating this barren land with very few exceptions, and it was refreshing not to have to manage a bunch of typical gameplay elements. I’ll add that I really liked that the area was completely open to me to explore as I chose to — there is no order that you must follow, just the straight-forward objective of visiting each of these nine marked points on the map and discover what awaits you there. Reduced gameplay mechanics, a singular and easy to follow goal given right at the start, and a compelling atmosphere make Kholat a perfect single-session Saturday thrill.
And whether it be by design or budget and time constraints or what have you, I applaud IMGN.PRO for keeping Kholat “reigned in” so to speak. By this I mean that they could have easily made this game artificially longer by including more dangers or just a larger area to explore or whatever else. Instead, you get a concise, very focused design that will give you a memorable and thoroughly engaging time for anywhere between four and six hours. Ultimately, I was left thinking about the story and I’m not sure I fully understood it, although I found every diary and article entry I could find. A New Game+ mode in which the map is marked with the rest of the items you did not find on your original playthrough would be a nice feature for a future patch if IMGN.PRO would be so inclined.
Speaking of patches, I believe only a single 190MB patch has been released so far, no word on what it changed or added. I did experience one CTD (Crash To Desktop) upon first launching the game after adjusting graphical settings, but just re-launching the game seemed to fix that right up. During play, I had maybe two or three one-second graphical hiccups either in framerate or textures clipping through, but that’s it, definitely nothing to be concerned about. Kholat was built on Unreal4 by the way, it looks great. I ran it on 4790K with 16GB and a GTX970 at full detail and 2560×1080 resolution, and had no issues other than the ones I just mentioned. Also of note — there are no invisible walls. When you encounter a path and cannot proceed, it makes sense, visually, as to why you cannot. In other words, you won’t find just an invisible wall that stops you, there will be a stack of rocks or a fallen tree or a canyon or something like that keeps you from continuing in that specific direction.
As great as the graphics are, the sound design is also excellent and very important to the experience. Headphones really help you pick up on those more subtle sounds, such as the sound of papers moving about in the wind, which if you follow these sounds, you will discover a new collectible that gives more info about the story. Other sounds include changing wind, the crunching of snow underfoot, trees creaking under the weight of the snow, water dripping into a pool in a cave, wolves howling, and so on. This specific genre has to rely heavily on sound design and I think IMGN.PRO did a great job with it. Sometimes the vocalized music is a bit overbearing (but it’s exceedingly rare anyhow), and it seems like there is a spot near the nexus of the game where you can hear rushing water in one area and then a few steps later it instantly goes silent (instead of fading out, Doppler effect style), but these, like those few graphical hiccups I encountered, are rare and minute compared to the quality experienced otherwise.
And with that, let’s head into the summary…