Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
There’s something about the sprawling isometric RPG that caught on particularly hard in the former Soviet Union, back in the ’90s and early 2000s. Perhaps it’s an indescribable affinity of the narodnaya dusha—that the Forgotten Realms and Middle-earth speak to something ancestral in the popular spirit: recalling byliny and all the spooky monsters that haunt the white pines, just out of view.
Regardless, although I have known that the world east of the Elbe is way into its CRPGs for a long time, I’ve mostly associated the region’s dev scene with, well, GSC Game World and CD Projekt—strange, janky and ambitious games, but not mechanically crunchy isometric CRPGs. That is until a Bluesky post from Felipe Pepe—who wrote (well, edited) the book on CRPGs—came across my feed, all wistful about a series called Zlatogorye, or GoldenLand. I was immediately determined to play it.
Stairway to Heathen
And I did. Actually, it was quite easy. GoldenLand 1, released in 2001, isn’t available on any storefront I have access to, but it’s not hard to find, and installing it is a matter of mounting a .cue file and hitting go. One confusing thing: the game seems convinced its English name is Heath: The Unchosen Path. I guess it is, technically, the game’s official English-language name, but everyone online just seems to call it GoldenLand, a semi-translation of its Russian-language name, Zlatogorye (Golden Mountain).
You are a hero(ine). Or you would be. Quite the misfortune: someone went and killed you while a roving band of vygaks—those would be the bad guys—laid waste to your village. But chin up, because you’ve been revived in order to serve the ends of the Good God Belobog in his struggles against Drah-Shu, who’s the evil god who very much oversaw the vygak situation that razed your village to the ground and who, even now, presides over an army invading from the east.
And here are your Russian oral epics already. This isn’t the knock-off, Tolkien-esque fantasy we’re all very familiar with. This is pure Old Rus: heroes standing against a pseudo-Mongol invasion as it threatens to overrun and subjugate them. Your avatar may as well be called Alexander Nevsky. Even the approach to gods is more Gorki than Gygax: no pantheon here, just Belobog—”The creator of everything that lives in the world,” the tutorial NPC tells you, “we honour him as Father”—and Drah-Shu. All very Orthodox.
It’s a mode of fantasy we don’t see all that often, which is a shame because it’s absolutely crammed to the gills with magic and mystery. Heck, your first task in GoldenLand is finding a guy called Gromoboy, a bogatyr: a kind of stock character of Russian legend—a roving heroic knight of the Lancelot mould.
And what strikes you playing GoldenLand is how neatly these tropes dovetail with all those western CRPG influences that made their mark on the devs who’d go on to create games like this. Character creation in GoldenLand is Baldur’s Gate on a budget. Pick a class (Fighter, Mage, Thief Ranger) or make one of your own, select a gender, and off you go into a game that feels for all the world like a combo of BG, Fallout, and Arcanum (though the latter wasn’t an influence, given it came out the same year).
Combat is a dance of managing action points, both your own and those of your enemies, trying to compute the perfect series of actions that lets you get some hits in while moving far enough away from your foes that they waste all their points shambling towards you. You know, Fallout.
Overcome enough foes, finish enough quests—seemingly every inhabitant of the game’s villages has at least one—and you’ll level up and get to select new, Fallout-style perks to mix up your play.
It’s a satisfying loop. Of course it is. It was satisfying in Fallout 1 and 2, as well. But it’s interesting to experience it in a game which feels like it was made with a tenth of the resources. Everything’s a little, well, janky. Animations have a staccato quality to them, combat can be unfair, even the fonts somehow feel a little off-brand—a set of plain black serif’s where Baldur’s Gate at least reached for a curlicue or two.
And yet, I kind of love it? Sure, I love it at least in part because it’s dripping with all the elements of Russian history to which I dedicated a not-insignificant part of my life studying, but I love it also because it all works. It works in part because, sure, the devs make up for a lack of budget with an abundance of love for the CRPG as a form (and this was Russian game development in the late ’90s/early ’00s, so likely a decent amount of crunch too), but also because its elements fit together so perfectly.
These mechanics and these narrative elements mesh so neatly that I’d kill for more like it, though perhaps with a higher budget and an English translation that did not refer, during character creation, to an “Unchancy deskside”. I want more CRPGs from more sickos from more places. Let a hundred GoldenLands bloom.
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