Summoning Ghosts of Post-Soviet Spaces: A Comparative Study of the Horror Games Someday You’ll Return and the Medium

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the tension between the universal themes of the horror genre that are appealing for the global public and the local character of the digital games developed by smaller companies/studios from the semi-peripheral countries of Central and Eastern Europe. To examine in-game representation of game spaces as well as the authorial intention and production processes behind their inclusion, we combine close readings of the two titles with interviews with their designers of two digital games: Someday You’ll Return and The Medium. Both games target an international audience but heavily feature real-life domestic locations and landmarks. The digitally represented physical space is also a vehicle for the narration, which is centred around memories of personal trauma of the in-game characters. While using the concepts of hauntology, postmemory, and folk horror, we try to understand the process of creating stories that appeal to an international audience but is heavily rooted in very specific local folklore (Someday You’ll Return) or painful national history (The Medium). This phenomenon can lead to both popularisation of new aesthetics in global market, as well as to perpetuating stereotypical narratives about national cultures and histories.

Keywords:

• Hauntology
• postmemory
• folk horror
• video games
• post-Soviet
• horror
• game industry

Marianne stands in front of the ruins of the Niwa Workers’ Resort, a decrepit hotel complex just outside of Kraków. It had been built in the 1970s in the style of monumental Socialist modernism but has laid abandoned since an unexplained massacre there left several people dead. Her mission: to uncover the history of this place, and of her own family. Daniel finds himself in a forest clearing, close to the Kazatelna sandstone rock in the hills of the south-eastern Czech Republic. He follows the trail markers leading to a summer camp he used to attend as a kid, looking for his daughter – but he will soon discover that the forest hides dark secrets, some of which concern his own repressed memories.

These two scenes appear in two video games that were released just eight months apart: The Medium (2021), developed by the Polish studio Bloober Team, and Someday You’ll Return (hereinafter SYR, 2020), developed in the Czech Republic by CBE Software. Unlike many other games produced in Central and Eastern Europe and despite being aimed at a global audience, these titles take place in the countries where they were made. Moreover, as games focused on horror and mystery, both represent the landscape and architecture of the region as sites of trauma and memory.

In this article, we will use these examples to explore two main topics. First, we address the tension between global and local themes and locations in horror games produced outside the main centres of the game industry. Second, as a specific case of this thematic locality, we analyse how Eastern European horror games work with the themes of personal and collective memories and how they represent them to international audiences.

Our discussion of the production context is inspired by the rapidly developing subfield of game production studies that focuses on production routines and labor relations in the game industry, as well as its political economy (Sotamaa and Švelch 2021). It also follows the existing (albeit scant) work on the Eastern European game industries (Ozimek 2018; 2019; Švelch 2018; Garda 2020; Garda and Grabarczyk 2021).

For the analysis itself, our primary theoretical approach is that of hauntology. The concept of hauntology was first introduced by Derrida (1994) to show how the philosophy of Karl Marx is still present in contemporary politics. It can also be used to understand how some phenomena or ideas seem to belong to the past and are supposedly long gone but are, in fact, still present in social, cultural, and political discourses. Like spectres, they still actively influence the current state of affairs, and also taint the future. From the perspective of hauntology, time is not linear; it is deconstructed and any presence of a strong concept that would stabilize it is impossible (Marzec 2015, 208–217). The identity of the spectres is also unstable, as Derrida writes: they are ‘neither soul nor body, and both one and the other’ (Derrida 1994, 5). This makes them more efficient in manipulating the present and staying out of sight. Despite their differences, both games focus on traumatic events in the past, be they collective or personal, and provide an outlet for representing and tackling those traumas. As both approach memories from a different angle, we complement hauntology with two other concepts that correspond with the Derridian formulation of hauntology: postmemory and folk horror, which are explained below.

The core of this article consists of a comparative study of the two titles. We performed close readings of both games and conducted real-time online video interviews with their designers, which were then transcribed and analysed. In the case of SYR, we spoke to one of the game’s primary creators, Jan Kavan, who was responsible for design, writing, programming, and music. In the case of The Medium, which was produced by a much larger team, we interviewed Dominika Stala, the lead level designer for the game.

Horror Games on the Periphery

The regions of Central and Eastern Europe have spent a long time on the periphery of the global game industry, beholden to Western and Japanese influences (Švelch 2021b; Garda and Grabarczyk 2021). Until the 1990s, Polish and Czechoslovak game programmers worked in amateur or semi-amateur environments and created games aimed at local or national audiences (Švelch 2021a).¹ In the 2000s, regional game development companies started to orient themselves toward international audiences. As a result, they had to tailor their output to the tastes and preferences of the largest and most trend-setting markets – traditionally the Northern American and Western European ones. Many Czech and Polish titles (for example the Polish zombie series Dying Light) are produced primarily in the English language and bear no outward signs of being produced in Eastern Europe. As Vanderhoef has argued in the case of Polish independent (indie) games, many peripheral studios choose to ‘occlude national signifiers in their games in order to (re)produce transnational entertainment products that appeal to global markets’ (2021, 161). There are notable exceptions. Games like Amanita Design’s Samorost series draw from local and regional visual arts traditions, while CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher series adapts the lore and characters created by the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski; The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (CD Projekt RED 2015) even draws from Eastern European geography and folklore to a greater extent than the source material (see Majkowski 2018). Other titles feature landscape modelled after various parts of the region. The Czech role-playing game Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Warhorse Studios 2018), for example, takes place in a small part of medieval Czech lands.

The motivations behind inclusion of domestic locations can vary. First, it is a matter of convenience. Using a domestic location reduces the cost and effort of doing art reference research in foreign countries. Moreover, today’s 3D scanning and photogrammetry tools make it more efficient to use an accessible real-life location than creating a fictional one from scratch (see Statham 2020). Second, it may help differentiate the product from its competitors. While national game productions are usually not as distinct as ‘small nation cinema’ productions (Hjort and Petrie 2007), setting a horror game in post-Communist Poland might, for example, endow the game with novelty value and additional publicity. Third, domestic locations can give local writers and designers a chance to create more personal stories. This can be especially valuable in the independent ‘indie’ game sector, where – similar to some areas of independent film – distinctive aesthetics and personal themes are likely to be promoted and appreciated (Garda and Grabarczyk 2016; Juul 2019; Vanderhoef 2021).

In horror games specifically, the choice of a setting depends to a large extent on genre conventions, many of which are inherited from horror fiction and film. As Krzywinska notes, ‘numerous games make use of Gothic locations, typically haunted houses, spooky woods, crypts and graveyards, derelict buildings, attics and cellars’ (Krzywinska 2015, 59–60). Perron gives a list of typical horror game spaces, including amusement parks, asylums, malls, metros, and prisons. What all of these have in common is that they tend to be abandoned; they bear witness to ruin and trauma. In Perron’s view, horror game space is therefore ‘genuinely dislocated’ (Perron 2018, 323).

Even so, it makes sense to ask where they are located geographically. Due to the popularity of English-language genre literature and cinema, horror video games are often set in the United States, no matter where the game was produced. Two of the most influential horror game series, Resident Evil and Silent Hill, originate in Japan but take place in fictional American cities and towns; the developers of the latter openly admitted that ‘the original Silent Hill was our attempt at making classic American horror through a Japanese filter’ (Perron 2011, 35). The canon of haunted video game spaces therefore results from a mixture of Japanese and Anglo-Saxon sensibilities – with a French touch, should we include the two series’ spiritual predecessor Alone in the Dark (Infogrames 1992).

Earlier horror games produced in post-Soviet countries also tended to be set in North America. Bloober Team’s Layers of Fear series (2016 and 2019) took place in the 1920s United States. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a 2014 mystery/horror game developed by the Polish studio The Astronauts, was set in Wisconsin, although the landscape was a recreation of ‘entire acres of land’ from the Polish Karkonosze mountains.² The use of post-Soviet settings in horror games was pioneered by the first-person survival title S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of the Chernobyl (GSC Game World 2007), developed in Ukraine and set in a fictionalized version of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Following the success of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., some of its developers went on to produce Metro 2033 (4A Entertainment 2010) and its sequels, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic Moscow. Like both of these examples, the games discussed in this chapter – The Medium and Someday You’ll Return (SYR) – are both contemporary examples of local horror.

Local Games for Global Audiences

SYR is a first-person thriller/horror game based on exploration, puzzle-solving, and crafting. Although its graphics are comparable to mid-budget (or ‘AA’) games, it was produced by the small studio CBE Software on a small budget, with most development tasks handled by a team of two people. It was released for the PC only. The Medium is a psychological horror game in the action-adventure genre, combining exploration and stealth gameplay with puzzle-solving. Many of the puzzles take advantage of the mirror world mechanic, in which the player affects the state of the real world by manipulating objects in the supernatural netherworld (and vice versa). It was developed by the mid-sized studio Bloober Team and was promoted as one of the launch next-gen titles for the Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles, while being simultaneously released on the PC. The development of both games was co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme.

Both games were aimed at international markets and audiences. Kavan (2021) admits that the Czech market is ‘completely negligible for us from the business perspective’. Stala (2021) concurs that despite the importance of Polish fans, their aim was to create a more universal experience. Contemporary game studios put considerable effort into ensuring that their products are adjusted to a variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. This process is sometimes referred to using the acronym GILT, meaning globalization, internationalization, localization, and translation (O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013). The process determined some of the decisions about in-game language. In both cases, the script was written originally in English. Neither game has been dubbed into their developers’ native languages due to budget constraints – they were only subtitled. Both games were designed to provide a comfortable user experience for the international audience. In both SYR and The Medium, the information that is important for the narrative and world-building – including in-game documents like postcards or letters – is written in English. Place names and some less important signs – called ‘decorative’ by Kavan (2021) – are left in Czech or Polish to add local colour. The names of the main characters – like Marianne, Thomas, Daniel, or Stela – can be easily remembered and distinguished by English-speaking players.

In line with this aim for global appeal, both games employ internationally recognized themes and tropes of the horror genre. This universality helps both foreign and local players comprehend the narrative and frame their core game experience. Both titles contain common horror character types such as ghost girls and monsters (in both games), a wise old lady (in SYR) or a killer nurse (in The Medium). The stories of both games are built around trauma, guilt, and coming to terms with the past, similar to the Silent Hill series, which was cited as a direct inspiration for both titles. SYR tells an intimate story of a family and the traumas of its members. As the core of the narrative is not culturally specific, Kavan speaks of a universal story ‘with folkloric colouring’. Although the game is officially promoted as a horror game, Kavan does not consider SYR a horror game in the classic sense (2021). His inspirations include the films of David Lynch and the works of Carl Gustav Jung, both of whom explore the world of dreams, memories, and the unconscious (Akser 2012, Sinnerbrink 2005). In the case of The Medium, Stala (2021) confirmed that Bloober Team wanted to create a game that uses the background of Polish history but is also universal enough that international players can understand it and empathize with the main character Marianne. The representation of the netherworld in The Medium was based on the paintings of Polish artist Zdzisław Beksiński, especially ones from the ‘Fantastic Period’ (mid 1960s till late 1980s). These are full of grotesque figures that inhabit a disturbed, decaying world whose architectural structures seem to be constructed out of debris and organic matter. The light plays prominent role here as it builds textures that provide contrast to an overwhelmingly dismal environment. This atmosphere reportedly boosted the imagination of the design team, who appreciated Beksiński’s visions for its horror qualities, because, as Stala pointed out in an interview, it corresponds with their collective imagination of the game’s netherworld (2021).

In both cases, the choice of a local setting was based on a combination of artistic and practical reasons. Bloober Team is based in Kraków – the same city in and around which The Medium takes place; the main duo behind SYR opted for places they knew from childhood. The developers believed that setting a story locally would allow them to create experiences and narratives that are more authentic and believable (Stala 2021). Kavan (2021) notes that working with familiar places meant that they knew the genius loci and the ‘smell of the air’ and could recreate their atmosphere. According to the designers, international audiences are receptive of the local aesthetics. Kavan (2021) mentioned foreign players whom the game inspired to visit the Czech Republic. Stala (2021) noted that the references to Polish culture make the game unique and exotic, similar to how Japanese games are attractive to European players. Keeping with Perron’s description of horror game spaces as ‘dislocated’, underused peripheral locations may evoke the experience of strangeness and foreignness expected in horror titles. This can be said about SYR and Medium, but also the recent folk horror game Mundaun (Hidden Fields 2021), which takes place in the Swiss Alps and is dubbed completely in the local Romansh language to enhance the sense of dislocation.

The types of environments in these local settings, however, also conform to genre conventions. The Medium’s Niwa can be considered an Eastern European mirror image of the Overlook Hotel from Stephen King’s (or Stanley Kubrick’s) The Shining (King 1977; Kubrick 1980), which was a direct inspiration for Bloober Team. In SYR, portions of gameplay unfold inside an abandoned military bunker, providing a gameplay experience not unlike other horror games that take place in dark corridors (such as the Amnesia series). Both of them can be interpreted as an example of the Terrible Place, which Clover (1992) uses to describe a place that is not scary on their own (like a hotel or a home), but becomes dangerous and filled with horror because of the horrible actions they have witnessed (31–32). The Medium and SYR feature also the theme of two alternative realities – the real world and a netherworld. In both games the idea of the netherworld is understood as a liminal, in-between space that is a deranged reflection of the human world. The difference is that The Medium allows the player to switch between two realities thanks to Marianne’s special abilities, while in SYR, Daniel enters the netherworld when he is injured or loses consciousness.

Landscape and Material Culture

In the design of the games’ simulated worlds, the local elements of the two games manifest in the forms of landscape, architecture, and material culture. SYR takes place in the Czech woods and features existing places (parts of Chřiby hills and the Bohemian Switzerland national park) and buildings (castles, churches, a summer camp, and a bunker), although they are assembled into a fictitious geographical area. The game ostensibly takes place in the present day (the main character, for example, uses a mobile phone), but all the buildings in the game are from before 1989 and there is little trace of post-1989 development. To a foreign player, perhaps the most peculiar local features are the uniquely Czech hiking trail markers, maintained by the Czech Tourist Club and omnipresent in the local landscape. These are sometimes accompanied by information boards about selected landmarks, which contain functional QR codes connected to real tourist maps. Besides their iconographic function, the trail markers also provide the main diegetic way of navigating the space. Kavan has nevertheless admitted that some international players fail to understand the signs and get lost (2021).

The world of The Medium is soaked with references to Polish material culture. The game starts inside a typical Krakowian apartment, which is – despite the year being 1999 – still furnished with objects dating to the pre-transformation times. Most people in Eastern Europe who grew up before the late 1990s would immediately recognise elements of the decor, like a classic wall unit present in most apartments at that time. Memories of parents’ or grandparents’ homes are also evoked by details like paintings of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, medals, old postcards, etc. According to the interview, the team constructed an assemblage of clichés from their childhood memories (Stala 2021). Most of the action unfolds inside the abandoned resort of Niwa, modelled after the existing Hotel Cracovia, a well-known landmark in the centre of Kraków. Despite moving the hotel into fictitious, more natural surroundings, the building’s exterior and interior were both reconstructed based on the actual hotel.³ Stala (2021) noted that recreating the architecture of the Cracovia produced narrow, cramped, and cluttered spaces. Combined with the fixed camera, this is designed to create in the player an uneasy feeling of being in space they cannot fully comprehend (Perron 2018, 256–265). As was stated in the interview (Stala 2021), this was a conscious design choice that, on the one hand, supposed to convey a ‘sentimental feeling’ for the Polish player by presenting familiar experiences of cramped space as opposed to the more spacious environment typical of U.S. architecture. Nevertheless, the resulting experience is very similar to the Japanese games from the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, which ostensibly take place in North America, but employ Japanese architectural proportions and similarly obstruct the player’s field of vision (Dimopoulos and Kallikaki 2020). The abandoned hotel provides an opportunity to experience the memory of a former architectural landmark that was supposed to represent the prosperity and progress of the Polish People’s Republic in the 1970s. Digital exploration of such modern ruins, as Fraser (2016) suggests, is also connected to disillusionment of the very idea of continuous progress.

Many in-game objects also serve as mementoes of local material culture. The Medium features, among other things, collectible postcards with typical 1970s/1980s Eastern European graphic design; in SYR, for example, the protagonist carries a vintage ‘My Day’ flashlight issued to the Czechoslovak military. The crafting mechanics in the latter game, according to Kavan (2021), refer to the Czech tradition of DIY tinkering encouraged by the scarcity of goods in the Communist era.

The Medium: Postmemory of Collective Trauma

Despite both teams’ aim of tackling universal topics, local settings are more than just window dressing. They are important because memory – and especially repressed memory – plays a crucial role in both games. In The Medium, memory is one of the central themes. The imprint of the tragic as well as happy memories is carried inside the in-game objects. Using a dedicated mechanic, the player can listen to an echo of past events and learn what really happened at the Niwa Resort. The memories are not just voices from the past, but sometimes also spectral reflections of actual events. Emotionally heavy moments have stayed in the present, influencing and haunting the rooms of Niwa. However, they are only visible when the player explores the netherworld. The netherworld, or the world on the other side of the looking glass, seems to be an emotional image of the explorable spaces. Those personal memories are mostly related to the political history of Poland. The inner motivation of major characters in the game, including all their wrongdoings, originated in their childhoods, triggered by historical events that made the characters suffer throughout their lives.

To better understand this phenomenon, we can use the concept of postmemory, first introduced by Marianne Hirsch. Through the lenses of autobiographical studies, she analysed the cultural texts that were created by the so called ‘second generation’ of Holocaust survivors. As Hirsch stated herself: ‘Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up’ (Hirsch 2008, 106). The second generation did not experience traumatic events themselves, but still lived in their shadow. The trauma still influences their lives and can ‘displace, even evacuate’ their own personal stories. Their (post)memory is being shaped not by the actual remembrance of the events, but rather by the cultural artefacts that preserved knowledge of the past, for example, diaries, photos, official documents. (Hirsch 2008, 107). Postmemory, as she points out, is not restricted to the subject of the Holocaust (Hirsch 2008, 108). It is a phenomenon that is intergenerational and transdisciplinary. The concept therefore helps us understand how the big, collective traumatic events are being translated over to the next generations, through personal narratives as well as fictional stories.

The lens of postmemory can be applied to various aspects of The Medium because the game presents an entanglement of different discourses and narrations. The main protagonist, Marianne, receives a mysterious phone call and starts a journey to uncover the truth about herself, her tragic past, and the supernatural powers that let her see the realm of spectres. Marianne’s motivations and issues are rather private, and her practical existence seems unaffected by political or economic reality (we assume she is Polish, but we do not know anything about her occupation or her life in the transformation era), making her an ideal narrative vehicle for global players. However, her story turns out to be inextricably connected to other characters: her father Thomas Rekowicz, the painter and his father’s mentor Richard Tarkowski, the secret police officer Henry Wilk, and her sister Lilianne. Their personal traumas are rooted deeply in the political history of Poland during World War II and the Communist era, including traumatic events like the Holocaust, the Nazi occupation of Poland, the Warsaw Uprising and the repressions of the Stalinist era.

Rather than a realistic representation of the traumatic event, however, the realm of spectral memories functions as an embodiment of the memory that is translated through the fantastic, yet macabre images. The narration here is not linear but consists of fragments of old conversations and is visualised through oneiric spaces, like an abandoned manor, a garden labyrinth, a slaughterhouse, and an interrogation room. Through Thomas’s eyes, Marianne relives the memories of historical, traumatic events that she did not herself experience, but which nevertheless defined her entire life. The only major character whose memory space we cannot explore is Lilianne. Also a medium from the Rekowicz family, she was a victim of sexual abuse as a little girl, perpetrated by Thomas’s friend – Richard, who saw in her his childhood friend Rose (a Jewish girl killed by Nazi soldiers). After the rape, Lilianne released the demonic creature Maw, who was responsible for the Niwa massacre. Although Lilianne’s story is one of personal tragedy, it was also affected by the historical events that she did not live through. After the massacre, she was locked down in a Nazi, later Soviet bunker, by her father for both her and the whole world’s protection, unable to leave and live outside the experience of other people’s trauma.

If the story in The Medium is not a recording of the actual memories of a given family, is it possible to talk about postmemory? If so, whose postmemory is it? In the interview, Stala mentioned that Poland has a rich history, but one permeated with trauma. Bloober Team wanted to tell a universal story about the evil side of human nature, with the traumatic events from 20th century Polish history as a background (Stala 2021). These events are still being discussed and remembered in Poland and also haunt in-game characters, especially male ones, as their private lives are always entangled with external events. The story of being both a victim and an oppressor is rooted in historical trauma. The postmemory here, even if it is not in the form of a personal story, clearly follows the dominant narrative of Polish history and the cliches collectively remembered in Polish society via numerous cultural artefacts, like movies, books, TV dramas, or other performative acts. In The Medium, this is most apparent in Richard’s part of the story, which features a heroic father who died protecting the Polish border in the beginning of the war and a treacherous ‘stepfather’ who collaborated with the Nazis and was later executed by the members of, presumably, The Polish Underground State. The grief and anger related to those figures are intertwined in Richard’s mentalscape, which takes the form of a ruined manor house of Polish nobility.

As we noted before, the netherworld, where the trauma is vividly represented, is based on Beksiński’s paintings. Beksiński did not give his works proper titles and left them open to interpretation. Art critics and researchers, however, have often interpreted his art in the context of his life experiences during World War II (Jarosz 2017; Węgrzyn 2017). As the example of The Medium shows, these images evoke associations with the traumatic memories of people who experienced the tragedy of World War II and the subsequent years of Stalinism and the later communist period in Poland. Although the story of The Medium is designed as personal, the creators did not escape the cultural memory that has been haunting them through the stories of the older generations.

This spectral character of The Medium, however, is not just preserved in story and the visual elements of the game. It is also supported by the narrative structures. Despite it being a very linear game with one ending, the construction of the final scenes makes the whole story a little more spectral. There is no clear – or ‘Hollywood-like’, as Stala (2021) called it – ending. The past stays unresolved, and the player does not know who survived and whether the monster is still alive. Then, in voiceover, we hear the same sentence that Marianne said at the beginning of the game. This implicates that despite the gameplay being linear, the timeline of the story is not. It is deconstructed and cyclical. The characters of the story seem to be trapped in a past that is constantly haunting the present. One cannot simply escape history.

Someday You’ll Return: Personal Trauma as Folk Horror

Compared to The Medium, the narrative of SYR is much more intimate and personal. As Daniel returns to the woods connected to his childhood memories to search for his daughter Stela, it becomes clear that his relationship with her was dysfunctional and that he had failed as a father. Unlike in the case of The Medium, the aspect of collective memory influenced by major historical events is missing or is at least very implicit. This tendency to keep memories personal has been confirmed by Kavan himself, who aimed to prevent the interpretation that Daniel was turned into a bad father and a bad person by the Communist regime (2021). Therefore, the protagonist is not a victim of external circumstances. The natural setting evokes the impression of ahistorical timelessness. The buildings – a small church, a pre-WWII military bunker, and a vaguely 1980s summer camp –seem decontextualized from the historical narratives and are used as signposts that give Daniel access to his memories. The woods are almost pristine and significantly aestheticized – nothing is destroyed, there is no garbage (apart from the candy wrappers that function as collectibles), no tourists walk around in them.

This timelessness works not only on the aesthetic level but also has a role in the narrative – one possible reading of the plot suggests that Daniel is wandering in his memories, in an idealized image of the forest. It seems that any traces of temporal, geopolitical grounding has been swallowed up by nature and its power. It is not only human characters within the game that have memory – nature itself has a strong ability to remember. The game presents the landscape as a metaphorical personified character who remembers every action and injustice. As one character says: ‘The forest is ancient and has a long memory. You don’t listen anymore, but it remembers you’.

Just as The Medium establishes structures of postmemory to comment on the enduring presence of repressed memories, SYR deploys the tropes of folk horror. As Scovell (2017) states, folk horror draws links between hauntology, topography, and rurality. Therefore, it could be defined as a sub-genre that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny, or horrific purposes (Scovell 2017, 9). The subgenre builds on conflict between the past and the present, Christian and pagan, tradition and modernity, physical and spiritual, nature and science, countryside and the city. In SYR these classic folk horror opposites are manifested by the conflict of Daniel as a person from a technocratic city struggling with ancient Nature. The totems and statues that can be found in the forest also represent these opposites by combining Christian iconography with witchcraft – metal crosses are adorned with antlers or skulls; holy pictures are overgrown with plants. The peculiar co-existence of Christianity and witchcraft which is part of Czech folklore is also represented by herbalism, which is implemented as a dedicated game mechanic.

The crucial features of both SYR and the folk horror genre are the landscape and isolation. According to Scovell, the landscape works as a punishment, and it is a character itself. The forest specifically is a potent symbol in the human psyche, representing primal, life-giving nature but also harbouring unseen danger (Simmons 2021). Other typical features of folk horror as defined by Scovell appear also in SYR – a skewed belief system and morality, the presence of violent and supernatural elements and methods used to reach a final catharsis, and the primal and raw violence connected with death in the slowest, most ritualistic of ways. SYR offers several endings based on the player’s decisions and almost all of them (from a very personal act of reconciliation to primeval transformation into an evil creature) take the form of a ritual.

Folk horror genre also works with the concept of memories and their verifiability. SYR, on the implicit level, focuses on the role of memories in connection to guilt. The story can be understood as a meta-narrative about the danger of forgetting or destroying memories and offers the materialised process of remembering. After every successful effort to face an interpretation of a repressed memory, Daniel gains the ability to read more blurred pages from Stela’s diary. The need to deal with the past and the present is demonstrated by the (optional) opportunity to use a special totem to destroy or purify piles of slime that embody Daniel’s memories. The players can decide how to deal with this source of Daniel’s memories – they can decide to destroy them and forget or go through the painful process of remembering. It could be argued that the remedy itself lies in the past.

However, time works differently in SYR and does not necessarily proceed in a linear fashion. Because the present is consumed by the past and the future, and the present is redeemed by the past, it is not clear what actually happens in the present. The folk horror genre is often manifested not only by the contrast of urban and rural worlds, but also through linear and cyclic understandings of time. In this sense, folk horror emphasizes a rural return as a movement to a strong cyclicality (Johnston 2019). In SYR, this non-linear understanding of time is supported also by the multiplicity of endings based on several decisions made by the player. It can be argued that all the endings are not just different options mutually excluding the rest; they exist alongside each, all happening at the same time. Therefore, they also work as an argument for a multitude of interpretations, and for the inaccuracy of the linear understanding of time.

This design choice supports Daniel’s confusion about his memories and questions which are real, and which are re-created or suppressed. This blurs the line between the reality and the dream, between the past and the present, and between life and death. After all, Daniel is not even sure if he is alive – the player is performing not only the deconstruction of linearity, but of his own material body and existence. This question of temporality and a permanent presence of the past in the present is the core aspect of the hauntology – it can be understood as a feeling of memory that is blurred but repeatedly re-experienced.

As we stated before, SYR does not tell the story of a collective trauma, but very personal and intimate memories deeply connected with the subjective and the local. In SYR (and folk horror in general) the local is indispensable because it refers to the pagan times when people lived in intimate connection to their close surroundings – it stands in contrast to the unanchored and global experience of the world, which is not connected with a specific place (Paciorek 2021) and which is represented by Daniel and his value system. Therefore, the landscape itself is the materialised embodiment of Daniel’s suppressed and intimate memories, not just a setting of the story but also a formative source of Daniel’s personality and experiences. The fact that it is a Czech landscape might seem incidental, but the local setting is crucial in telling the story as it allows the designers to create memories that are specific enough to be believable and relatable.

Conclusions

We started our discussion of the two games by exploring their production background. The use of local settings in both SYR and The Medium was driven by a mix of artistic vision and practical considerations. To appeal to an international audience, they employ horror genre themes that can be comprehended across the globe. This, however, leaves them with little space to critically engage with histories and identities connected to the settings they employ (see Sterczewski 2016). Both games focus on personal rather than political narratives. While SYR avoids explicit discussion of history, The Medium mostly replicates the dominant historical narrative of big events and clearly defined heroes and villains.

While the stories themselves do not question historical narratives, they do question the workings of memory and address the process of remembering. Each of the two titles does so differently: while SYR focuses on personal and individual themes, the trauma of The Medium is rooted politically. Memories, even if based on factual events, are presented in a more emotional tone. They are often erratic and incomplete but powerful enough to influence the reality surrounding the player. They take the form of Derridian spectres of uncertain ontological status, invading places and in-game objects. They are fragmented and highly personal, which often makes them unreliable and unclear. The endings of both SYR and The Medium suggest that the history these games present is struggling to stabilize and finalize itself – the horror can continue.

Horror games seem well suited for the use of local environments. Creating strange, scary, or melancholy places is crucial to the horror game aesthetic. Horror games’ focus on environmental design allows local developers to recreate the places around them as strange and mysterious. While most action-adventure games feature gameplay based on power fantasy, horror games also tend to focus on tragic experiences, enabling developers from peripheral or semi-peripheral regions to tell stories tied to local historical traumas or the dark undercurrents of local folklore. Using Central and Eastern European settings in horror games runs a risk of fetishization and stereotypical usage of the post-Soviet space, which has, to a certain extent, also happened in case of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. At the same time, titles like SYR or The Medium may contribute to the normalization of such regional settings in video games and, more generally, to a greater thematic diversity within the medium.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was supported by the Charles University program PRIMUS/21/HUM/005: Developing Theories and Methods for Game Industry Research, Applied to the Czech Case.

Notes on contributors

Tereza Fousek Krobová

Tereza Fousek Krobová is a researcher at Charles University, Prague and the member of the grant project Developing Theories and Methods for Game Industry Research, Applied to the Czech Case.

Justyna Janik

Justyna Janik is a lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Management and Social Communication at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.

Jaroslav Švelch

Jaroslav Švelch is a new media and video games scholar based at Charles University, Faculty of Social Sciences. He is the author of Gaming the Iron Curtain: How Teenagers and Amateurs in Communist Czechoslovakia Claimed the Medium of Computer Games (MIT Press, 2018).

Notes

1 An exception was the Polish studio P. Z. Karen Development Co., which produced games for the Western markets thanks to an arrangement with the U.S. company Logical Design Works, run by a Polish immigrant (Mańkowski 2020).

2 In a similar fashion, the military simulation game ArmA III features the geography of Northern Bohemia posing as a fictional Eastern European country of Chernarus.

3 As Hotel Cracovia is considered a building of heritage value and belongs to The National Museum in Kraków, the team needed to get a special permission to photograph the premises and gain access to the original plans.