With Russian munitions raging above, Dariia Selischeva began making a video game in a bunker, previously an art gallery. Titled What’s Up in a Kharkiv Bomb Shelter, it is a portrayal of real occurrences during the bombing in the early months of Russia’s unwarranted invasion of Ukraine. The game is based on Selischeva’s conversations with neighbors and her friends hiding elsewhere.
The game involves walking around and talking to other survivors. It is created with lo-fi Bitsy software with a soundtrack featuring explosions, listless guitars, and hushed voices. Selischeva said, “My goal was to provide an opportunity for ordinary people’s voices to be heard, to capture a fragment of life in a shelter.”
Dariia’s Game
The game combines humor with the gloomy environment and attempts to relate to the chaos. While somebody is looking for their missing grandson, another is cheering their dog that ran under the shelter as soon as the bombings began. People say that when the war is too close, it’s hard to believe. The brain sees and analyzes everything that happens, but it turns off the reaction.
In the game, some characters fluctuate between different colors similar to, in the words of Selischeva, “lightbulbs that are about to burn out,” which describes the trauma caused not just by war but by another woman’s experience of harassment. Selischeva explains, “I put myself in her place. There, inside it, I felt that I was both there and not there at the same time. Later, I asked her if she was experiencing something similar, and she agreed. I spoke with a psychologist who helps people with PTSD, and she confirmed that victims of violence, until they heal from trauma, are in a quantum state, between existence and nonexistence. They have been treated like objects, so they lose their self-image and lose faith that they are free.”
Storytelling with games
Selischeva is not the only Ukrainian developer making a game depicting Russia’s attack. A game called Zero Losses, created by a horror game studio, Marevo Collective, in which a Russian soldier destroys his comrade’s body to build the Kremlin’s official casualty figures.
Stepan Prokhorenko, one of the organizers of this year’s Ukrainian Games Festival on Steam, said that some of these are more “lighthearted” than expected. Games like Ukrainian Farmy are about a truck driver that steals tanks, and Slaputin is a game in which you hit Putin with sunflowers. Stepan believes that these games are “weaponized” artwork made by those who spent their day in vocations, volunteering, or active military service. He said, “I believe that games are storytelling, and storytelling is how you make ideas survive. The idea of a free and independent Ukraine is something Russia despises and wants to erase. So, games become yet another battleground, in a way.”
Putinist Slayer, created by Bunker 22, begins with a Star Wars-like rolling preamble in which a drugged Putin is in alliance with aliens, which makes the player travel into space to release his minions, referring to the Ukrainian wartime slang. The game is the backstory with sci-fi historical information. It challenges the Russian state’s self-serving “editing” of Ukraine’s past and the “invisible poison of Russian media manipulation.” Bunker 22’s anonymous lead developer said, “It is both a parallel fictional world that is more connected to today and the present than any other game.” He continues, “The truth is a natural disinfectant for propaganda. But the problem is how to interest people in that truth and how to deliver it.”
Selischeva is influenced by Anna Anthropy’s book, Rise of the Videogame Zinester. She said, “The position of witnessing is democratic and simple: You cannot conclude when it is too difficult to generalize.” Selischeva believes truth does not require being explained.
