Muy divertido, con graficos y chistes tipo Dia del Tentaculo. Un poco cansador el tema constante de "comunismo malo", pero no quita de la diversion en general.

👍
👍Superb Voice Acting
👍Bold and Colourful Hand Drawn Graphics
👍Puzzles Had Just the Right Amount of Difficulty
👍Satire was amusing and fun to uncover
👍Meaningful Achievements
👍Trading Cards

👎
👎 Only Six Save Slots

Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka With Love is developed and published by Artifex Mundi, usually attributed to making Hidden Object Games. Recently they broke the mould a little when releasing My Brother Rabbit and have now released their first adventure in the point and click world.

The game oozes quality with its superb voice acting and colourful hand drawn artwork .

I was surprised by how good the puzzles were for a first attempt. They were not too difficult to be frustrating but just difficult enough to feel rewarding. Items in your inventory can be combined and pressing space on the keyboard reveals items of interest.

There is a very clever hint system in each scene represented by a telephone helpline or a character. If you get stuck trying to solve a problem, you can ring up the helpline and ask for a hint. They won’t always give you a direct answer, but they will point you in the right direction.

The story was amusing, full of anecdotes and jokes aimed towards communism. The environments are full of witty and politically incorrect signs and slogans for you to find. For example, clicking on the postbox in Matryoshka tells you that “The Matryoshkan postal service will make sure your letters don’t contain any errors. Spelling errors of course.”

Everywhere you’ll find these quips and it does feel a little like Communism bashing. Lots of jokes about permits, long queues and astonishing inflation rates etc. but I suppose that is what satire is all about.

The story line is okay. I wouldn’t say it was mind-blowing, but it was interesting, if not hard to follow in places, and there were a couple of twists and turns along the way. It was just the right length at 14 hours.

A special mention must go out to the voice acting. It was superb. Every single character I encountered was professionally acted, full of character, wit and charm. The Russian sounding voices sounded authentic and were easily understandable.

The graphics were bold and colourful, reminiscent of Daedalic and Lucas Art titles. The characters movement was excellent, and they were all drawn and acted like a stereotypical Communist person would. The world of Matryoshka was a well thought out and enjoyable experience to visit.

I would have liked to have seen more save slots as currently there are only six which might prove difficult if you want to go back afterwards and mop up any achievements. There is an autosave feature that doesn’t use any slots and will allow you to continue your game from where you left off.

Overall, I would highly recommend Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka With Love. It appears that Artifex Mundi have taken their reputation for high quality games and applied it to the point and click genre. I will be keen to see where they go next.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1833086275

Evan Kovolsky (or Ivan Kovolsky as he is often jokingly referred to in the story) dreams of becoming a fully-fledged member of the Communist party and visiting the land of Matryoshka. A place he has read so much about in books and magazine articles. Nobody has been granted a visa there for years but one day Evan receives an invite to visit the leader of Matryoshka and is unwittingly thrown into a high stakes game of political intrigue.

The story is nothing special but don’t let that put you off. Most of the enjoyment is achieved through character’s witty exchanges and the amusing observations pertaining to a Communist lifestyle. The remarks and observations are certainly very politically incorrect and stereotypical but that is half the fun of the game. Reading signs, talking to characters all deepen the layers of what life is like for the inhabitants of Matryoshka. Propaganda is rife and Evan goes through a journey of discovery and enlightenment.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1836837437

🕹️
What I did enjoy about Irony Curtain was the way in which you can manipulate your inventory in certain ways to solve different puzzles. Some games are very rigid where one item does a certain task and items can’t be combined. In this game certain items in your inventory can be used more than once to solve different puzzles. For example, a piece of wire can be bent in different ways and items can be combined multiple times to generate new items. It was a refreshing change and meant you were always examining inventory items for extra clues or ways of manipulating them.

Matryoshka is a huge place and the environments match. The game area is quite large for a point and click game and the screen scrolls rather than having separate screens which you can enter and exit. Thankfully Evan can run fast with a double click of the mouse, but you can’t fast exit screens even if there is an obvious exit.

There are four chapters to the game, and they appeared to increase in difficulty. The first two chapters were relatively straight forward but I had to really think in the last two chapters. I would estimate there are roughly 10-15 different scenes for you to navigate so there is plenty of variety on offer.

Another interesting concept I don’t recall experiencing in other games is the way you can telephone a help line to ask for hints on puzzles you are struggling with. The operator will not divulge the complete solution but instead will point you in the right direction by maybe suggesting what items you will need or who to speak to.

The puzzles in Irony Curtain are overall logical and well thought out. Most of the solutions would be had in real life but because this is a wacky game there are a few liberties taken with some puzzle solutions but nothing too far-fetched.

There were quite a few puzzles where you had to fetch items off characters who then asked for other items you had to fetch. This is not unusual in this genre, however. I think the puzzles were perfectly balanced. I struggled on quite a lot of the game, but I worked it out eventually and that felt very rewarding.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1847598286

🎵
Every single character I met sounded professional and authentic for their character. They were always stereotypical, but then again this is a satire! I was very impressed with the voice acting throughout and they have obviously poured a lot of time into this area.

There was always some sort of Russian themed music playing in the background and special effect noises also sounded excellent.

📺.
Bold and colourful graphics. All the characters looked great and the environments were detailed. The characters were very well drawn and had bags of personality.

Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka With Love is a very impressive first attempt by Artifex Mundi in the genre of point and click adventure games. It contains a few elements I haven’t seen in other games namely the hint system and the clever use of inventory.

You’ll have a lot of fun meeting the characters and laughing at the communist satire.

Curator Info:

Follow our curator page: OCG-Curations if you like and want to see more reviews like this one.

Game was received free through Curator Connect.

The developers of this game have pledged to donate money gotten from game sales from the 27th of February till the end of March to the Polish red cross's #helpforUkraine fund.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/866190/view/3109176926616347650

I will continue to support these developers for their assistance to the Ukrainian people, and I call upon my fellow gamers everywhere to continue to support Ukraine in their fight against Russian aggression.

Slava Ukraini!

REVIEW OF FINISHED GAME
edit - In a recent update the developer said they had put a 'cheat' for an area of the game mentioned below, as well as a skip on the puzzles and added manual saves. I haven't played the game since these things have been added. If they work, they have addressed all the problems I had.

As there was one big negative* for me and would affect some people (or they would like to know) I’m doing a full review. fyi re time I replayed it for my 1 ach I missed.

Tech stuff – No profiles, only auto save (argh in a P&C especially with achs you need manual saves) but there is a hotspot indicator (spacebar) which tells you in each scene what you can interact with. There is also a hint system (a hint not a solve) in each area which is the phone (or fortune teller in one scene). If you get more items or info use the phone again and it will give you a big clue with what you need to do to solve an objective. For those used to HOGs you will miss the diary that keeps info you find, here you will need a pen and paper. You will also have to remember your objectives.

You won’t get lost, as there are at most about 3 scenes accessible to you at one time which is good as this game is not easy in parts but with the hotspot indicator and phone calls I did work out everything myself.

This game isn’t one of the adventure games that plays like a HOPA (hidden object puzzle adventure) but without the hos, it’s a true ‘old fashioned’ point n click game, games you have to think with. There are puzzles and this is where I had problems. There are some puzzles you come across in HOGs, there are even a lot of the same kind ‘fast reaction’ type puzzles – shooting and stamping items are both the same, click on the correct item but you get about a couple of seconds for each item to move to it and I was OK with it.

*But there is one puzzle (the bricklaying puzzle) that you have to play and get a good score to be able to proceed with the game. You can’t skip it (or any puzzle) and it is ridiculously tight regarding responses (it was for me). So, if you can’t move fast and accurately you will be stuck with a game that you can’t finish. A lot of people play these games because they are either older, or can’t move fast and/or like me have zero patience for arcade type games and expect logical work out puzzles that require effort. This puzzle doesn’t require any skill except either a good mouse, or being young or brought up/play a lot of arcade/timing games. If I want to play those type of games I’d play time management, shooting or arcade games but I don’t. There should at least be a skip button on it.

The rest of the game though, was well thought out, really good gameplay and what you hope a P&C would be but sadly rarely is. I wouldn’t say the game was funny but was more amusing in its situation and the character’s naivety. For people that are good at or don’t mind timing things this game would be a near perfect P&C, ‘if only’ with that one puzzle, it would have been for me.

N.B For HOG players that are used to ultra family friendly viewing, it’s not 100%, but nearly there. Maybe 1 and nearly 1 scene of swearing, and there was a weird innuendo quick sentence that I thought was so inappropriate as I think the person was supposed to be 7? (the person in the box in the metro station) but you could play this with kids around. It was nice for a refreshing change to have zero supernatural and just a nice straightforward story.

Highly recommend if you like a lot of good thinking gameplay and don’t mind timing things, and a FYI for those that don’t like timing/reaction things.

Ginger’s Games Curator page

• Really fun game full of references, Easter eggs, and great jokes (Polish people will recognize the most of them).
  
• Peculiar and interesting characters and good plot.
  
• Inspired by both classic and modern point & click adventure games.
  
• Puzzles are not very hard but still can give your brain cells a workout.
  
• Beautiful hand-drawn graphic.
  
• Not recommended for younger children.
  
• Dziękuję za super grę, Artifex Mundi.
  
• Evan is too cute. :P

I must have a monkey’s paw lying around here somewhere, because I’ve been wanting Artifex Mundi to make a point and click adventure game for a couple of years and now when I finally get it…I get Irony Curtain. The first scene of the game gave me a gut feeling that this game wouldn’t be nearly clever as it thinks it is when it comes to general comedy as well it comes to satire of the Soviet Union, and my gut was right. I stuck with this game though because I thought it would least could make an interesting critique out of it and because it’s more mediocre than outright bad.

Irony Curtain is a great example of what I’m really starting to dislike in smaller studio adventure games, adventure game cargo-culting. Irony Curtain is just filled with forced references to better games, they’re not even jokes, just “REMEMBER GRIM FANDANGO?!” There is even a mandatory dialogue puzzle where you have to say anagrams of classic adventure games and it’s just absolutely eye rolling. Most of the jokes in the game just go over like a lead balloon, like a whole sequence where the protagonist, Evan, thinks he has to show the Matryoshkan Leader his ass, but ha ha it turns out he just needed an ID pass but the Matroyshkans say pass without a p for absolutely no reason. There’s not one but two jokes complaining about political correctness like a washed up Boomer comedian. It’s the embarassingly cringey kind of humor one can expect from a bad Daedalic game. (Though it never becomes as mean-spirited as Deponia)

Gameplaywise it’s just meh. The game gives you a hotspot button and an in-universe hintline you can call, which is nice, but the problem is the latter is used as a crutch when it comes to the game’s multiple instance of puzzles where the game gives you really no hints on what you’re supposed to even start to do. It’s just not good adventure game design, even old game Day of the Tentacle gave you some good hints from just talking to people leaving you just enough to infer what you need to do without spelling it out. The Red Square sections is just also horribly padded out with a really boring fetchquest train that must have been completely excruciating before they patched in running apparently.

One of the strong suits about the game is that art design and atmosphere is really nice. The voice-acting is actually solid too. So really the game does really well on the artistic polish side, it’s the gameplay and especially the writing is where it really suffers.

Now the Soviet Union can be satirized, it did some absolutely absurdly callous, short-sighted, and incompetent things, just look up how the Soviets nearly drove whales to extinction for no reason or how they turned the Aral Sea into a real life Mad Max wasteland for just two of many examples I can think off the top of my head. You would think Artifex Mundi would have some good incisive satire, what them being Polish and all, but really it’s not much better than any old stuff here in the States; long lines, straight to gulag, etc. There are some good satire here and there, but as I said the game thinks it’s smarter about than it actually is. The truly ironic thing is that while it criticizes the Soviet Union’s authoritarianism and imperialism through the allegory of Matroyoshka Artifex Mundi glorifies America and capitalism in the same breath, never once ever lampooning the other side of the Cold War that definitely deserves it too. Evan opines how America totally doesn’t imprison its citizens without due process or spy on them and the Cold War era CIA as seen as heroic liberators, etc. It’s just a laughably naïve and ignorant view of America and American capitalism during the Cold War and especially now in our present day capitalist hellworld. Lest anyone forget about things such as McCarthyism and Jim Crow during the time the game is supposed to take place or how the CIA destabilized democracies to instate brutal dictators that the game is trying to criticize. When it comes to the present we’ve been going nearly two decades on a forever war, people are dying because they can’t afford medicine, and now major American corporations like Apple and Activision Blizzard are tripping on their asses to cater to China, a brutal totalitarian regime, by stifling any defense of the people under Chinese rule protesting to insure their basic rights just to make a buck just for starters. Funnily enough Artifex Mundi are what they are mocking with Evan, just naively oblivious to the States and American capitalism instead of the USSR and Soviet communism. If you’re going to do a political satire you need to do some research first. And I’m not really being too hard on this game, it wants to be treated seriously to some degree, it’s not like C&C Red Alert where Tim Curry corpses over going to outer space because it’s the last place untainted by capitalism.

Now when it comes to the characters, they really isn’t much to say, most of the cast are just all shallow stereotypes, which really hurts the game when it tries to shoot for pathos in the end. They play the hopelessly naïve card on Evan way too much for him to be in any way endearing, it’s clear they wanted to make him like Guybursh or George Stobbart but it just doesn’t work.

Ultimately Irony Curtain is a disappointing game, too caught up in referencing better games and making uninformed satire to really have a strong identity of its own. I won’t completely rule out Artifex Mundi yet, but they’re really going to have kick their writing and puzzle design up a notch for me to consider their next game. You can do a lot worse when it comes to adventure games but you can do a lot better, so that’s why I wouldn’t recommend Irony Curtain. Honestly play Paradigm instead, it also has a Soviet Era aesthetic but its actually funny.

An average point and click with a few strange puzzles A dog bowl, an excavator, and concrete?. The story is mostly forgettable and nonsensical.

The main character is hard to relate to, I do not think anyone wants to think of themselves as such a doofus. I am not sure point and click enthusiasts will enjoy this as much as the classics it is attempting to replicate. This is probably better for casual players who like other Artifex Mundi games.

The game overall feels stretched out and slowed down. Movement speed is slow, even with double-click to run. There is a lot of back and forth in chapters two and three, and there can be long pauses before a character speaks.

I found it mildly funny and entertaining for a few hours. The non-story achievements are a nice touch and reward the curious player. However, there are many more opportunities for unique dialog where funny lines could have been added as opposed to default responses such as "this does not work with that." Additionally, sometimes dialog would remain the same even after accomplishing a related task and that is another missed opportunity.

While Artifex Mundi usually produces low-budget hidden-object games, the audio and visual on this point-and-click are top-notch. I was immediately reminded of the Deponia series' presentation.

However, after a few chapters in, I just couldn't take the superfluous and monotonous dialog, unrelatable main character and repeated moon logic. I avoid hints and guides by principle, but was increasingly wanting to use them just to progress the plot or avoid another 30 minutes of trying everything on everything. While the sights and sounds were a pleasure, I realized I was still in a gulag and gave Irony Curtain my dasvidaniya.

+Voice acting's great
+Music and ambient sounds are great
+Colorful and very well animated
+Manual or autosave at any time (hard to miss achievements)
+Object highlight
+Detailed inventory pictures

~Double-click to run, but no fast travel
~Areas of heavy backtracking
~Hint system cleverly integrated, but not always available
~Story is vague and moves at a snail's pace
~Did get a few chuckles, but humor usually falls flat
~Estimated 9 hours of (dull) playtime
~References to other media are frequent and usually lack subtlety

-We get it. Communism is bad.

-Your character is a one-dimensional manchild with no redeeming qualities. Guybrush was a naive moron, but had a sense of humor. Rufus was an a-hole, but had a tragic backstory and character development.

-Moon logic/try-everything-on-everything approach. This is complicated by the number of inspectable, but useless environmental objects.

-One puzzle failed the first time, then succeeded using the exact same approach the second?

-Minigames do provide a nice change of pace - but these ones require lightning fast reflexes and cannot be skipped. This will piss off much of your target audience. Strange that this game pays repeated homage to Machinarium but fails to learn from one of that game's two major sins: forcing frustrating action games in a puzzler.

I really liked this game. It's a playful romp through the Cold War era where a naive young academic gets his ultimate dream vacation and gets his eyes opened in the process. The writing started a little over the top for me, but it settled in to a very good point and click adventure that had some challenging puzzles as it went along. The game has an interesting phone a comrade type hint system throughout the game so if you do get stuck, help is just a phone call away. I thought the graphics were nice and crisp and the story was fun. This game is well worth the price for the play time.

Feel free to follow my review page!

Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love is a surprisingly good point and click adventure game, probably one of the better ones released in recent years, filled with everything you can expect from the genre, an interesting story, great voice acting, humor, and some medium to hard puzzle difficulty.

👍 The good parts:
-Voice acting is well done.
-The story is quite interesting for a humor-based game.
-The atmosphere and overall locations are nicely detailed.
-Hint system in case you're ever stuck, which will happen.

👎The bad parts:
-Not all puzzles make sense which is sadly common for the genre.
-The ending could've been better or more detailed.

Games that are primarily focused on humor can offer players some nice stories more so than your average drama game and we've seen this happen a lot of times with the point and click adventure genre. Irony Curtain is no different than the other adventure games like Deponia series or Monkey Island and if you loved playing those, you'll easily enjoy this game as well.

The story pretty much puts our hero Evan in an adventure to Matryoshka which is a satirical country based on communism, where he'll uncover the real truth about what's truly going on. It's a fun story where you'll meet a nice cast of unique characters but sadly the end felt a bit rushed or somewhat unsatisfying since I never got the chance to see what happens to the characters you meet throughout the game.

Whether or not the rushed ending is a hint towards a sequel is unclear but I do wish for Evans story to continue.

Story rating: 8/10

The gameplay is exactly what you expect, a classic point and click adventure game where you solve puzzles by combining items in your inventory with world objects or between them and a few mini-puzzles.

There's nothing extraordinary regarding the game mechanics nor anything bad. There are a few inconsistent puzzles that may or may not make sense but it's very common with the genre.

I do wish the genre would evolve while maintaining its classic formula in some other ways but it is what it is and Irony Curtain does a good job at what it set out to do. If you ever feel stuck, the game also offers a hint system that isn't too obvious but not too obscure in the tips it gives you.

Gameplay rating: 8/10

Irony Curtain has a fantastic overall audio design from the well-made soundtrack that fits perfectly with the theme of the game to great voice acting, which is honestly very important for an adventure game. It's not easy to make players laugh but the voice actors really managed to make me chuckle a lot of times.

The sound effects are pretty standard, nothing out of the ordinary or worthy of mentioning.

Audio rating: 8.5/10

The backgrounds are well drawn, the atmosphere feels oppressive while maintaining the exaggerated and humorous theme of the game and overall the art style is detailed and colorful.

I do wish the game had more locations to discover but for an 8-hour adventure game, there were enough.

I personally did not encounter any bugs or performance related issues with the game so all was good from that point of view.

Graphics, performance and tech analysis score: 8/10

Straight the point, Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love is a highly recommended game if you're a fan of classic point and click adventure games and even if you never played such a genre the game is pretty much a good start to get into as its never too difficult while also giving you a good story filled with intrigue and humor.