Kolkhoz: The Red Wedge is about a political cadre in the Soviet Union during the collectivization campaign of the late 20's/early 30's following the end of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Your job is to convince workers and peasants to join the local collective farm while having to deal with all of their views, personalities, and problems. You're forced to face and overcome various contradictions that come to life when translating theory to reality.

It plays as a 2-D story-telling game that involves using dialogue and puzzles to solve problems. The puzzles take the form of abstract shapes that once completed often take the form of an object relevant to the problem. Along the way your journal (J) gives you historical facts to explain the sociopolitical background of the period.

Overall, Kolkhoz: The Red Wedge is a very honest and neat game. It's a new approach to such a specific and often controversial period in Marxist history. However, being a 2-D puzzle/dialogue game it can get dull after awhile. It's not a game to binge, but one definitely worth playing.

3/5 stars.

A good debut for a solo game developer. Lovely graphics and succesful storytelling, average but acceptable gameplay features for a interactive novel kind game. With in game info about era and fine atmosphere, I especially recommend to people who interested in Bolshevik Revolution, 1930's collectivization process, CCCP or enjoyed novels such as "And Quiet Flows the Don " or Gladkov's "Cement".

Such a nice game placed in a well studied historical context. It makes the player go through a storyline full of day to day political, economic and human-driven issues of the Soviet peasantry which is facing the history's first great collectivization process. Very good for a first game.

Nice little indie game, if you like constructivism, puzzles and Soviet history then you'll like this.

If the collectivization of soviet agriculture in the 1930's is something that interests you , this will be fun. It's a side scrolling walking sim with dialogs (with rough translations at times) and with a really unpolished, abrupt and unfinished ending. I'm glad i played it but i must say it was quite disappointing (the ending).

What could be better than a game set during the specific point following the October Revolution, when a new social order is put into practice, starting with the villages far from Moscow? This is the hook, but unfortunately, this game does not deliver on this promise. There are some glimpses of this; the tension between those who were slightly better off before this process began, and the way that the new order is used to settle old scores. But mostly the game involves moving left or right through rows of houses, trying to remember where a particular peasant lives.

The English translation is very rough, and the text is implemented in such a way that it is very small (or sometimes very large, or cut off the screen) and progresses very quickly. The game is linear and there are few options. A traditional visual novel format would have been more appropriate and less distracting from the story (the long walks past the houses, listening to repetitive short piano loops and wind samples do not add anything). The lack of save points was also quite frustrating, as there is no indication of when the game saves, which means that my time with the game was spent repeating sections that hadn’t saved before. The ending was abrupt and did not resolve the story, such as it was.

The Constructivist puzzles themselves, while obtuse, are quite original. I particularly liked the one about making a rivet. This probably should have been offered as a free game, so that the developers could get more feedback and improve their next release.

Finished the game.
The puzzles were sometimes obtuse but the biggest problem was the forced walking back and forth through the map. without that the game would last less than half the 2.6 hours.

Dialogues and plot were childish and amateurish. It was actually way less political than I thought going into it but it was "disappointing" on every aspect.

I am no English native speaker but the number of spelling errors and other grammatical horrors was very high. Not suggested to anyone. And it sounded like as a game for me...

I fell asleep playing this game.

Now, I'm a leftist (but not a Marxist-Leninist or Stalinist), but my gripe with this game isn't the politics (unlike a certain red-hatted reviewer). It's just an incredibly boring game.

This game is presented as a story where you try and slowly convince everyone to support kolkhoz, but it barely even fulfills that. There is some influence and changing of sides, but it seems to be somewhat vapid. "Your kolkhoz farmers fixed my fence, I shall join you. Take my oxen!" My brain was just like, "huh, what just happened?" It's unclear if my decisions even have an effect on the game.

Walking from place to place looking for people takes up about 70% of the gameplay. I literally dozed off while holding the left arrow key for more than a minute. And then missed some of the actual conversation. It would probably have been better (and a lot shorter) if the player was allowed to travel on a map.

What I did like about it: The puzzles are nice and creative. Good historical background. Some thought-provoking questions about fairness, truth, government, loyalty, etc especially during the meeting.

Fun short game

great!