We made a game about our experiences with communism - Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love was developed using our history with the absurdities of this system. We employed satire and cartoony artstyle to give our players a feel of how weird things were in the 60’s in Poland. This resulted in creating a satirical point and click adventure game, channeling not only the communist era but also the classical p’n’c games of the 90’s - and what amped the nostalgia even more was that artstyle was inspired (amongst other things) by a cartoonist of the era, Waldemar Kazak. The result was an amazingly weird, twisted and ambience-enchancing art presented in 22 hand-painted locations!
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We were inspired by actual buildings and locations created during the reign of communism in various countries.
You can see these inspirations in many points in the game, in different buildings - from the Crimson Square, the Leader’s palace - inspired by most communistic leader’s mansions to the Gorky Park and the metro.
Many of the items you’ll find in Irony Curtain are directly copied from the real life – we used washing machines such as the one below, we also had dial-up phones and cameras with film!
Times were tough, though, and with the constant shortage of essentials we had to become a resourceful nation of MacGyvers, coming up with ideas on how to repair items that could not be replaced or how to create something with key ingredients missing.
Things were bad and sometimes worse – from just empty shops and the necessity of queueing for everything, censorship (Orwell's "1984" style) and ubiquitous gray, to bloodhed in the streets and people going missing. And we remember that even when making jokes about communism.
