Andrei Pechalin

I am a freelance videogames critic. I've written interview-led features, previews, reviews, and op-eds for Edge, Eurogamer, and PCGamesN. For a couple of years I was a columnist at The Escapist. I try to understand games within their broader cultural context, for example, by reference to literature, philosophy, history, or film.

A selection of my work is featured on this website.

If you might like to commission me for something - coverage, consultation, Russian/English localisation, mock reviews, etc. - please do get in touch at andreipechalin@gmail.com.

Eurogamer.net •

Frostpunk 2 set off a personal and ideological storm in my head

Frostpunk developer 11 Bit Studios doesn't engage with the question of whether video games should tackle ideological questions, so much as it takes that engagement as a given. It's an axiom baked into the DNA of everything from This War of Mine, which presented the cruelties of war from a civilian perspective, to the original Frostpunk and now Frostpunk 2 - the studio's philosophical magnum opus, the culmination of years of experimentation with what I like to call its ideological simulators.
It'...
Eurogamer.net •

Dune: Spice Wars review - a good strategy, but an underwhelming adaptation

Early Access can seem like the prescience of Paul "Muad'Dib" Atreides, the saviour, prophet, and eventually emperor in Frank Herbert's series of Dune novels. As a game releases into Early Access, you can see the possibilities ahead of it, the design decisions it might and might not incorporate, the vague outline of the finished work. As Early Access progresses, the possibility space narrows; the outline solidifies.


But if there is one theme to take away from Herbert's work, it is that seeing...
PCGamesN •

Ultra-hard Steam space game is a nightmare alternative to Starfield

On one hand, it is a maximal gap between the player and the game – a requirement to put it down for long stretches of time to work out how to continue playing it. On the other, it is a kind of videogame equivalent of the extended mind hypothesis – the boundary between what’s on screen and what’s on the desk mediated by my jottings and the manual, the game’s esoteric geometry almost spilling out of the monitor onto the paper before me.
The Escapist •

Hardspace: Shipbreaker Is a (Literal) Deconstruction of Science Fiction

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey famously begins with what Arthur C. Clarke called the “longest flash forward in the history of movies,” as an animal bone spins up into the sky after being struck by one of humankind’s ancestors and is suddenly replaced by a rotating satellite. It’s a mesmerizingly ambitious edit that also performs a narrative sleight of hand — in showing how far we have come in a few million years, the edit takes attention away from the need to explain how we got there....
The Escapist •

Elden Ring Refines FromSoftware’s Obsession with Decadence & Decay

It may be more instructive to view the world of Elden Ring less as some kind of inverted post-apocalypse or high fantasy nightmare and more as an example of the so-called Dying Earth subgenre, exemplified by the likes of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun. In the latter, protagonist Severian journeys across an Earth so ravaged by a dying sun and repeating patterns of decay and conflict that it can offer him nothing more hopeful than an opportunity to break that pattern. So with Elden Ring and so perhaps even the greater FromSoftware canon — after seven games and 12 years of refinement and renewal, what will the next title look like?
The Escapist •

The Forgotten City Is a Philosophical Tour de Force

The Forgotten City plays like elaborate clockwork: Perform an action or make a dialogue choice and watch the roughly two dozen citizens trapped in the titular Roman settlement respond accordingly, shifting their positions relative to you and to each other to reveal new dialogue options, items, and locations. And when the time loop you are stuck in inevitably restarts, you bring your knowledge and your inventory with you, creating opportunities to sequence events in a different order on your grad...
The Escapist •

The Art of Puking in Death Trash – Hands-On

Have you ever wished you could puke on demand? Have you wanted to collect your puke, put it in your backpack, and use it later to power aging machinery? Have you considered that your puke might be related to cosmic horrors nesting inside you? These are some of the many questions raised by Death Trash, the isometric pixel art action RPG from developer Crafting Legends made available via a 2-3-hour demo in the Steam Summer Next Fest.

Death Trash doesn’t care if you think puking is juvenile. You’l...
The Escapist •

STALKER 2 Should Embrace Its Source Material

This discussion of STALKER 2 contains spoilers for the novel Roadside Picnic, the film Stalker, and for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise.

The gameplay trailer for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl (or just STALKER 2, to simplify) shown at E3 2021 is prime hype material. The graphics look unreal, the game world oozes the familiar foreboding atmosphere, and the gameplay seems to recapture the frantic firefights and patient exploration of the old titles. Assuming we are not looking at a vertical sl...
The Escapist •

It Takes Two to Appreciate Game Literacy and Its Evolving Language

Video game literacy isn’t a novel idea: You can’t hand a controller to someone who has never played a video game and expect them to keep up. It’s also understood that there are certain, more specific conventions: Jumping is pretty uniformly mapped to the same button across games, things that glow can probably be interacted with, and so on. We take these things for granted, but we know they are there.

What’s perhaps less widely observed is just how much the language of games has evolved over the...
The Escapist •

Disco Elysium’s Post-Socialism Evokes Nostalgia and Melancholy

Bloodshot eyes, a corpse-pale face, hair that looks like the butt of Dylan Moran’s joke about comb-overs, and late 1990s Russian market stall T-shirt and jeans – it looks I’ve decided to go fully method for this replay of ZA/UM’s hit Disco Elysium. I would say it’s an appropriate way to celebrate the imminent release of the Final Cut update, but I would feel an affinity with Disco’s protagonist even without the lockdown get-up.

No, I am not a disgraced alcoholic cop with amnesia and a misplaced...
The Escapist •

How Thief Helped Pioneer the New Weird Genre

Everyone agrees that Thief: The Dark Project was important. It helped to establish stealth games and immersive sims, demonstrated new ways to integrate world-building and narrative, and was one of several titles that showed that first-person games didn’t have to fit the mold of Doom or Ultima. What not everyone might realize is that Thief was also at the forefront of a new genre of speculative fiction: what’s come to be known as the New Weird.

The New Weird emerged in the 1990s, pioneered by wr...
The Escapist •

The Spice Must Flow: The Rise and Fall of Dune Games

I remember playing Dune II on my Sega Genesis around 1995. The game was too complex for a controller, I was seven, and I didn’t speak English, so I didn’t have a clue what was going on. I was oblivious to the fact that it was based on one of the richest, strangest, and most successful science fiction universes ever and would define the design of RTS games for more than a decade. Later, when I became obsessed with Dune 2000 and Emperor: Battle for Dune, I couldn’t imagine that the series would fa...
The Escapist •

Wasteland 3 Review: A Shakespearean Narrative in a Lifeless World

The niche InXile Entertainment has carved out for Wasteland 3 makes a lot of sense. While Bethesda’s first-person Fallout 3 (2008) popularized the post-apocalyptic RPG and Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas (2010) married popular form to old-school sensibilities, Wasteland 3 is those old-school sensibilities. Turn-based, party-based, and isometric, with a few quality-of-life features and fancy post-processing, at first glance it’s exactly how I imagine a late ‘90s CRPG to look in 2020. But only at fi...