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 •

The 5 Best Half-Life: Alyx Mods for Story and Exploration

Nearly three years since its release, Half-Life: Alyx has become not only the gold standard for VR gaming, but arguably the gold standard for VR community content. Even before Valve released the official modding tools in May 2020, the community was creating some incredible work, such as the prize-winning Overcharge mod. But it is arguably the inclusion of the jaw-dropping trailer for Levitation during last summer’s PC Gaming Show that provided the first mainstream demonstration that the Alyx mod...
The Escapist •

20 Years Later, Arx Fatalis Remains Arkane’s Most Ambitious and Flawed Game

Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss is often considered one of the first examples of immersive sims, games focused on player agency and complex gameplay that emerges out of the interaction of multiple simpler systems. So it is perhaps little wonder that the first title developed by Arkane Studios — the primary torchbearers of the immersive sim philosophy since the demise of the likes of Irrational Games — was a spiritual successor to Ultima Underworld.

As Dishonored is to Thief and Prey to Sys...
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 •

20 Years Ago, Morrowind Marked a High Point of Open-World Experimentation

These days most people remember the giant mushrooms. That memory might seem apt, given that The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was quite the trip when it released 20 years ago, but there was a lot more to Bethesda’s open world than psychedelic plants. So much more, in fact, that, with the possible exception of Shivering Isles – the masterful DLC for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Bethesda hasn’t been able to make anything as deep, strange, or immersive since. Indeed, in many ways Morrowind marke...
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 •

Returnal Is an Evolution of Dark Souls’ Storytelling

This discussion of storytelling and narrative devices contains minor spoilers for Returnal, none for Dark Souls.

“Octopus upstairs? OUR BRETHREN ARE SEVERED,” reads the pockmarked stone monolith covered in glowing blood-like alien script in the first biome of Returnal. Protagonist Selene Vassos’ scanner tells her the translation is only 47% accurate, which means the lowercase writing is a placeholder, a supposition presumably made by Selene’s computer system until she can collect more cyphers s...
The Escapist •

Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia: Exhibition Is Art That Only Work as a Video Game

In a year that has given us the likes of Genesis Noir, Mundaun, and Cruelty Squad, a virtual art exhibition by one of the world’s biggest rock bands is perhaps not the most unusual release in the medium. Nor is it completely unexpected — virtual performances by real-life artists are increasingly common, and members of Radiohead have toyed with the boundaries between music and other forms of artistic expression for years. Guitarist Johnny Greenwood scored Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Bloo...
The Escapist •

Unpacking Is Environmental Storytelling at Its Most Literal

Moving house might seem like a strange premise for a video game. The building of boxes, the weeks of packing, the living in semi-empty rooms in a state of suspended transit, the legalities – on goes the list of tedious tasks that ensure total exhaustion. But it’s an exhaustion that is, unlike the violence of many video games, familiar to most of us. It makes Unpacking relatable right out of the box, if you’ll pardon the pun.

It’s also not really what Unpacking is about. Wisely, developer Witch...
The Escapist •

20 Years Ago Today, Halo Refined First-Person Shooters for the Console Age

It’s an uncharacteristically warm spring morning in 2002 as a short bespectacled teenager walks towards an undisclosed location in England. He carries a backpack that contains a large and heavy black box, a controller that is too awkward for his hands, a mess of LAN cables and SCART leads, and a DVD case with one of the best shooters ever made. The teenager is excited – it’s his first big multiplayer party, two teams of eight players, red versus blue, going head to head to capture flags, defend...
The Escapist •

Psychonauts 2 Is Years Late, but Its Message of Healing Is Perfectly Timed

A lot might have changed since 2005, but against all odds, Psychonauts has stayed largely the same. Sure, there is a new lick of paint – the Tim Burton-esque art is now buttressed by a remarkable lighting engine and some incredible animation. But at its heart, Psychonauts 2 is the warm, endearing, consistently wacky platformer one would expect from an almost direct sequel to the original. The short narrative gap between Psychonauts and Psychonauts 2 is covered by 2017’s VR exclusive Rhombus of R...
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 •

Max Payne 20 Years Later: Aging Narrative Tropes, Timeless Gameplay, & Life in Slow Motion

Max Payne will celebrate its 20th anniversary next month. Going back to it now, particularly in light of its sequels and legacy, feels like picking up a piece of the industry preserved in amber. There is a strange brew of youthful naivety and borderline sociopathy in a narrative replete with tropes and clichés, while the gameplay trades on the cultural zeitgeist established by The Matrix two years earlier. And yet it remains one of the most impressive sophomore efforts from a young studio and on...
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...
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