KARJALA

Introduction

KARJALA, developed by UWEG and published by SQRT Games, released on Steam on 10 September 2026 at NZ$16.79. It's a first-person Backrooms-style horror game in which a hot-tempered private in the Soviet army is thrown through a portal into an anomaly-filled liminal space after a confrontation with an officer, and must track down a group of missing scientists while being hunted by monsters through the game's shifting corridors and rooms. The game ships on Windows only, with no controller support. As a small, independently-published launch, it debuted with a genuinely divided review base: 9 total reviews at the time of writing, split roughly evenly between favourable and unfavourable.

What's working: real atmosphere and a deliberately ambiguous story

What comes through most clearly across KARJALA's favourable reviews is a shared appreciation for its atmosphere and its willingness to leave real questions unanswered. One detailed Russian-language reviewer writes, translated: "The ending is so open that I thought I'd glitched and missed something. The last note, which can only be skipped by returning to the main menu, is beyond my understanding. But it seems like that's a deliberate artistic choice." That same reviewer singles out a recurring character as the game's standout piece of atmosphere: "Drunk Vasilich, with the good-natured smile of a serial killer who escaped from the asylum, materialising after every kill, is beyond praise," adding that the game's gunfire sound design is solid as well.

Other reviewers found the setup engaging even where they stopped short of an outright recommendation. An English-language reviewer, who played at launch, writes: "I liked the game, was a bit fun and the story seemed interesting... after the first patch it seemed a bit better and saves saved," specifically noting that an early flashlight-and-crouch control mix-up, which had left the first encounter confusing, was addressed in a post-launch patch. A separate Simplified Chinese reviewer describes a similarly rocky but ultimately positive start, translated: "The game gives very little guidance, and the visual quality and gameplay are solid, it's just that once you're inside you don't know what to do, so you end up following the guidance somewhat by accident."

The honest problems: no saves, missing settings, and inconsistent threat rules

Set against that praise, KARJALA's review sample carries specific, repeated complaints, starting with a punishing structural choice: the game currently has no way to save progress. A Russian-language reviewer lists this first among a set of concerns, translated: "From the very beginning it's stated there are no saves. Die, and you start over. This turns into a slog when you forget where a specific window with a ghost is and die because you got caught. Then you have to run through it all again." A separate reviewer frames the same issue more bluntly, translated: "Visually an interesting product, but it's held back by no save on exiting the game, a drawn-out opening, and a zombie that soaked up eight headshots and then grabbed me anyway... for now, I can't recommend it."

Reviewers also report specific, unresolved interface and settings gaps. The same detailed Russian reviewer explains a brightness problem tied to that lack of saves, translated: "Gamma can be changed in the settings, but not before starting the game, which made the opening extremely dark. I was just poking around blindly like a kitten. You can't see anything." A separate reviewer reports missing mouse sensitivity options alongside a disorienting camera problem, translated: "This is the first time a game has made me motion sick. The fisheye distortion is intense, especially when aiming the camera down. There's no mouse sensitivity setting, gamma is adjusted against a black background, and if you stop sprinting while still holding shift, the camera-shake animation doesn't reset properly. That's a real technical issue." A detailed reviewer reports the game's central window-based threat behaves inconsistently between encounters, sometimes requiring a crouch, sometimes a sprint, and sometimes not triggering at all, making it read as unclear rather than tense. A separate reviewer criticises the interface bluntly, reporting an early lightbulb-based hint left them without any clear direction, and that the game generally launched without a windowed or borderless display option.

Verdict

KARJALA backs up a small, genuinely divided launch with real atmosphere: reviewers who land positively credit its unsettling recurring characters, solid sound design, and a deliberately open, ambiguous ending that at least one reviewer reads as an intentional artistic choice rather than a loose end. Its honest problems are structural rather than cosmetic, however: a complete lack of saves that turns any death into a full restart, gamma and sensitivity settings reviewers describe as awkwardly implemented or missing outright, and threat behaviour more than one detailed reviewer found inconsistent from encounter to encounter. None of that erases what its favourable reviewers are responding to in the game's atmosphere, but the sample's even split and the severity of its structural complaints are worth taking seriously at this price. This is a hesitant recommendation for horror fans specifically drawn to its Backrooms atmosphere and open-ended story who can tolerate real launch-week friction.

Wanderer callout

A reviewer who admits an ending left them confused enough to suspect a bug, then works through that confusion in the review itself to conclude it was probably an intentional artistic choice rather than simply calling it broken, is exactly the kind of good-faith, self-correcting evidence Wanderer treats as more valuable than a snap judgement either way: it models how to sit with ambiguity before passing verdict on it.