Citizens! We live in times of unprecedented danger! We are beset on all sides by traitors and saboteurs. Reactionaries whisper treason in dimly lit rooms. Their mouths spew poison and lies that eat away at the foundations of the worker-peasant revolution, at the root of the world revolution itself.
And, worst of all, no one gave me a desk big enough to deal with it.
What Awaits, Aleksey? is a clever mystery/puzzle game that caters to all my specific obsessions. It’s a Stasi simulator, more or less—you are Aleksey Lutomski, a recent hire at the security service of a fictional 20th-century communist state, tasked with identifying the members of an underground cell of dissidents who are going around saying mean things about the motherland.
For the most part, this means obsessing over the tidiness of your desk. It is no longer World War 2 and you are not Stierlitz. You are not kicking in doors and taking down fascist spies with a Tokarev. It is 1970: the socialist sixth of the Earth has settled into bleary stagnation. The enemies of the state are disaffected academics and you fight them by going through their mail.