Kalinov

One week, they said.

KALINOV is a top-down survival story set in an Exclusion Zone that never stopped living. The region was emptied in a single week. The beds were left made. Years later, people still walk in: for scrap, for work, for answers.

You are an operator with a key, a radio and a room above Block 7. A voice on the band, Kestrel, has work for you. Three factions need hands. At night a low hum comes up from the rail yard, and nobody will say what it is.

This is the demo (version 0.1). It covers the home estate and the Western Reach: about 16 story steps, from the first call on the radio to the first ending screen. After that you can keep playing in the Reach. The full game is still being built.

What you do

• Survive: carry what you can, patch your wounds, cook, craft and repair. Your pack has limited room.
• Take contracts from the radio, the satellite phone and the notice boards, and work your way up with the faction you choose.
• Explore farms, a village, forest and river. Search houses, cellars and bunkers. Night changes the Zone: the dark, the rain and the people who only come out after dark.
• Fight or sneak. Enemies see you by line of sight and hear your shots. Crouch, use bushes, shoot from cover, or avoid the fight.
• Follow the Hymn: a signal people say is a song, and the reason some of them walk toward the hum.

Features

• Top-down pixel-art world with day and night, weather and line-of-sight vision
• Story told through radio transmissions, papers, notes and rumours
• Three factions you can work for, each with its own ranks, gear and rivals
• Hostile groups that fight by their own habits, and wildlife
• Guns, melee, grenades and binoculars; a gunsmith, a workbench, a kitchen and a med bench
• A hideout where you save, sleep and sort your stash
• A dog who may follow you and warn you of danger
• Keys can be changed in Options; a graphics page has display mode, screen size, vsync and three quality levels

[IMAGE 3: the radio desk or the satellite phone]

How to play in 5 lines

1. Start a NEW GAME and choose how you start. Listen to the radio at home (press E at it).
2. Walk with WASD, run with SHIFT. Hold the right mouse button to aim, click the left one to fire.
3. Press E to open, search and talk. TAB opens your pack. M opens the map, J the journal, P the satellite phone.
4. Your next job is marked on the screen. Leave the estate by the road west when you are ready.
5. Save by sleeping in your bed or sitting at a lit fire. There is one save slot: CONTINUE loads it.

Controls (keyboard and mouse; no controller)

Action	Key
Move	W A S D
Run	SHIFT
Crouch	CTRL or C
Aim / fire	Hold right mouse / left mouse
Use, open, search, talk	E
Reload	R
Primary gun / pistol	1 / 2
Med kit	3
Special slots	4 and 5
Grenade	G
Quick melee / melee weapon	F / V (or 6)
Binoculars	B (hold)
Pack and stash	TAB
Journal / map	J / M
Next job	T
Satellite phone	P
Pause	ESC
Full screen on or off	F11

All of these except ESC, F11 and the mouse buttons can be changed in Options.

System requirements (Windows only)

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
• RAM: 8 GB minimum (estimated), 16 GB recommended. The game uses about 2.5 GB of memory right after New Game and about 3.3 GB after ten minutes in the Reach (measured on the developer's PC). It has not been tried on a PC with 8 GB.
• Graphics: a DirectX 11 capable card (estimated; tested only on one RTX 4060 Ti). Integrated graphics are untested.
• Disk: 5 GB free (the game folder is 4.7 GB)
• Screen: 1280x720 or more. The game starts in a 1280x720 window.
• Keyboard and mouse. The first start takes about 20 seconds behind the title screen on a fast PC (the art loads); it may be slower on older PCs.

Known issues

• One save slot. The save lives in the Windows registry, so there are no cloud saves and no save file to copy. NEW GAME replaces the save (a backup of the old one is kept).
• No controller support.
• The download is large (4.7 GB unpacked) and the game needs a lot of memory for what it shows. A smaller, faster version is planned.
• Tested on one PC only. If the game does not start, try the launch option -force-d3d11.
• Windows may show a "Windows protected your PC" (SmartScreen) warning because the game is not code-signed yet. Click "More info", then "Run anyway". Some antivirus programs may also flag it by mistake.
• Changing display mode or screen size in Options is new; if the picture looks wrong, press F11 or restart the game.
• A Unity logo shows at start.
• Some hints and texts may be out of date or too early or too late in places. Please tell us.

Content note

• Violence: top-down shooting, melee and animal attacks. Enemies, animals and the player die. Blood is shown as small pixel effects; the BLOOD setting in Options can turn it OFF, LOW (the default) or NORMAL.
• Tobacco and alcohol: the player can smoke and drink for small bonuses.
• Dark themes: a sealed region, missing people, a cult-like faction, a war and the ruins and machines it left behind.
• Language: mild. No sexual content.
• The low voices of the hum and the Hymn at night can be loud for some players: use the sound sliders in Options.

Made with

Art made with AI tools (OpenAI Codex image generation) and put together by the developer. Character voices, the radio operator and Kestrel's clips made with ElevenLabs. Code written with AI coding agents. Music and sound effects from CC0 and royalty-free libraries (full list in the game's CREDITS screen). Made in Unity 6. Font: Oswald (SIL Open Font License).

Feedback

Tell us where you got stuck, what was unclear and what did not run. Use the comments on this page.