The USSR Is a Strange Loop

Like so many nostalgic productions, Sovpunk is anti-entropic:  the past cannot be allowed to simply be gone.  The sheer evocation of the vanished era is a both a balm for melancholia and the insistence on melancholia's permanence, externalizing the feeling of endless loss as something that can be seen, enjoyed, mourned, and visited. Sovpunk is fundamentally a refusal to let go and move on.  But it is also playful and creative. If we look at the USSR as the equivalent of a dead loved one, Sovpunk does not insist on preserving its beloved in amber.  As Sergeue Oushakine puts in the title of one of his articles, "We're nostalgic but we're not crazy."  By the same token, Sovpunk is melancholic, but not psychotic, with no need to mummify the Mother(land) like Norman Bates does to his mother in Hitchcock's classic film.  To continue the comparison with Psycho a bit longer, the Sovpunk community is not dressing in drag and pretending to be its dead Mother, but indulging in cosplay and having a good time. 

In many cases, Sovpunk is literally a game.  The list of Sovpunk exemplars inevitably includes a set of video games with an aesthetic derived  from the Soviet past.  Besides Metro 2033, some of the most famous games to earn the Sovpunk classification are American or European rather than post-Soviet. From 1996 to 2009, the popular Westwood Studios franchise "Command & Conquer " produced the games in its "Red Alert" subseries (along with several expansion packs and an iOS version). Set in an alternate timeline that managed to avoid World War II only to see Stalin invade Europe in 1946, it develops both a. counterfactual Soviet past and an equally fanciful Soviet "present" in the 1990s (in Counterstrike, one of the expansion packs). [1] Though both the Allied and the Soviet factions are playable, the game designers cannot be bothered to hide their Western bias. The results are entertaining (particularly Tim Curry's meme-worthy performance as a Soviet premier declaring his intention to escape into the "one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism--space!") But Russian enthusiasm for the Soviet particularities of the games leaves plenty of space for irony,

By contrast, Russian-produced Sovpunk video games have the home field advantage; no only are they better acquainted with Soviet realia, but they presumably have a stronger sense of what might appeal to games in the post-Soviet space. On the Russian-language Internet, every announcement of a new Sovpunk-inflected game inevitably draws comparison to Endless Summer ("Beskonechnoe leto"), a game whose informal development began in 2008 before its commercial release in December of 2013 on PCs (and made available on Steam the following year). "Endless Summer" is not the first  visual novel (a term for games combining animation, video clips, and text) to be created in Russia, but its iconic status in Russian gaming is so undisputed that the opening paragraph to an article on the history of Russian visual novels posted to stopgrame.ru in 2019 reminds the reader that the genre did not begin with this famous game (https://stopgame.ru/blogs/topic/97227). 

Endless Summer appears to be a deliberately derivative story, built as much on allusion as on innovation.  The plot, at least initially, is typical Time Crasher material: the hero falls asleep on a bus in 2009 and wakes up as a 17-year-old on his way to a Soviet summer camp in 1987.  Soon, however, Endless Summer turns into a variation on Groundhog's Day: the summer camp is a time loop, and the player's job is to find their way out. As for the characters, their names are  Runet injokes.  The protagonist is Semyon Persunov, a Russification of the English "same person" used as an anonymous handle on early twenty-first century Russian image boards, while the heroine, Alisa Dvachevskaya, is named after "Dvach", or "2chan," a Russian equivalent to the notorious 4chan. [2]  

More striking are the game's visuals, even though, here too, the aesthetic is more familiar than innovative. The visual novel is originally a Japanese form, with anime character designs;  Endless Summer produces a delightful cognitive dissonance with Soviet realia surrounding Soviet characters drawn like the heroes of Japanese animation (the pioneer scarf and uniform serving as a handy analogue for anime's ubiquitous Japanese school garb). [3]

Endless Summer handily encapsulates the appeal and the peril of the nostalgia that drives so much Sovpunk: the summer camp is a nice place to spend some time, but takes on a sinister overtone when the hero (and the player) realizes they're stuck in a time-loop.  Granted, nearly all video games resemble a time loop for the player, since players keep coming back to play the same game again and again, at least until they manage to win.  The time loop of Endless Summer is both a proxy for game play and a cautionary tale about nostalgia itself.   We may want to (imaginatively, or even politically) visit the past, but to stay there is to admit defeat.  

Stories of time loops have an intrinsic, puzzle-box appeal:  what do I have to differently in order to get out?  But they are also an adventure-themed equivalent to the successful work of mourning:  the mourner must grieve, even wallow, but only for a culturally specified duration (or, here, a given set of iterations of the loop).  The longer one is trapped in the loop, the closer the player's predicament resembles melancholia.  The player is fixated on the past (here, literally fixated in it), incapable of moving forward.  Even summers should not be endless.

Equally appropriate is the development of the two most anticipated Sovpunk games to cash in on Endless Summer's appeal:  Mundfish Studio's Atomic Heart and GM Reds' visual novel SovietPunk: Nostalgia for the Present.   SovietPunk takes place in a twenty-first century USSR, populated by anime Komsomol girls who could have stepped right out of Endless Summer. GM Reds launched a very small, but successful Kickstarter in February of 2021 to raise money for a demo, which is now available on Steam as Part One of the game, but there is no information available about the timeframe for its full release.  Atomic Heart, set in an alternate Soviet 1950s, made a splash when it dropped an action-packed, visually sophisticated trailer in May, 2018, but anonymous reports of layoffs and strife may explain why even a demo version has yet to be seen. The endless anticipation for both games inadvertently recapitulates the temporality of the lost USSR itself, which continually deferred communism to a later date.  Even in the world of video games, the radiant future rarely manifests as the radiant present.

Notes

[1] "Alternate timeline" is an inadequate designation, since the "Red Alert" series, with its multiple endings, changing geographic and temporal settings, and convoluted connections to the larger "Command & Conquer" franchise, has become a multiverse of its own. 

[2] She is modeled on the anime-inspired mascot for 2chan, Dvach-tyan. The mascot was conceived on the same imageboard that gave birth to Engless Summer, Ychan. 

[3] The original release also included erotic content in the manner of the "eroge" (Japanese erotic video games), but the game was cleaned up for its release on Steam.