Greetings, friends! You are tuned in to the Drunkard Racoons station and today we are glad to present our first large-scale project codenamed “Frequency: Chernobyl”.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1415600/Frequency_Chernobyl/
Few words about who we are and what we do
The Drunkard Raccoons studio was founded in Moscow in 2019. The company's founder, Sergey Golubkin, is the owner and CEO of the GEMENOT board games publisher, author and producer of more than 50 board games, ex-producer for Nival Interactive and Ubisoft, as well as a lecturer at the Higher School of Economics, the Higher School of Business Informatics, and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The studio consists of 9 full-time employees with abundant experience in game development. Frequency: Chernobyl is the first of the studio's projects with the current line-up.
Frequency what?
Frequency: Chernobyl is a mystical puzzle adventure in which the player takes on the role of an amateur radio enthusiast Val who has dedicated his life to unraveling the secrets of the “number stations.” The investigation leads him deep into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, where he will have to face off against a bizarre temporal anomaly when an elusive radio signal turns out to carry the voices of people from the distant year of 1986.
What's the setting?
The game's story transports the player to one of the once most powerful radio stations now shrouded in mystery - the OTHR "Duga," which has become iconic for both professional radio operators and radio amateurs all over the planet.
“Why there?” you might ask.
Back in 1976, a powerful unidentified signal began interrupting shortwave transmissions around the globe, interfering with negotiations and public broadcasts in numerous countries. The source of the disturbance was traced to a then region of the USSR, but finding out who or what exactly relayed the signal proved to be impossible as nothing but a humble Young Pioneer summer camp was marked on all the maps at the supposed point of its origin. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the whole world learned of the giant complex of top-secret objects "Chernobyl-2" and "Lubech-1," of which only the OTHR "Duga" survives to the present day. And this is where we went in order to gather the necessary materials for Frequency: Chernobyl.
Imagine yourself standing in a forest in the middle of a deserted military zone, not a living soul in sight... And there, towering right above your head, stand the majestically steep "openwork" steel walls of the transmitting antennas. The spectacle is as beautiful as it is creepy... and very surreal! This is exactly the kind of atmosphere we are trying to recreate in our game.
During our visit, we have shot terabytes worth of photo and video materials that we now use to painstakingly reconstruct the entire location for "Frequency: Chernobyl" in great detail: from the general landscape all the way down to the textures on individual structures and the local vegetation. There is still much work to be done, but we are ready to raise the curtain just a little and share the highlights of the development process so far. Check this out!
Be sure to read the followup article to learn more about the future title's plot and puzzles (we plan to publish it in a week or so).
For now, add Frequency: Chernobyl to your wishlist and follow us on social media of your choosing, be it Facebook, Twitter, or Discord!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1415600/Frequency_Chernobyl/