Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love Review

An amateur journalist, Evan, finds out that sometimes not everything is what it seems in Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love. Evan over the years has become a fanboy of a country called Matryoshka where he believes THE perfect society exists. It isn’t until his dream of seeing this great nation comes true that he discovers things are a bit different than he was led to believe.

The game is a point and click adventure game where you’ll control Evan, mostly through the different areas of Matryoshka. Upon arriving in the country you’re going to be recruited by an organization bent on creating change, but of course nothing is going to go according to plan. As this is a point and click adventure game you’re going to focus on interacting with your environment, collecting items, completing tasks for other characters, and of course trying to spend more time with a very beautiful, but mysterious lady, who is the reason you end up in the country.

I really enjoyed this game. The art style reminds me of Daedalic Entertainment’s Deponia series, and if I’m being honest the same level of humor was present in the game as well. The game had pretty good pacing, there were a couple of times where I was a little bit lost trying to figure out how to accomplish a specific goal/task (ie. the disguise, sorry can’t say anything more on the subject, don’t want to ruin it for you), but overall if I was observant enough the answers to some of the multi-step puzzles were right in front of me (ie. your personalized stamp, once again SPOILERS so no I’m not going to tell you more ;) ). I think one of the main reasons I was able to stick with the game was that wonderful keystroke that allows you to see all the interactive points in an area. I know it dumbs down some of the exploration in the game, but when you're about to pull your hair out because you just can’t figure something out, man what a relief to have a little help.

The only thing that hurts this game, in my mind, is something completely out of the developer’s hands. I decided to start this game days before the Ukraine invasion by Russia. Now this is a very satirical game, and I immediately saw Russia being Matryoshka, at any other time in this crazy world we live in this fact would have had me rolling on the floor laughing. So here’s the deal, at the end of the game this game is definitely worth picking up and playing from end to end.