Gaming: You've Never Heard Of It, But A Russian Studio Made A Fantasy Take...

Keep your Baldur's Gate 3s, I'm playing GoldenLand. Or Heath. Whatever it is, I'm playing it.

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Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

There's something about the sprawling isometric RPG that caught on particularly hard in the former Soviet Union, back in the '90s and early 2000s. Perhaps it's an indescribable affinity of the narodnaya dusha—that the Forgotten Realms and Middle-earth speak to something ancestral in the popular spirit: recalling byliny and all the spooky monsters that haunt the white pines, just out of view.

Perhaps it was that they ran pretty good on bad computers and were a decent way of learning English. Hard to say.

Regardless, although I have known that the world east of the Elbe is way into its CRPGs for a long time, I've mostly associated the region's dev scene with, well, GSC Game World and CD Projekt—strange, janky and ambitious games, but not mechanically crunchy isometric CRPGs. That is until a Bluesky post from Felipe Pepe—who wrote (well, edited) the book on CRPGs—came across my feed, all wistful about a series called Zlatogorye, or GoldenLand. I was immediately determined to play it.

And I did. Actually, it was quite easy. GoldenLand 1, released in 2001, isn't available on any storefront I have access to, but it's not hard to find, and installing it is a matter of mounting a .cue file and hitting go. One confusing thing: the game seems convinced its English name is Heath: The Unchosen Path. I guess it is, technically, the game's official English-language name, but everyone online just seems to call it GoldenLand, a semi-translation of its Russian-language name, Zlatogorye (Golden Mountain).

You are a hero(ine). Or you would be. Quite the misfortune: someone went and killed you while a roving band of vygaks—those would be the bad guys—laid waste to your village. But chin up, because you've been revived in order to serve the ends of the Good God Belobog in his struggles against Drah-Shu, who's the evil god who very much oversaw the vygak situation that razed your village to the ground and who, even now, presides over

Source: PC Gamer