Independent Russian game developer and publisher Sergey Noskov gives us a fascinating but overwhelming picture of St. Petersburg in 2052, where humanity lives alongside androids and other nonhuman robots, as well as mysterious digital entities called Phantoms. All of this is done through a mechanically simple logical-arcade production.
PC users had a chance to get to know the 7th Sector in March last year, and in February 2020 the title was expanded with new platforms – Xbox One, PS 4 and Nintendo Switch. The game controls and the basic principles of its operation are by no means complicated, so rest assured – when creating ports, there was simply nothing to break and, as expected, my console copy did a great job.
As I mentioned, the title is quite simple to use. In fact, we are dealing here with a side scroller – we move the controlled character to the left or right, and the frame obediently follows her, keeping her more or less in the center of the screen. In this way, we avoid various traps and solve logical puzzles, which usually come down to the skillful use of switches and other simple devices or selecting the appropriate options on the computer terminals we encounter. There are, of course, some exceptions to this, depending largely on what form we follow. What I mean?
Excuse me, what am I actually?
The 7th Sector is characterized by the fact that in every respect it throws us into deep water. We do not receive any introduction to the plot or any tutorial. The game just begins – we see a handful of information about which button is responsible for what … well, that’s it. Thus we become a spark of energy in a braided wire that can whip wherever the cable goes, and jump to other links when they come close enough to our “figure”. This is how we move through the first levels – sneaking from one wire to another and activating various machines or switches that give us access to subsequent circuits, thanks to which we keep going. However, it does not end there!
At later stages, we will be able to get out of the cables and take control of other “bearers” of our being – and there are quite a few of them. We will become, among others: a toy, remote-controlled car, a self-moving ball (which reminded me a bit of the Roomba cleaning robot), a futuristic drone hovering in the air, or a four-legged battle droid with a cannon attached to the “head”. We take the most interesting form only in the final stages, but I will not reveal what it is, so as not to spoil the surprise for people interested in the plot.
A do-it-yourself story!
One of the more intriguing aspects of the 7th Sector is undoubtedly the way the story is presented to us in the background. This game definitely has a storyline, despite the fact that there are no dialogues, entries in the “journal” available from the menu, or anything else. As already mentioned, Sergei Noskov throws us into the whirlwind of events without any introduction or exhibition presenting the realities of this universe.
We learn everything about the depicted world “on the run”, observing what is happening around us, reading propaganda posters or content painted on the walls in the form of not very sophisticated graffiti. As a result, most of the information is not served to us directly, and how much we understand from the story after completing our adventure with the 7th Sector largely depends on our perceptiveness and the ability to draw conclusions from incomplete and sometimes also ambiguous data. This form of presenting the story may not convince everyone, but it was conducted really professionally; in the end it even dragged me in, though I was quite skeptical at first.
You’re not panimaje? You won’t go any further!
In general, all the fun is based on logical puzzles interspersed with arcade sequences. The puzzles can be moderately diverse, but usually boil down to guessing the appropriate order of switching the “switches” available in a given location, solving a simple system of equations or obtaining a code securing a door or a computer terminal from the elements of the environment. On the other hand, arcade games test our reaction time in a fairly classic way, the ability to plan movements for a few steps ahead or the most ordinary skill in clicking buttons on the pad. The former oscillate between average and really difficult, while the latter are not particularly complicated and nobody will throw the controller out of the window because of them.
When discussing the puzzles standing in the player’s way, however, we need to talk about the only serious drawback of 7th Sector – the missing translation. As the game is set in cyberpunk St. Petersburg and its author is Russian, the original language version of the title is, of course, the Russian version. There would be nothing wrong with that, if not for the fact that everyone who does not speak Russian will simply not understand some things.
This production supports other languages as much as possible, and at the beginning we will not notice any errors when playing the English version – the menu is completely translated, as well as the instructions related to the controls appearing in the first stages, and we will not experience any errors in them. Unfortunately, we will soon see that a lot of inscriptions visible in the game world as graffiti, the content of posters or advertisements is only in Russian. They are integrated into the textures displayed to us, which we see in their original form. Somehow, no one thought about replacing such elements of the environment in favor of people playing in other languages, nor even offered us “cinema” subtitles at the bottom of the screen explaining what we cannot read.
In this way, we miss a lot of the atmosphere of this universe and the side information describing the original world of Noskowo, because, as I have already mentioned, non-interactive elements of the environment are the main method of communication between the title and the player. This, unfortunately, is not the worst yet. Fleeting flavors of this type can be regretted somehow, but it is more difficult to get over the fact that the translation has not been given some clues to solve the puzzles.
Some of the puzzles near the start of the game seemed a bit pointless to me, but I managed to get through them by trial and error. It frustrated me a bit, but I kept going and stopped thinking about it. At some point, unfortunately, I was not able to solve a puzzle requiring a specific number that I could not find anywhere. After a dozen or so minutes of complete confusion and fruitless searches, I turned on the Internet … how did I find out that this stage is very easy, as long as we read the sentence written on the glass in Cyrillic.
Not knowing Russian, I considered the inscription to be another insignificant detail of the surroundings, and yet without reading it, it is simply impossible to solve the puzzle – well, unless someone has time to try all possible combinations of the four-digit code. Looking back, I realized that most of the puzzles I previously thought were pointless were accompanied by e-mails available in terminals, which were also written entirely in Russian. Regardless of all my sympathy for this game, I cannot understand how the developers could have made such a culpable mistake and failed to ensure that all the content necessary to solve the mandatory puzzles and, consequently, complete the title was translated.
