You know that special feeling when you finish a game, close the app, and then sit and stare at the wall for 10 minutes, just digesting it? When the lump in your throat appears not during the credits, but half an hour before the end, because you already know how it’s going to end, but you’re still hoping against hope that you’re wrong? I’ve had that happen a dozen times in my life. In Planescape: Torment, in The Last of Us, in Disco Elysium and The Alters.
And now—in Hail to the Rainbow, an indie game from a Russian developer about a deaf and mute kid with a wrench and a cyber-Niva. The developer, Sergey Noskov, has been making games for over ten years. “35 mm,” “The Giant,” “Seventh Sector”—all of them were unique, atmospheric, but always a little rough around the edges. They all felt like they had potential that was just beyond the limits of one person’s abilities.
Well, in Hail to the Rainbow, Sergey didn’t just break through that ceiling, he kicked it down, drove a Niva over it, and completed three victory laps. And the result is ten to fifteen hours of pure, genuine, sometimes infuriating, but incredibly lifelike adventure.
Spoiler alert: I’ll be covering both the gameplay and the story. I’ll keep spoilers in a separate section titled exactly so.
Atmosphere & Aesthetics
Hail to the Rainbow takes place in an alternate Russia, roughly equivalent to the 2020s, but technology has developed differently in the in-game world compared to the real one. No smartphones or holograms. Instead, there are monitors, analog consoles, and bulky computers with green screens. And concrete is everywhere. Brutalism, constructivism, massive buildings, underground bunkers, and gigantic industrial complexes. Add to this an eternal winter, thick fog, falling snow, and somewhere on the horizon, frozen three-legged robot hunters.
Sergey drew inspiration from the paintings of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, from Blade Runner, Alien: Isolation, Half-Life 2, and, yes, from Atomic Heart. A long-dead world through which a lonely boy wanders.
And you believe in this world. You believe every scratch on the wall, every rusty pipe, every crunch of snow underfoot. True, the crunch of snow was a bit of a misstep. The sound of walking on snow here is… strange, more like an engine starting up. For a game set in a snowy setting, this is an unforgivable oversight.
Otherwise, the visual narrative is top-notch. Each location tells its own story. The abandoned cosmonautics museum, with exhibits that have become junk. The Golden Brains scientific complex, with capsules where the bodies of those connected lie in cryostasis. The village by the lake, with the home of a robot writer suffering from writer’s block. You just walk and look, and you don’t need long dialogues. The world speaks for itself.
There are also direct references to real architecture. The “Cascade” complex in the game is almost a spitting image of the Yerevan Cascade. Statues, staircases, fountains—everything is recognizable. It’s clear that the designer approached the design with passion, and didn’t just throw in assets from the store.
Gameplay – Why I Love and Hate This Game
The game features a Niva SUV, which you assemble piece by piece in the garage. And when you get behind the wheel for the first time, you must:
- Turn on the ignition with a dedicated button.
- Depress the clutch.
- Shift into first gear.
- Gently press the gas pedal.
- If the road is snowy, shift into low gear.
- If it’s dark, use the headlights.
- If it’s snowing, use the windshield wipers.
- If you want music, insert a cassette into the stereo.
This isn’t Need for Speed. This isn’t even an arcade game at all. This is a tactile experience I haven’t gotten since the first time I drove a real car. You feel every gear, you hear the gearbox squeak. You see the snow melting on the windshield and dripping down.
And it’s pure, unadulterated joy when you’re driving along an empty winter highway, blasting Nobody’s Nail Machine, and just… floating. Frozen three-legged robots, abandoned gas stations, and the old “Glory to the Rainbow!” posters float past. The world is dead, but you’re alive.
Of course, there are some oddities: the rearview mirrors didn’t work at launch, but they added this feature in a patch. The reverse button with a manual transmission is a controversial decision, but you get used to it. And the car is practically invulnerable: the only time I lost it was in a story scene, and it was painful. But driving through a minefield in a Niva is a special kind of pleasure and stress at the same time.
And now about the annoying part.
Our protagonist Ignat is not a super soldier, he’s a rather skinny teenager, and it shows. Melee combat consists of two strikes (light and heavy) and a block, which, to be honest, I hardly ever used. Hitting robots with a wrench is a dubious endeavor. They hit back hard, and it takes you a long time to recover. Some enemies’ attacks are poorly communicated: you just suddenly lose health and have no idea where it came from. There’s no dodge, only a block, which doesn’t always save you.
Firearms include a shotgun and a submachine gun. Shooting with a gamepad is hell. I don’t know if the patches have tweaked it yet, but aiming was awkward. Ironically, Ignat can soak up a ton of bullets and still survive, but his aim is hampered… who knows. Apparently, the developer wanted to show that the guy is an engineer, not a fighter. But then why is he so resilient?
The enemy hitboxes are a whole other story. In one episode, I had to reload several times simply because I couldn’t hit a spiderbot, standing so close to it. Bullets passed through its limbs without doing any damage. It was incredibly annoying.
But there are some positives. The impact of hits is brutal—when you land a critical hit, the game slows down, and you watch the robot fall apart. When you shoot the head, the enemy falls back. The gunshot sounds are loud. Overall, the combat isn’t central, and that’s a good thing. The main focus here is exploration.
Our Ignat has health, cold, hunger, and radiation meters. Sounds a bit like a suffering simulator, doesn’t it? But no, the balance here is average, but there are nuances.
On the one hand, you rarely die from hunger or cold. Everything is cured with a couple of clicks. The survival system works more nominally: if you’re cold, warm yourself by the fire; if you’re hungry, eat. All these parameters function identically, and there’s almost no real influence from the environment. I never figured out whether cold itself reduces health: I noticed the drop and simply replenished it any way I could.
On the other hand, there’s resource management. For some reason, Ignat can only carry seven components and seven chemicals, while crafting most useful items requires two components and one chemical. As a result, chemicals are consistently overstocked and components are in short supply, which means additional resources simply don’t fit in the inventory. This is a clear imbalance that I hope will be corrected.
And here we come to the most controversial part. Hail to the Rainbow has puzzles that are brilliant and infuriating.
They’re unconventional. They’re not about “moving a statue into the right hole” or “connecting pipes.” They’re about finding a date in a two-minute film projected to open a safe or realizing that the numbers in a painting are a stereogram you’ll never see (and eventually opening a guide). Or maybe you like solving a math problem while a crazy robot knocks on the door?
On the one hand, it’s original. Games haven’t made me think like that for a long time. On the other hand, it’s not obvious. I got stuck for 20-40 minutes several times simply because I couldn’t figure out where to go. One of the moments was that I had to grab the handlebars from a bicycle that was just sitting in the corner, looking like props. And then use those handlebars to climb down from the roof. How was I supposed to figure it out?
Or another example: on the boat, you had to press Ctrl to duck and avoid being shot. What game have you ever seen controls like that in? I haven’t. So I spent half an hour dying and didn’t understand why. Thank goodness for the internet. Advice: don’t be shy about Googling. The game is worth it. Don’t ruin your experience because you’re stuck in a hallway for an hour.
Sometimes the game goes overboard and turns searching for the right piece of paper or password into a chore, especially when the locations get larger and new ones are added to the familiar ones. But in the right moments, this design truly rewards the attentive player, rather than wasting time.
The game doesn’t have a message log or a database for saved notes, codes, or hints. Everything is supposed to be memorized. For some, this is a plus (the player isn’t distracted by menus), for others, it’s a minus (it’s easy to forget a four-digit code, especially when there are five of them in the game). I’m of the latter camp. At least a simple text log on Ignat’s tablet would have been nice.
The controls are generally odd and the button layout isn’t intuitive. For example, the shotgun is on the number “5,” and the drone is on the number “4.” In the heat of battle, it’s easy to press the wrong button, and then instead of firing, you launch drone controls and freeze in place. At least you can rebind the buttons, but by default, it’s torture.
What the game does well is create small, interactive actions. Connect a wire to a capacitor, twist a nut, assemble a detector from components, play tic-tac-toe (and the AI actually thinks, the patterns don’t repeat), fly Floppy Bird. It’s all animated, everything requires your participation, and it’s incredibly satisfying.
The drone is a whole other story. You can use it to scout the area, drop ladders, flip switches, and distract enemies. And the technical implementation is fantastic: when you control the drone, the game renders two images simultaneously—the drone’s first-person view and Ignat’s view as he stands still. It’s a significant workload, but on decent hardware it flies smoothly.
Plot and Narrative – Spoiler-Free
Ignat is an orphan. Or rather, he considers himself an orphan. His mother died under mysterious circumstances, and his father volunteered for the front and disappeared. He lives in a bunker, corresponding with the mysterious Nikola (trading him for parts for food and resources), and communicating via radio with Mikhail, a former teacher who lives in an unknown location and never shows his face.
One day, Ignat receives a message on his computer: “Hello, son. There’s a whole universe inside you. Remember?” A phrase his father wrote on his guitar. Ignat decides to check where the signal came from.
And so the adventure begins. You’ll drive a Niva through snowy hills, visit abandoned cities, explore scientific complexes, descend into dungeons, sail a boat, run from robots, and shoot them. You’ll be pursued by one particular mechanic, Igor, who, for some reason, really wants to kill you. And only towards the end will you understand why.
The story isn’t about a hero saving the world. It’s about a boy searching for his father. And about a world that fell apart because of ordinary human greed, stupidity, and the desire to be better.
The plot is told through flashbacks that Ignat sees as he falls asleep. It works brilliantly. One flashback in particular—Christmas morning as a child, with a Christmas tree, presents, and the Chip ‘n’ Dale theme song playing in the background. In that moment, you don’t just see a child on screen—you become that child yourself, and decades pass before your eyes, years left behind. This is the kind of memory of a lost past that can only be awakened by a project created by someone who grew up in the same reality.
Spoilers Ahead – Skip to the Technical State Section to Avoid Them
You have been warned. The following text is for those who have already played it or don’t mind spoiling the experience.
The catastrophe in the world of Hail to the Rainbow didn’t occur because of a “machine uprising” in the classic sense. Robots are people. More precisely, their consciousnesses, transferred into mechanical bodies through the “sleeper program” and Vernadsky’s helmet.
The program was created as a blessing: the terminally ill, the elderly, and veterans were given a “second chance.” Their real bodies were placed in cryostasis, and their consciousnesses controlled the robots. But the system quickly degenerated into slavery. Mechanics were forced to work in factories, mines, and service industries—24/7, without rest, without pay. They had no rights and were cheap labor. Those who couldn’t cope went crazy: they attacked people, smashed everything around them and got called “deviants.” But the number of deviants kept growing. And at some point, they realized: there are millions of us, and only a few of them.
The war didn’t start because of evil machines. The war started because people decided they had a right to other people’s lives.
Ignat lost his hearing and voice due to a medical error during a neural interface implant surgery. His father, Viktor, an engineer at Raduga, tried to bring the surgeon to justice. But everything was shrouded in corruption and bureaucracy.
Then his father committed the irreparable. He illegally connected to the Sakhaty combat drone and killed the surgeon… and his entire family. The police quickly identified him. During the arrest, Ignat’s mother was accidentally killed—she was struck by a police robot. Victor was forcibly connected to a combat mechanic and sent to the front. Ignat ended up in an orphanage. Everything he remembered was a lie. His father is no hero. He’s a murderer.
The game has two main endings and two secret ones.
Main (good): Ignat finds his father’s body—a Sakhaty combat drone that crashed. Mikhail offers to give up his backup battery to revive the drone, but warns that after doing so, it will shut down forever. Ignat refuses. He’s not ready to sacrifice a friend who has become almost like a father to meet his biological father, a murderer. They leave together. A bittersweet ending.
Main (bad): Ignat agrees. Mikhail dies. Ignat connects to his father’s consciousness through Vernadsky’s helmet. They meet—but the price is too high.
Secret Ending 1: If you go down to the secret bunker (the one with the strange anomalies) in the first chapter, you can open a door that “wasn’t there before.” Behind it is a robot copy of Ignat. This is a reference to Sergey’s other game (“Red Lake”) and the SCP universe. You meet yourself, but not human.
Secret Ending 2: If, after receiving the information about your father, you don’t go to the boat, but go up to the roof of the academy and destroy the main translator, all the mechanics will shut down. Including Mikhail. All the robots die. Ignat is left alone in an empty world. Without a friend, without a purpose, without hope.
I chose the first one and I don’t regret it. Because Mikhail is the heart of the game, and when he says, “I understand your feelings very well, Ignat,” you believe him. He’s the only one who’s stayed by your side all these years. He deserves to live.
Technical State, Visual, Sound
The game is made in Unity 2019 but it looks like it was made in UE5. Sergey is an artist, and it shows. The lighting, textures, and models are top-notch. Especially the snow. I don’t know how he did it, but the snow here… almost feels real. Almost because the walking sound, as I mentioned, is a bit lacking. I hope they fix that.
When it comes to the optimization, I’m getting a stable 140+ FPS in 2K on an RTX 4070 Super without scaling. On Steam Deck, it’s 60 FPS with minor drops in complex scenes. It’s better to play on PC, but it’s also playable on Deck. I haven’t encountered any crashes or critical bugs the entire time—a rare occurrence for an indie project.
However, the visual has its downsides: the human models. This is a particular pet peeve of mine. It’s the most unimmersive aspect of the game. The vehicles, architecture, sky, fog, robots—everything looks consistent. The rubbery, unnatural faces of the characters stand out from the overall picture. They look like dolls. Perhaps this is a limitation of Unity or a lack of experience in sculpting. But the fact remains: cutscenes with people (and there are few of them) are an eyesore. Kudos to the author for blurring the faces in flashbacks—at least it’s somewhat justified by the memory loss.
Level design is excellent in some areas, a bit rough in others. Some locations feel empty and artificial, as if you’re watching an unfinished Blender render. Sometimes the game lacks clear navigation: you simply don’t know where to go and end up running in circles. In particularly bad cases, the developer even drew literal arrows on the ground to point the way. This is a sure sign that the level design isn’t fully developed.
The music in Hail to the Rainbow is a special love. Nobody’s Nail Machine and Dmitry Blinov wrote tracks that you want to listen to separately from the game. Especially the cassette tapes in the car. There are melancholy melodies, jokes about Petka, and songs. The weapon sounds and robotic hums are all top-notch. But the sound of walking in the snow, as already mentioned, is a disaster. And this is despite the game having a snowy setting! How could they not bother with proper samples?
Hail to the Rainbow isn’t for everyone. If you’re used to map markers, hints, and autopilot, you’ll get stuck on the first puzzle and curse everything. But if you’re yearning for atmospheric adventures where the world speaks to you in the language of details, not dialog boxes, then pick it up without hesitation.
If you want to understand what one person can accomplish in six years, with a brain, hands, and a burning heart, play it. If you love winter, snow, old Soviet cars, melancholy tracks, and stories that make you want to cry, this is it.
I play a lot. I’ve seen dozens of AAA projects with budgets that would give Sergey Noskov a heart attack. And you know what? Most of them are soulless assembly lines. They’re beautiful, they’re technically perfect, but they have no heart.
Hail to the Rainbow has a heart. It beats to the rhythm of the Niva’s windshield wipers, in every crunch of the snow (yes, even that weird one), in every note, in every phrase Mikhail utters. This is a game made by someone who loves what they do. And that love is transmitted to the player.
Yes, there are some flaws. Yes, sometimes the unobvious puzzles make you want to smash your monitor. But when you reach the end, look at the credits, where it says “a project by Sergey Noskov”—and almost no one else—you just want to stand up and applaud.
