Perestroika

Year 1990, the Cold War is gasping its last breaths, and someone in the Soviet Union is sitting at a computer programming a game. They name it Perestroika. You'd expect at least a simple political satire, maybe a fallen economy management sim, bread queues simulated in ASCII. You get something completely different.

Perestroika is an arcade romp from Soviet studio LocIS that shares nothing with Gorbachev's reform policies except its name. The player controls a small digit moving across the screen, and the goal is to jump from one floating platform to another, collect money, and reach the goal. No story, no context, no ideology. Pure mechanical puzzle-arcade.

The controls are simple, almost spartan — arrow keys, jump, spatial awareness. Platforms move, vanish, change speed. Falling into the void costs you a life. The game ramps up difficulty gradually and without wild swings, so the early levels are manageable even for someone who's never played anything tougher than Pong, while later screens demand patience and precise timing. The graphics are plain even by 1990 standards, the sound is minimal — Sound Blaster certainly didn't break a sweat here. Yet because of this, or perhaps despite it, the game has a certain raw functionality that won't disappoint.

I remember it as a curiosity — not for its gameplay merits, but for its origin. Perestroika is one of the few computer titles to reach the West straight from Soviet sources, at a time when their software scene was a mystery wrapped in Cyrillic for most of us. That gives it a historical flavor that has aged better than many others from that era. The playability itself hasn't aged dramatically — an arcade from 1990 is simply an arcade from 1990, don't expect more.

Today you'll appreciate it mainly as a five-minute trip to a time when software traveled on floppies across the Iron Curtain and a game's name had nothing to do with its content. You can play it in your browser without installation, without DOSBox, without headaches. If you're into gaming obscurities and like looking at things made somewhere other than California or Japan, it's worth a peek. Just don't expect anything more than a solid little arcade that carries a grand name for no reason whatsoever.