In 1997, Swedish game company Vision Park released the game Kosmopolska on PC CD-ROM. It's a strange and fascinating game, full of interesting gameplay ideas, obscure puzzles and a distinct visual style (much of it based on images by Swedish illustrator Mattias Adolfsson), but hampered by technical problems and limitations.
The game begins with the unnamed main character finding himself locked inside a prison cell, with complete memory loss. The only clues to why he is locked up is supplied by the prison guard, and he is very vague, only suggesting that something terrible has happened. To find out more, you have to explore the cell. Soon, you discover that some items in the cell can be used to transport you away to a strange, colorful world of imagination. This comical, cartoony world is a kind of alternate history in which Poland (under Soviet rule) is engaged in a space race with France, Switzerland and the USA, with three enthusiastic Polish cosmonauts constructing spaceships in order to travel to the Moon and Mars. The overarching mission of the game is to figure out how this "space world" is related to the real world of the prison cell, and thereby find out why you are locked up.
Kosmopolska has several different styles of gameplay. In the black-and-white cell, you can turn around and click on objects in order to solve various strange puzzles. While many of these are pretty interesting, some of them are really difficult and bordering on unfair, with very few clues on how to proceed. Occasionally the prison guard shows up to talk to you, and the conversations are depicted through (non-interactive) FMV sequences with real-life actors. For a 90s CD-ROM game with FMV the acting is actually pretty decent, especially since the actor playing the prison guard is none other than Leif Andrée, a fairly well-known Swedish stage and film actor.
The first few visits to the colorful "space world" consists of non-interactive CG sequences, but soon you take on the role of one of the cosmonauts, and have to go through training in the Polish space centre (the titular Kosmopolska), which is done through a series of minigames (including a variant of Simon Says and a Lunar Lander clone). After that, the gameplay shifts to a very interesting variation on the real time strategy genre, in which you are competing with the other nations to be the first to build various spacecraft. The dynamic here is somewhat different from your typical RTS. Instead of building units and attacking the enemy, you are recruiting scientists and workers and gathering resources to research and construct the various parts needed for the spacecraft, always having to keep an eye on your recruits to make sure that they are busy and aren't just standing around costing money. These strategy segments are interspersed with some other minigames, and with dialogue sequences in which you have to convince various authority figures to give you money for the space race. Here too the voice acting is mostly quite good and entertaining.
The mix of gameplay and the mix of comical cartoonishness with grim black-and-white seriousness, all portrayed in a distinct visual style (and some pretty decent music), has made this a game that has fascinated me for many years. The CG visuals perhaps look a little primitive to modern eyes, but the limitations of the technology is actually made an intentional part of the visuals. Without revealing too much of the plot, I can say that there is a reason why the characters in the "space world" looks and moves like simple marionettes.
With all that said, there are some technical limitations that pose some serious problems. The game is full of bugs and has a tendency to crash at inopportune moments (especially when you've almost reached the end of one of the RTS segments, only to have to play through it all over again), and the sound skips or cuts out completely in several of the movie sequences. The biggest problem, however, is the fact that the game was made to be run specifially in Windows 95, and is almost impossible to run modern machines. I originally played it on a Windows 95 machine back in the 90s, but never finished it then, and when I wanted to return to it many years later, I was out of luck. It was only last year that I finally managed to find a PC emulator that could run it (bugs and all), so that I could finally reach the end and find out the horrifying truth behind my imprisonment.
For those of you reading this, there is an additional problem: The game is entirely in Swedish, and no attempt was ever made to release it in English. And it is very unlikely that a fan translation of the game will ever be made, for several reasons. It's obscure, even in Sweden. It's difficult to get running and technically messy, probably something of a nightmare to hack, not to mention the difficulty of adding some kind of translation to the dialogue in the video segments. And perhaps most importantly, several of the puzzles are based on writing words or even rhyming sentences in Swedish, some requiring the specific Swedish letters Å, Ä and Ö. I have no idea how those puzzles could be translated without a major rewrite.
So, I decided to do the next best thing. I managed to find a video playthrough of the game, and sat down to make a subtitled translation of it. It took me quite a while, but now I can proudly present a completely english subtitled playthrough (not just the spoken dialogue, but also for the text segments) of Kosmopolska (EDIT: And here it is on YouTube as well). I'm not a professional translator, but I've done my best to be accurate to the original Swedish while making the English sound at least somewhat natural. I think this is the closest that non-Swedish-speaking people are going to get to experiencing this obscure, strange and fascinating game. If you are going to watch the video, be aware that while most of the game is pretty innocent aside from a little swearing and drinking, the ending and final revelation is kind of horrifying, containing discussion of murder, and possibly a depiction of a mental breakdown.
Oh, and if there are any other Swedish-speaking Talking Tyrants who want to try actually playing the game, I can provide a brief overview of how I managed to get it running on a modern computer.
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