Initial impressions

As soon as we start, we notice the lack of dubbing, even in English. Therefore, the game is in Russian, but it has an English subtitle. This is easily explained by the fact that 35mm developer is autonomous and probably had bigger concerns, yet, if you don’t understand the language it’s going to be a more complicated experience.

At the beginning of the campaign, we start our journey in a post-apocalyptic world with Petrovich, our main character, and his travel companion, Tedovitch, we don’t know yet if we can trust him, that’s because in one dialogue he says “there’s nothing inside”, referring to the little hut which we started, but there are loots there, such as food and medical kit, after collecting these items, Petrovich grumbles: “But he said there was nothing here”.

Our scenario is a forest, some huts, and places that we can explore, but you have pay attention because our travel companion will not follow you in some peripheral parts and will be waiting for you in the path of the mainline to continue the story.



A story valued by developer

Here we start by congratulating Sergey, the main narrative is the highest point of the game (maybe the only one), well written and surprising, to the point of leaving the player interested and involved. To be honest, when I saw the trailer, I expected something more towards horror, but in the reality, I received more drama, suspense, and almost no scare.

The story has two lines, one that we experience playing and the other appears in flashbacks during the campaign, which shows us the beginning of everything, for example, hospitals full of sick people. The other part is presented by letters and journals left behind on the map and dialogues between travelers and, after some time, with survivors: yes, there are a lot of them. This is explained in an old journal where is possible to discover the mortality of the disease: it has absurd levels of more than 80%! However, some people had antibodies and were able to survive the near extinction of humanity.

With events that happened before, we had a constant feeling of loneliness and anguish, because, even though we had a companion, dialogues are rare and momentary and the environment contributes to that, the abandoned houses, sick people, and not so welcoming dark places, reports of how the chaos has established in the world will also leave us with an enormous sense of sadness, with the increase of despair for essential supplements, from robberies and murders by the lack of law. Closer to the end, avoiding spoilers, the last cutscene has an interesting plot twist.



A little more about Petrovich

35mm brings us closer to our character, showing in one flashback that he had a daughter and a wife, apparently lost with the epidemic, encouraging even more solids feelings of compassion and solitude. A curiosity given by the game, it’s his passion for photography, questioned in a determined moment by Tedovitch if his profession was related to that, he answers that is just a hobby, and through thoughts (we can difference normal dialogues due to the fact that is shown subtitled between asterisk), tell us about his belief of a camera is a little time machine, which through photos we can remember past moments and feelings. Inclusively, the final happens when we interact with the photo album of our family, that is, 35mm promotes interaction with the photographic world, but during the campaign, the camera doesn’t have a function. It’s also possible to see the photos taken in the game menu.



Some mechanics are weird and doesn’t have a clear function

Criticizing more hardly, we don’t receive any instruction at the beginning, just how to walk and the possibility of interact with items, squash down or run and each key to use. Yet, some items don’t have a function or are completely disposable during this short gameplay, counting around 4 hours, I admit that I took more time because I was streaming and wanted to explore everything, and I was stuck in some puzzles (typical of these games) and parts where we need to search for items on the map to be able to progress. The combat is rude, the action part was careless, it doesn’t have a lot of emotion besides the basic ones, we just need to press the key that is shown on the screen several times and we are free from the fight. At this point, 35mm seems like a senseless mix of genres, the survivor is not well done and the idea of using a firearm is not well adapted.

Ugly art and basic sounds

Talking more about the technical part, I understand the difficulty to lunch something independently, probably without support for this development area, but the game graphics are badly optimized, ugly, and rude, even when we put on ultra-mode. The audio, which is so important in suspense games, doesn’t let us down, with environmental sounds and most of the time reinforcing feelings of solitude and music annunciating moments of tension and combat, there are also radios that we can interact and can play Russian sounds and announce some news, contributing to the narrative. Being sincere, for a game of this genre, all of this was not sufficient to make me tense and distressed, thus, the delivered audio is at maximum adequate and minimum simplistic.



We thank the PR team of the Terminals platform to allow us to play 35mm on PC.

35mm is available for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, Switch, and PC.