Boulder's Gate 4

Disclaimer: This is a work of metafiction. The story about Sergei is not real, and this game was created in its entirety for So Bad It's Good Jam 2025.

The story of this game begins a handful of years ago, though the exact date depends on how you count it.

My part in it started in the dark-yet-hopeful days of 2021 with a chance encounter in a Russian internet forum (what I was doing there I will leave as an exercise for the reader). I was scrolling through pages of Google-translated text and memes that I didn’t understand without context when I happened upon a series of posts from a man named Sergei and the game he was working on.

As far as I could tell, it was an attempt to build his own version of the then-new Baldur’s Gate 3, in Russian and with some arbitrary changes. It wasn’t exactly a good game, or an organized development process on display. It was exactly the kind of jank I live for, the bastard child of Emba-5 and Train Travel Simulator.

I’m being open about that, because that’s what Sergei would have wanted. He was brusque but earnest, and had a very sarcastic, biting wit to him. I won’t render judgement upon him- he was a lost soul, shaped by nature and nurture, like any of us.

This being 2021, living with periodic lockdowns, unstable employment and a general sense of boredom and ennui, I reached out to Sergei in broken, machine-translated Russian. To my surprise, he replied, and over the next months we built a rapport, overcoming the linguistic and cultural barrier with a shared love of bizarre jank, different forms of RPGs, a distaste for American exceptionalism and a probable disregard for copyright law.

At some point we started toying with the idea of me translating the game, making a few tweaks, and releasing it in the English-speaking world. We never really firmed up these plans or drew up any sort of agreement, but I have decided to take the early version I was sent, translate it, and complete it, for one reason.

Early this year, Sergei disappeared.

All that was left that was messages left on unread and posts with no followup. No warning, no explanation, nothing. Scattered, like dust on the wind.

I’d like to imagine that Sergei is off sipping margaritas on a tropical island somewhere, but being realistic, it’s likely something bad happened to him. Like many of us, he had his own struggles. He got COVID in 2020 or 2021, and never fully recovered. He struggled with alcoholism, especially in recent years. And let’s not forget the oppressive regime he lived under.

(all of that is public knowledge, though not well known outside the Russian internet)

This might be the only version of this game released- I don’t know if he ever published anything more complete than the early previews I saw. It’s possible a version exists on a Russian website I don’t know about. I do hope that Sergei is still around somewhere, he is doing well, and I hope he comes back some day.

I hope that I’ve done this game justice, and I know that even if it’s not quite the vision he had, Sergei would appreciate his creation reaching a wider audience to be experienced.