Kholat is a first person horror game that claims to be based on the events of the infamous Dyatlov pass incident, where 9 russian students lost their life under very mysterious circumstances. That's a very interesting premise, just imagine, maybe the devs managed to recreate the scene of the inciden, allowing you to explore, find clues, gathering information about the different theories going around and testing their validity in the process. Just, wow.

2bad that doesn't happen

Instead during the first minutes of gameplay, you'll get teleported to a far away snowy valley at night and experience a completely unrelated story, barely connected to the original incident through some diary entries and one scene at the ending. So kinda like Clickbait, in videogame form.

But I can forgive the bait-n-switch if the rest of the game is interesting enough, and it was, at the beginning at least. The story did some interesting stuff, trying to connect various theories about the incident but the fact that it was delivered trough optional notes and letter meant that I was bound not to get 100% of what was going on. Beyond that:

• The valley looks beautiful, thanks to the Unreal™ Engine™ 4™ and the atmosphere is great.
• The main song is pretty good.
• The game only gives you an empty map, a compass and a flashlight and send you on your way, only setting up markers when you find a note or a campsite (more on that later). I like that, it makes me feel like I'm an actually explorer.

Those 3 things are the best aspect about this game IMO, no complains there. I do have complain about the rest, tho.

The map is too big and it's filled with a lot whole of nothing, so it gets pretty boring going from point A to B, specially considering how slow you move. You can only walk or very VERY briefly run, so if you go the wrong way, you are going to enjoy a painfully slow walk back to where you started, which ends up harming the exploration part of the game

You can also find campsites scatter around the map, that allow you to quick travel between them. Cool idea but you can only travel from camp to camp, so you still have to slow-walk/short-run your way to them. But be careful on your way there because if you die you are going to restart from the latest checkpoint, a.k.a. the last time you picked a note in the middle of nowhere or on another camp. If it's the latter then... bad luck i guess, start to short-run again.

Lastly, this is supposed to be a horror game. The thing that chases you is a shadow man, when it gets angry it turns into a red shadow man, very spooky and original. It might also be blind because you can lose him by you turn off your flashlight, so it was barely an obstacle.

Conclusion: It's basically Dyatlov Pass Incident fanfiction. I wouldn't recommend it, unless you love everything even slightly related to the subject. And even if you do, you are probably going to enjoy yourself more by just watching someone else's playthrough.

Rating: 1 or 2 stars, can't decide honestly. I mostly didn't enjoy it, but I also didn't completely hated it. I'll probably never play this again, but it's so short (~3h) that it didn't really feel like a waste of time.