Zaslon and its factions
The place is the plot: a camp that outlived the system that built it.
Zaslon is the last GULAG on earth, now run by its former prisoners. Three nations hold it, one believes it is superior to the other two, and they rose under Mnogogrishny, a former aviation engineer.
Zaslon is the name of the place and the name of the problem. The game calls it the last GULAG on earth: a secret Soviet site in the Siberian taiga where the regime kept its best scientists together with the prisoners it could not release, and where, by 1969, the prisoners are the ones giving orders.
The setup, as the store page states it
The GULAG system was abolished under Khrushchev — but not for everyone. The most dangerous inmates were sent to Zaslon, and among them were people the state still needed alive: engineers, physicists, specialists. They rebelled under Mnogogrishny, a former aviation engineer, and won what the store page calls an illusory independence. The camp is now run by its former prisoners.
You are Morok, the son of one of the scientists who developed a secret weapon on this site, built around a mineral that is found only here. The store page names it tungsten; the October 2026 sale announcement names it tungusium. Both are the studio's own wording, six months apart, and they describe the same thing: a local ore that makes the weapon possible and makes Zaslon worth holding.
| Entity | What official material says |
|---|---|
| Zaslon | The last GULAG on earth; a secret Siberian site run by former prisoners |
| Morok | Player character; son of a scientist who built the weapon here |
| Mnogogrishny | Former aviation engineer; led the uprising |
| The three nations | Three groups of former prisoners who resisted communist rule; one considers itself superior to the other two |
| The mineral | Tungsten (store page) / tungusium (October sale post); found only in this region |
| Local peoples | Evenks and Tungus, named in the August 2026 festival announcement, living inside the mysticism of their legends |
| Historical figures | The store page promises encounters with real historical figures who were a threat to the regime |
The three nations, and why the number matters
Three is not decoration. The store page describes a balance of power that has already broken: three nations of former prisoners held the territory together against the state, and one of them has decided it is better than the other two. Every faction interaction you have in the game sits inside that fracture — which is also why the achievement list is built around liberating places rather than capturing them.
The names that appear in official text are settlements, not factions: Vanavara, Sverdlovo, Nahirna Zachepilivka and Vanavara-Zachepilivka. Two of those are objectives in the achievement list, one appears in a patch note about a broken door, and one appears in a patch note about NPC pathing. They are your geography for the whole game.
Where the story comes from
The developers describe the script as fan fiction inspired by The Tiger Hunters, a well-known Ukrainian adventure novel; the store page reduces the same claim to "a storyline based on a popular adventure novel". The setting is that novel's world pushed into the Soviet camp system and into the Tunguska anomaly.
That origin explains the tone. This is not a documentary about the GULAG and it is not a Soviet-era military sim; it is an adventure story that uses a real historical apparatus as scenery, then drops a meteorite into it. The store page's closing line for the player is blunt about the register it wants: "Better to live running than to rot alive."
What is beyond the fence
Everything outside the settlements is anomaly ground: a meteorite impact that broke ordinary physics, magnets of opposing polarity in the rock generating the floating Petryks, and legends that have started walking around in the flesh. That is a separate subject and it has its own page.
If you want the practical version — how to move through this territory, what to save before, what breaks — start with how to play and keep quest progression for when a task goes quiet.
