OKUREK

OKUREK is a roughly 40 minute, single-sitting folk horror game in which the player looks after a farm for someone who has left in a hurry. A note on the kitchen table asks for the cucumbers to be tended and the flowers to be watered. The farm is an isolated homestead at the foot of Bohemia’s sandstone cliffs, in the 1980s Black Triangle, an area marked by mining towers, a lake formed by excavation, a rust-coloured creek and trees stripped bare by smoke. A purple rot is also spreading through the player’s plots.

The core gameplay is a daily farming routine. The player plows plots, plants seeds, waters crops, harvests cucumbers, collects eggs and seals pickling jars. The source material states the work is repetitive on purpose. The jars of pickles on the shelf can talk, and each has a different philosophy on helplessness. A deer prophet that speaks in rhyme also appears. As the routine breaks down, the player must find what started the rot and then choose between two endings: burning everything down, or sealing and preserving it.

The game has no death screen and no fail state, and is described as a story about inevitability rather than skill. It features two concurrent rots, one personal and one industrial, and a PS1-era low-poly visual style. The developer lists Color Out of Space, Annihilation and No One Lives Under the Lighthouse as inspirations, and compares its play to What Remains of Edith Finch, Paratopic and No One Lives Under the Lighthouse.