KGB was the acronym of
famous (or rather infamous) Komitet Gosudarstvyennoy Bezopasnosti,
or Committee of State Security. In other words, Russian intelligence
agency. In most games you’d play the dashing CIA agent, intent
on fighting godless commies and your
adversaries would be KGB agents.

Not so in KGB.
You play a dashing KGB operative, Maksim Rukov. But it is 1991
and the times have changed. the Eastern Bloc is largely gone, the
Soviet Union is crumbling and the power of the Party is no longer
absolute. Perestroika and Glasnost are in full swing… and instead
of fighting imperialist and/or zionist swine, you are assigned
to Department P of Moscow KGB and investigate internal corruption
within KGB itself. And who knows, CIA agents might actually be
your friends, not enemies.

First I must mention one
feature of the game that truly impressed me – the writing style.
The authors must have had a consultant with very good knowledge
of Soviet life. I had the misfortune to be born in a communist
country and I must say that the phraseology was spot on in all
its awfulness. The talk about the Party, soviet achievements, the “sword
and shield” of the state (yes, that was KGB) – it was so absurd
as to be funny. As long as you did not have to live in it.

But let’s start at the
beginning. Your first task in KGB is to investigate the murder of a certain
Mr. (or is that ‘comrade’?) Golitsin, ex-KGB operative who decided
to leave the warm bosom of the agency and set up his own business
as a private detective, and action that smacks of individualism,
free-marketeerism and several other -isms.

But now comrade Golitsin
is dead, shot by an unknown assailant. So much for free enterprise.
Your investigation of his office will reveal that he was on the
track of a Moscow mafia gang which may have been run by and employed
other ex-KGB agents (who apparently decided to venture into the
stormy waters of the even more free enterprise).

The gang is apparently
producing snuff videos – recordings of torture, mutilation and
killings. Live recordings. I should say that KGB is definitely not for the squeamish players.
There are no graphic depictions of violence, but even some of the
textual descriptions are enough to turn one’s stomach. The snuff
videos are apparently somehow being smuggled out of the country
and most likely exchanged for some other contraband.

The plot soon thickens
– a number of gangs, KGB factions, CIA agents are involved and
there seem to be some major conspiracies going on. In fact towards
the end I was almost unable to follow the action, simply because
of the sheer number of characters, factions, motives and objectives.
You will unravel the mystery if you are lucky – and if you play
your cards right.

It should be obvious that
all this is a very dangerous business. And indeed, failure or death
lurk at every corner. Besides the danger of being killed, if you
fail in your investigation (and that is very easy), you will be
sent to some remote part of the Soviet Union and given plenty of
time to contemplate your failure.

The puzzles per se are
not that difficult in KGB. One or two ciphers, interrogations and
classic inventory puzzles. Where the difficulty comes is the timing.
While KGB is not a real time game, time does flow within the game
and it is very important. You have to be in the right place at
the right time. What’s worse, the order of your actions is of extreme
import. If you for instance interrogate someone too early, you
may miss vital clues. But if you come back later, the people won’t
talk to you. Dead ends galore.

This leads to some serious
amount of backtracking – which I did not consider very fun at all.
You will often discover that you failed to do something earlier
and will have to replay a part of the game. Sometimes it’s easy
– if you die or otherwise fatally fail, you will be allowed to
take a step back which usually (but not always) lets you try some
more fruitful approach. But you will still often be forced to reload
an earlier game and possibly replay long segments.

This is made more difficult
by the fact that there are only four save game slots. This is not
as bad as it sounds, but it does mean that you have to be careful
with “save early, save often” because you might not be able to
return to a “good” save after you’ve run into a dead end. The game
is split into four independent chapters, but two of them are quite
long and if you are unlucky, you might have to restart the entire
chapter (there’s an option to do that).

Let’s examine the technicalities
now. The game was released in 1992 and that obviously shows. Graphics
are VGA 320×200, 256 colors. Not exactly impressive but not really
that awful to look at. There is very little animation, most screens
are completely static. Of course the game fit on a few floppies,
it’s from the pre-CD-ROM era.

Music is Ad Lib style,
again not exactly bad but certainly not up to today’s standards.
Pleasant enough to listen to though. There is no digitized sound
so I can’t say how awful the voice acting was.

The interface is slightly
unusual. It is fully mouse controlled and right click pops up an
action menu. The default is “smart pointer” which will select the
most appropriate action when you hover over an object. At several
points in the game you will have to manually select other actions
though, for instance when you need to hide or move dead bodies
out of sight. The inventory screen is separate and you can investigate
and manipulate inventory objects to your heart’s content there.
Most of them are not really useful anyway. There’s also a map but
I did not find it all that useful.

An important element of
the gameplay are the dialogues, and unlike many (or most) other
games they are parts of the puzzle in KGB. What and how you ask people matters.
You may not always have enough time to exhaust all dialogue options
so you must choose the questions carefully. And if you say the
wrong thing, you may miss vital clues or worse. Much worse. It
is amazing what KGB agents or mobsters will do when they’re upset.

KGB in
my opinion manages to recreate the atmosphere of the crumbling
Soviet empire quite well. Not that that’s a very pretty picture,
but it is certainly interesting. The conspiracy plot is rather
complex, perhaps even a little too complex. The almost constant
need for backtracking is a definite negative in my mind. It makes
the game much more difficult, which is okay, but also less fun
by forcing you to repeatedly play parts of the game, which is not.
My final grade is a C+.

Final Grade: C+

System Requirements:

• 386/20
• DOS
• 500 K Memory
• CDROM
• Adlib
• Soundblaster
  compatible