Solo developer Davit Andreasyan, in partnership with indie.io, invites players to brave the chilling depths of Soviet Antarctica in NEDRA, a new first-person survival horror game. Players step into the Arctic suit of Artur Arayan, a lone survivor trapped between primordial horrors, insane cultists, and the brutal cold, as they uncover ancient secrets that should have remained buried.
Davit Andreasyan is a veteran developer by day, working on AAA games and moonlighting as an auteur horror game maker. Drawing on his lifelong passion for complex stories touching on emotion, psychology, and philosophy, he aims to create atmospheric, experimental games that take creative risks. His first indie title was Inmates, released in 2017 and described by one reviewer as “restoring faith in the horror genre that has seen too many copycats.” Find out more on the developer’s official website.
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What is NEDRA?
Survival lies at the heart of NEDRA‘s gameplay. After a rescue mission goes awry, Arayan becomes the sole survivor, crawling from the burning wreckage into the biting cold. He finds refuge in a secret Soviet research installation, codenamed Aurora, but staying warm presents a new danger. Frostwalkers, twisted remnants of humanity, stalk the frigid wastes, drawn to any heat source.
Players face a difficult choice: dash through the blizzard, hoping to outrun the monsters, or deliberately risk hypothermia to become undetectable. Combat offers little long-term solution. Artur’s limited tools—a crowbar, flare gun, and blowtorch—prove scarcely effective against the horrors.
Players might take down one or two Frostwalkers, but more emerge from the snow, quickly overwhelming them. Warmth, however, presents both risk and opportunity. While heat increases Artur’s visibility, it also makes the creatures more vulnerable, forcing players to weigh every encounter as both a threat and a potential opening.
Should players survive long enough, they will experience a gripping story that reaches far beyond a Soviet research program. Ancient mysteries await among Antarctica’s frozen wastes, primordial secrets that question the very nature of the world and humanity’s role in the greater order of the universe. The plucky Soviet mechanic will discover truths that may have been better left undisturbed, and may have to make an impossible choice no human should be forced to make. This choice, however, is not the end of the story.
NEDRA’s approach to Survival is its largest selling point.
- Make A Choice: Every moment outside a shelter becomes a tense, high-stakes balancing act. Players must choose to stay warm and risk contact with monsters, or stay invisible while slowly freezing to death.
- Stay Alive: Players can use painkillers to prolong life while freezing, or down a horrible mix of iodine and alcohol to keep Artur alive. If all else fails, players can follow in the footsteps of Aurora’s crew and bite into one of the Frostwalker worms to render Arayan invisible, escaping death by embracing its edge.
NEDRA is the first step into an expansive universe crafted by its sole developer, Davit Andreasyan. It serves as both a standalone story and part of a vast web of narratives, mysteries, and lore developed over twenty years in the gaming industry, driven by a passion for the horrific and mysterious.
