One-Eyed Likho is a grim first-person horror adventure set in a world inspired by a dark, Slavic fairy tale. Explore an unsettling and twisted land set in 19th-century Russia in your endeavor to escape your own evil fate.
I worked with localization collective Warlocs to edit the English version of the game text, along with a companion artbook and comic, translated from Russian by Alexander Preymak. The edited English text was then used as the base for further localization into six more languages.
One-Eyed Likho’s tone is rich and poetic, based in Slavic folklore but also drawing on mythology from around the world. Centering on the figure of Likho, or “evil,” a slippery character who appears in numerous guises across different tales, the game draws connections to diverse related tale types, notably the myth of Odysseus and his encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus.
In addition to character narration and dialogue, One-Eyed Likho also features the Book of Worlds. This is a folklore compendium of variations on the Polyphemus story, numbered 1137 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folk tale types, with pages of new tales the player can collect to read as they progress. Editing this collection of thematically related stories, all drawn from different cultures and with different narration styles, was a really enjoyable challenge. For some tales, we could draw on existing English-language versions, but many others came from Russian-only sources.
I learned a ton working on this project—not just about this family of tale types, but also new terms and cultural concepts in Russian clothing, folklore, religious iconography, and architecture. (Like what is a podklet of an izba, how is it different from a cellar, and do we have a term for this in English? No? And what the heck is a “red corner”?)
This is a game I would have been excited to get my hands on just as a player, but I’m especially grateful to have gotten the chance to work on it as an editor and help make this gorgeous, moody, striking game more accessible to a wider audience.