Domestic solo developer Sergey Noskov is back with a new, intimate post-apocalyptic adventure where cozy warmth coexists with longing for home and a touch of hopelessness. Like many projects created by a single author, the game balances between successful finds and natural limitations. But from the outset, it's clear that it has enough imagination, attentiveness, and authorial style to stand firmly on its feet. What is Hail to the Rainbow like? Let's find out in our review.
The Land of Lost Cyberpunk
Hail to the Rainbow doesn't waste the player's time and immerses you from the first minutes into the life of a young man named Ignat, forced to survive alone somewhere on the fringes of civilization in Russia in the near future. The game doesn't explain the world's structure with long monologues or cutscenes, but shows it through the hero's actions and the tasks he faces.
The first steps take place in an abandoned space museum. Ignat comes here with a simple goal: to get a capacitor to power up de-energized devices. This isn't a game convention, but part of the internal logic: in a world that once advanced far in technological development, until everything collapsed into the abyss, electricity is valued no less than food or warmth. The museum also serves not only as part of the narrative, but also as a testing ground where the game rather harshly introduces how to interact with the world here.
Interactive items are almost indistinguishable from the environment, the interface doesn't give global hints, and notes aren't recorded in a separate journal. To find a way out, open another door or safe, you have to carefully read the notes, extract codes and hints from the text, pay attention to details, and notice visual markers in the interiors.
There are segments where you literally need to interact with objects to open the way further: look for keys, pull levers, bring de-energized panels back to life, and start mechanisms. The hero also has a drone, and in some episodes, the game encourages you to actively use its capabilities — not only for aerial reconnaissance, but also to drop a ladder, open a locked door, or reach a collectible photograph hidden away from the main route.
In addition, Noskov regularly uses small mini-games and technical actions. There's hacking, where you need to isolate the correct fragments from a digital pattern in a limited time; there's unscrewing bolts by rotating the stick; there's assembling and repairing items, when you have to drag the parts into the correct positions without intrusive hints. Sometimes such interactions seem excessive, but in the context of a project essentially made by one person, their very variability and manual elaboration inevitably surprise and continue to surprise throughout the game.
This approach works great for immersion, but it also has a downside. Hail to the Rainbow hardly makes allowances for inattentiveness. If you're used to bright markers on the mini-map and a separate tab with active tasks, the museum will quickly make it clear that there won't be any of that here. It's an honest but tough move.
Sometimes the game goes too far and turns the search for the right piece of paper or password into wandering in circles, especially when the locations become larger and new techniques are added to the familiar ones. However, in successful moments, this design really rewards the attentive player, rather than wasting time. In small spaces like the museum, the balance is maintained accurately, and if you manage to get out of here without outside help, the rest of the game won't cause any particular problems — the project doesn't sprawl in scale, and most of the future locations remain linear, even when snowy wastelands spread around.
The Long Road Home
Having reached the shelter, Ignat finally gets a respite. Here you can read messages from survivalists, play tic-tac-toe or a small side-scroller, and listen to Dmitry Blinov's melancholic soundtrack. I confess, if there were more tracks on the computer, I would have lingered here for a long time.
But Hail to the Rainbow isn't an extraction survival game about endless sorties and returns to base. On the old computer, Ignat finds a letter that, judging by its content, could only have been sent by one person — his father, whose fate has been unknown for many years. After repairing the rickety Niva and completing preparations, Ignat sets off on a journey through the inhospitable expanses of Russia, where the consequences of a long-ago catastrophe are felt at every step.
The further story isn't built on saving the world or a global threat — everything has already happened, and the world will never be the same. This is Ignat's personal journey, an attempt to restore a connection with the past that he thought was long lost. For this story, Sergey Noskov creates a surprisingly plausible alternative reality — a variation on the theme of "what if a technological revolution had occurred in the Soviet Union." Something like Atomic Heart, but closer to our reality, and therefore hits more accurately.
Abandoned villages, stations, laboratories, and peeling signs, through which Ignat makes his way, are full of details reminiscent of the fact that people once really lived here, even if they shared space with machines. Each location is an independent puzzle, a small story where at least something from the past life has been preserved: scraps of records, forgotten things, and sometimes working mechanisms that have outlived their creators.
Anxious dreams and fragments of memories, into which the player plunges when Ignat falls asleep, only further fuel interest and slightly lift the veil of secrecy. They not only restore the chronicle of the disaster, explaining how Ignat manages to survive, where he gets his engineering skills, and why he is silent, but also deliver a powerful nostalgic uppercut. In one of these flashbacks — a morning on New Year's Eve: Ignat wakes up, runs to the Christmas tree to open gifts, and somewhere in the background sounds the familiar "Chip-chip-chip-chip and Dale are rushing to you…"
And at this moment, the player doesn't just see a child on the screen — he himself becomes him, and dozens of years left behind pass before his eyes. In any case, that's how it was with me: that's what my New Year's morning was like in the 2000s, and now it all seems like a dream. And this is the kind of memory of a lost past that only a project created by a person who grew up in the same realities can awaken.
Hail to the Rainbow is imbued with an atmosphere of loneliness, literally breathing with the absence of hope, support, and the future. Ignat is truly alone. Only hints give to understand that there are others nearby: he brings a detector to the tower, leaves it, and takes the supplies left for him in return. But behind all this there is no living presence — only an exchange of traces, as if the world continues to exist by inertia.
The only constant interlocutor remains the electronic voice built into the cybernetic eye. At first, he seems like an impersonal assistant, but over time he reveals himself as an independent character with his own history and helps not to get completely lost in this cold world. However, not all machines here are friendly, and soon Ignat realizes: a wrench is not only a tool, but also a weighty argument in a dispute with robots.
The Physiology of Survival
The combat system is implemented extremely utilitarian and doesn't pretend to be the central mechanic. The main weapon at the beginning of the game is an ordinary wrench. The impact of the blows is felt weakly, and the behavior of enemies isn't always readable: the attacks of some robots are poorly telegraphed, so health flies away faster than the player has time to understand what exactly passed through the block. There are no evasions, so survival often comes down to carefully circling around the enemy and timely raising your hand for protection.
And here I want to slightly scold the developer. Despite the fact that the game is formally positioned as an adventure with elements of a shooter, the shotgun appears later than I would like, and closer to the finale, a submachine gun is added to it. However, firearms remain more of an episodic tool than the main way to deal with enemies.
Yes, shooting is more reliable and pleasant, if only because you don't need to guess the distance to the target, as in the case of a wrench, but there are enough nuances here: there are few cartridges, and hits require accuracy, because the hitboxes of some enemies can at best be called strange. In one of the tense episodes of the final third, I had to reload several times only because, standing almost close, I couldn't hit the robot spider.
Nevertheless, on normal difficulty, there are enough resources for survival with a margin. At any moment, I had a couple of medical injectors at hand, cans of condensed milk in case of hunger, a handful of reagents for crafting cartridges or treatment, and a little more of everything that might be useful on the way. Not that all this was absolutely necessary, but if you're traveling through the post-apocalypse, you should approach the matter seriously.
At the same time, the survival system works rather nominally. The game mentions cold, hunger, and radiation, but in fact it all comes down to simple medical care for the character. Froze — eat. Got hungry — warm up by the fire. All these parameters function the same way, and there is almost no real impact from the environment. I never understood whether the cold reduces health by itself: I noticed a drop in the indicator and simply replenished it in any available way.
There is also a separate claim to resource management. For some reason, Ignat can only carry seven units of parts and seven units of chemicals with him, while crafting most useful items requires two parts and one reagent. As a result, chemicals are consistently in excess, and parts are in short supply, which is why additional resources simply don't fit into the inventory. Perhaps the balance will still be adjusted — as the excessive battery consumption when activating terminals and tablets has already been corrected.
Variety at the Limit of Possibilities
In addition to clashes with ordinary opponents, the game also features several boss battles. They are not particularly difficult and more often serve as event scenes than real tests of reaction and accuracy, but they work great in the context of the project. One fight forces you to run away from a tireless sadist robot, trying to activate all the switches in the labyrinth; another pleasantly refers to the battle with the Twins in Atomic Heart; and the final one resembles the battle with the Hedgehog from the Mundfish project, but is complemented by an unexpected humanistic accent.
There are also stealth segments — literally a couple of episodes. One takes place in Ignat's old house, another in a dark forest, and another on the roof, where you have to distract the enemy with a drone, quickly disconnect from the controls, and move from place to place. There is no full-fledged stealth here, but that's the beauty of Hail to the Rainbow: the game doesn't artificially stretch itself out.
It took me about thirteen hours to complete and watch three of the four endings. A convenient chapter loading system from any autosave point allows you to painlessly review the necessary forks. During this time, the project manages to offer a noticeable variety of situations: a car chase, hide-and-seek in the forest, shootouts, puzzles, exploration, ordinary and event battles.
Even while moving between locations in the "Niva", the control of which is simple but requires getting used to, the developer manages to throw a challenge at the player — for example, forcing you to drive through a minefield, regularly getting out of the car and risking being blown up in order to orient yourself using the detector's marks.
The sequence of these episodes is built smoothly, and Hail to the Rainbow almost never gives cause for fatigue: the pace changes in time, and there are minimal repeating fragments. All this is accompanied by an interesting story, inventive direction of cutscenes, conversations "about life", and meta-commentary by Sergey Noskov, which is pronounced by the "voice in the head."
One of them appears when Ignat is waiting for the elevator and hears that it would be nice if a crowd of opponents didn't appear now, whom you need to hold back until the cabin arrives — a transparent hint at a hackneyed cliché. Another arises when Ignat crawls through narrow sewer pipes: "I've always been surprised at how easily characters in video games move through the ruins of the post-apocalypse. Rebar, glass, broken pieces of concrete... you can get injured", — is heard in the head.
Ringing Modesty
Like most indie projects created alone, Hail to the Rainbow does not try to hide its limitations. Visually, the game relies on realism, but does so economically: unobtrusive textures, honest lighting, minimal effects. At the same time, the scenery, fog, and snowy fields work for the atmosphere and immersion, skillfully masking the lack of small details — nothing more is required of them.
The lack of technology is noticeable only in facial animations: in some scenes this is even justified by the plot, and somewhere it is naturally perceived as part of the visual language of the game. All together, it only emphasizes how well Noskov knows how to work within the given framework and turn limitations into a stylistic device.
Accordingly, there are no problems with optimization here. The game maintains a stable 144 frames per second on an RTX 4070 Super, and the video card is only loaded halfway in rare peak moments. During the entire playthrough, there were no critical bugs or script failures — another testament to how carefully the project is assembled and tested.
Separately, it is worth noting the sound. Thanks to the work of Dmitry Blinov and Nobody’s Nail Machine, the world not only sounds authentic, but also supports that melancholic atmosphere of a road adventure that runs through the entire game and is maintained until the very end.
Otherwise, it would be strange to demand a technical level of an AAA blockbuster from an indie project, but Hail to the Rainbow fulfills its ambitions one hundred percent.
Diagnosis
In the dry residue, Hail to the Rainbow gives the impression of a complete and well-thought-out project, especially if you remember that most of the work was done by one person. The world is convincing even with minimal means, the gameplay is varied within the possibilities, and the sound and atmosphere maintain the desired mood until the very end. Yes, the combat system remains utilitarian, stealth is symbolic, and individual episodes suffer from straightforwardness and minor roughness, but all this does not undermine the overall structure. For an indie game, this is a good example of how limited resources can be turned into an expressive artistic language.
Hail to the Rainbow is a game made with hands and heart, and this is perhaps the most important thing to know. It is small, sometimes rough, but in every frame you can feel the author's style. Perhaps someone will think that Sergey Noskov repeats techniques from past projects, but for me this is my first acquaintance with his work, and it turned out to be extremely charming. With all the limitations, the game sounds confident and self-sufficient. It does not pretend to be large-scale, but it has an understanding of form and respect for the player. If you are close to the post-apocalypse with a Russian soul and you are calm about the technical compromises that coexist with the author's sincere love for his work, then my strict recommendation.
