Biopunk rarely gets its own spotlight the way cyberpunk does, and most games that dabble in engineered bodies and rogue biotechnology borrow the label without building a world specific enough to earn it. Athanasy earns it. Its entire premise hinges on a single invented word, the disease turned blessing at its center, and everything about how humanity’s last refuge actually functions grows directly out of that one idea rather than getting bolted on as set dressing. That’s a rare enough achievement in a genre that usually settles for surface aesthetics.
Deep beneath a surface Earth that’s gone completely uninhabitable, the City survives as an engineered maze of steel, concrete, and biopolymers. Steel corridors replace streets, and the maze like layout itself becomes its own kind of prison, one nobody in the City seems to fully register as a prison anymore. Its sky is a projected green screen with fake clouds painted onto billboards, since nobody living there has actually seen a real one in generations. The locals just call it the City, no other name, a small detail that says something about how little identity anyone here has been allowed to hold onto. Josiah Kaviani, a young mathematician scraping by in near total isolation, starts the story with no idea anything is wrong. A dream about speaking human flesh cracks open a question he can’t unsee, and that question ends up dragging him toward a truth the City has spent generations trying to keep buried.
Josiah’s isolation isn’t incidental either. He’s brilliant, methodical, and almost entirely unable to connect with the people around him, which makes the encounter that pulls him out of his routine land as more disruptive than it might for a more socially grounded protagonist. Even his talent works against him in a way, since a mind built for solving abstract problems has no ready framework for processing something as messy and human as what he eventually uncovers. Once that first crack appears, how much he actually chooses to pursue, and how much he lets himself look away from, becomes the real engine driving the rest of the story.
The City itself began as a research facility studying nano surgeon technology capable of curing any ailment the human body could suffer. That research succeeded catastrophically, producing an uncontrollable, contagious form of immortality the story names athanasy. A religious faith has grown up around the machines responsible in the years since, treating them as the only thing standing between humanity and total extinction, and watching that faith curdle into blind institutional complicity gives the story real thematic weight beyond its body horror surface. Many of the technologies scattered through daily City life, alternative biotech for synthesizing food and fuel, bioluminescent lighting, biopixel screens, draw from real research at various stages of development, which grounds the horror in something closer to plausible extrapolation than pure invention. Watching an entire society organize itself around worshipping the source of its own suffering says something uncomfortable about faith and institutional survival that the story never states outright, trusting the premise itself to make the point.
Nine distinct endings track wildly different paths Josiah’s life can take depending on choices made throughout, from The Conformist, a quiet, career focused path that closes on an unremarkable end, to routes that pull him much further into the City’s underbelly. Some paths lean toward quiet complicity, others toward open rebellion against the City’s ruling structure, and the game never signals which choice is actually right before you’ve made it. None of the nine lands anywhere close to happy, and piecing together the City’s full, ugly history takes replaying through multiple outcomes rather than accepting any single ending as the complete picture. That structure asks real commitment from anyone chasing every ending, since a single playthrough only ever shows a fraction of what the City is actually hiding. Achievement names like Something Is Missing and Top of the Food Chain hint at just how different those individual paths get without spelling out what actually happens in any of them.
Polyanna complicates Josiah’s isolation early on, sharp, socially fluent in ways he isn’t, and never reduced to a simple romantic option despite how the story initially frames her. Anselm Diodato cuts a colder figure, a bureaucrat wearing the mask of cold blooded functionary duty over what turns out to be real religious conviction underneath, and watching that mask slip is one of the more effective character reveals in the whole cast. Both characters exist to test different versions of the same question the whole game keeps circling, how much of what people believe is actually chosen freely, and how much is just survival dressed up as conviction.
The prose carries real philosophical density, leaning into religious undertones and dense, deliberate phrasing that reminded me more than once of Dostoevsky. That comparison to nineteenth century Russian literature isn’t accidental either, given the team’s own background, and the prose earns it more than most games reaching for the same association usually manage. The localization holds up well enough to preserve that weight in English rather than flattening it into generic dystopian shorthand. It’s demanding reading, more interested in interrogating complicity and institutional faith than delivering easy thrills, and that ambition mostly pays off, though I found the setting and atmosphere carrying more weight across the story than any single scene or character moment managed on its own.
Athanasy first released on itch.io on January 22, 2022, followed by a Steam launch on April 13 that same year, with Valkyrie Initiative later bringing a Nintendo Switch port to market at $9.99. Eleven achievements track progress across the nine endings, and a dedicated art gallery lets players revisit unlocked scenes once they’ve cleared enough of the story to see them. A single playthrough runs close to two hours, though seeing everything the game actually has to offer stretches closer to five to ten hours across multiple attempts. That’s a short enough individual runtime to make chasing several endings in one sitting actually feasible, rather than the kind of commitment a longer game would demand.
Wirion, the Russian indie team behind Athanasy, took its name from a fictional biocorporation dreamed up years earlier by composer and original concept creator Egor Efremov. The whole idea started life in 2018 as a first person VR quest called Biopoiesis. Writer Sergey Chekmayev’s concept of genetically adapted human races settling exoplanets fed directly into the City’s own worldbuilding once the project shifted into its current visual novel form. Mikhail Kryzhanovsky and Vsevolod Egorov wrote the screenplay, and some of the team’s original, darker ideas got toned down before release, though most of that harsher material stayed intact in the finished game. That corporate name choice was itself a small piece of world building bleeding into the studio’s own identity. A biocorporation name close enough to the word virion underlines both its clinical menace and how contagious its ideas turn out to be.
Visually, the earthy, hand drawn art style and simple animation keep focus squarely on the text without distracting from it. Artists Taya Rostovtseva, Daniel Gorbunov, Kardalak, and Evgenia Shpakovskaya built the varied, atmospheric backdrops that give the City real oppressive texture across its underground sprawl. Static images carry most scenes, with sparse animation reserved for moments that actually need the extra weight. That restraint matters given how grim the subject matter gets, since a louder, more aggressive art style could easily have tipped the whole presentation into shock value rather than sustained dread.
The score pulls from a wider team than most visual novels bother assembling, Hotel Alpha Unicorn led by Efremov himself, alongside contributions credited to musty luxury, Sal Solaris, Noises of Russia, Anastasia Zelenskaya, and Lisa Shapkin. That collaborative approach produces unnerving, chilling ambient work that does as much to sell the story’s dread as the writing itself. Individual tracks lean into dissonant, uneasy textures rather than conventional melody, built specifically to sit under scenes of quiet horror rather than announce themselves. Wirion released the full soundtrack separately just over a week after the Steam launch.
Verdict
Athanasy takes a familiar dystopian premise, humanity’s last refuge hiding underground from a dead world, and reshapes it around an unsettling central idea: that curing death might be the worst thing humanity ever accomplishes. Josiah’s slow unraveling of the City’s true nature across nine distinct, uncompromising endings gives the story real replay value, and its dense, philosophically minded prose and unnerving score elevate it well past its budget conscious presentation. It asks real patience and offers no comfort in return, refusing every one of its endings a happy resolution, but for readers drawn to bleak, body horror inflected science fiction willing to sit with real moral weight, it delivers something considerably more thoughtful than its grim aesthetic first suggests. Few genre entries commit this fully to a single unsettling premise and let it drive every layer of the world built around it.
