The underground labs of the original Half-Life were set somewhere among New Mexico’s towering desert canyons. It wasn’t your prototypical blockbuster locale, but it was still Hollywood-esque, reminiscent of Cold War-era sci-fi films like Them!, where US Army men battled against giant irradiated ants below a blistering American sun. The setting of Half-Life’s sequel, on the other hand, felt markedly different: colder, darker, and altogether more otherworldly.

Half-Life 2 didn’t just give us an original setting; it introduced many in the West to a whole new style of landscape, geography, and architecture. City 17 may have been fictional, but the influences were plain to see. Set somewhere in Eastern Europe, the metropolis drew clearly from real post-Soviet spaces. Art director Viktor Antonov has previously talked about how his childhood hometown of Sofia and how his formative urban explorations there inspired the creation of City 17. Other places like Belgrade and St. Petersburg were also used as reference.

Read next: Half-Life: Alyx review

Even without its monolithic Citadel and sci-fi trappings, City 17 was an immensely explorable place. From its grand train terminal — a reformulation of Budapest’s Western station — to its post-industrial edgelands and grotty courtyards and apartment blocks, the city felt familiar, while simultaneously appearing fresh and even exotic to players who are unfamiliar with post-Soviet particularities. City 17 would go on to act as a kind of prototype for a whole swathe of games featuring these kinds of settings. Valve was a giant America corporation, so its success emboldened both Western developers and smaller studios working out of Russia and Eastern Europe who now knew their localities could export well.

There’s also growing interest in post-Soviet settings outside of games. The mood of these places seems to strike a chord with thousands of Instagram accounts and almost as many coffee table tomes, all documenting ruins of the USSR. Like these photographic accounts, video games re-create images of hostile landscapes and ravaged cities, and slowly but surely, post-Soviet environments have become ubiquitous. 

This modern interest in everything post-Soviet is unusual. “It’s weird after this amount of time that it should still be such a thing. The Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, so it’s been gone for a very long time,” Owen Hatherley, journalist and author of Landscapes of Communism and The Adventures of Owen Hatherley in the Post-Soviet Space, tells me. “You wouldn’t see people in the 40s describing Eastern Europe as post-Habsburg, it’s just not how it was interpreted.” For Hatherley, our somewhat puzzling obsession with post-Sovietness raises two questions: “Why is this still the lens through which the area is interpreted? And why is it interesting to people that have absolutely nothing to do with it?”

“There’s an element of exotica, of it being a terrifying evil alternative world,” Hatherley explains. “But I think actually the allure comes from the art world, and then percolated outwards from there. Firstly, there are the ruins and the kind of landscapes you get in [Andrei] Tarkovsky films, particularly in Stalker. But there are also the obsessions with Chernobyl and the kind of ghost towns left there. It sort of became an alternative way of telling a horror story. This idea of a gigantic, horrifying zone.”

A few years after the release of Half-Life 2 came the Ukrainian-developed S.T.A.L.K.E.R., an open-world game that played out in a fictional version of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site called The Zone. It was loosely based on Tarkovsky’s film, itself an adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic novel. S.T.A.L.K.E.R., with its post-industrial ruins and ghostly Pripyat, represents an adjacent obsession. It’s become popular to want to visit the area, both virtually and in reality, where for a mere $100, you can book a tour around the affected area, Geiger counter in hand.

Chernobyl and its abandoned towns continually pop up in games. That includes American blockbusters like Call of Duty but also the many games that have attempted to recapture S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s dreary wasteland in the intervening years. Likewise, the survival genre is also steeped in a post-Soviet aesthetic — PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Rust, Escape from Tarkov — all following in the wake of Day Z, which originally melded popular zombie survival fantasies with the fictional Soviet “Chernarus” map from ARMA2. Even the latest in gaming’s battle royal craze, Call of Duty: Warzone, is set in a post-Soviet style region called “Verdansk.”

Beyond a romanticized lust for ruins and an obsession with Chernobyl, post-Soviet settings can also be, as Hatherley explains, an “alternative way of looking at an existing society. You have most of the things that we have except it’s assembled in the wrong order.” One example of this is the upcoming Atom RPG, a post-apocalyptic game inspired by older RPGs like Fallout and Wasteland. While the Fallout series is famously set in the nuclear-ravaged wastelands of America, Atom RPG draws from the late Soviet Union. Its developers, Atom Team, are a multinational studio based in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and Latvia.

Anton Krasilnikov, one of Atom Team’s writers, tells me about the infamous “utilitarian block of flats” that served as inspiration for areas of the game. “We integrated a lot of government produced household products that most people from post-Soviet countries will recognise. This includes edibles like condensed milk, canned meat, biscuits, Pyraniks, and vodka. We also included familiar items like duct tape, glue, posters, books, toys, etc. as well as automobiles like the GAZ-20 and GAZ-66.” For many, the appeal of something like Atom RPG will be the reconfigured nature of its world. While all of the individual elements are commonplace, the whole feels alternative-world, at least to those living outside the post-Soviet sphere.

Krasilnikov tells me that the majority of the development team witnessed the late ‘80s and ‘90s first-hand. “We remember the movies, music, atmosphere, crime waves, socio-economic and political unevenness, and unrest. Despite the hardships we remember these times fondly, since we matured alongside them.” Many of the game’s characters — “hard-headed, idealistic communists that refuse to accept the apocalypse … corrupt and lazy officials … simple folk who are just living day to day, struggling with the little money they have” — are based on fiction from the period as well as real people and situations the development team lived through.

“Cultures and ways of life that no longer exist always fascinate people. The Soviet period is no exception. The way of life and culture that took place there is now perceived, especially in the West, with a special kind of allure. It seems exotic, even alien,” says Krasilnikov. 

Another significant element that seems to captivate us has to do with the anxieties we feel around the fact that our days are numbered. “For various reasons, climate change among them, society gets obsessed with visions of a modern industrial society that has collapsed and become a series of ghost towns,” says Hatherley. This is why post-Soviet landscapes and obsessions around Chernobyl seem to so closely overlap. Our fascination with Chernobyl continues as we become more ecologically anxious than ever.

While we often gravitate toward dead and decaying worlds, it’s important to remember that, as Hatherley mentions, many of these post-Soviet places are actually inhabited. “There’s a temptation to go around pointing at Soviet housing estates and shouting about what awfully bleak and ruined they are. But they aren’t ruins, there are thousands of people living in them.”

“I actually found it to be an escape.” — Sean Vanaman on writing Half-Life: Alyx

The games of Alexander Ignatov are far more personal than apocalyptic. It’s Winter, with its “panel houses, snow, overcast sky, tiny kitchen, and shabby staircase,” lets you wander a small Russian apartment complex. A collaboration with poet Ilya Mazo, the game garnered a surprising amount of attention, despite the slowness and mundanity. “Perhaps players wanted, subconsciously even, to feel what Russian winter sadness was like. How it feels to be left alone with their thoughts in an empty and unfriendly world,” Ignatov explains.

While the It’s Winter store page talks about how there’s “no room for adventures and breathtaking plot,” players seemed to be engaged just by exploring the austere environment and were pulled in by the somber mood and atmosphere. Ignatov tells me that he finds it difficult to think of the game as being attractive to anyone. “Russian players were very focused on the game’s flaws, and often commented that it was too similar to reality — why pay for the game when you can just look out of the window? — which made it feel repulsive. For Eastern European expatriates, perhaps the game was nostalgic, but it’s difficult for me to imagine what attracted other non-Russian players other than exoticism.”

Ignatov’s follow-up game, Routine Feat, is closer to capturing his own personal mood. While the development of It’s Winter took an emotional toll on Ignatov, Routine Feat was a more life-affirming experience that helped him recover. “Routine Feat is my everyday life, but exaggerated in terms of loneliness and monotony. I drew inspiration from the hot and sweltering summers of my hometown, as well as Viktor Pivovarov’s ‘Projects for a Lonely Person,’ and the music of Russian underground bands like Talnik and Curd Lake.”

Both of Ignatov’s games present places that feel authentic and appear to have real historical weight to them. “I lived in a one-room apartment with my parents in a house similar to the one in the game. It was the happiest time of my life, and I tried to convey this carefree attitude through the bright and sunny environment. I also tried to hone in all the tiny details from my life in those years — an old radio and TV, the birds singing outside the window, a refrigerator without a light.”

Hatherley believes that a lot of the recent interest in post-Soviet settings is being driven by work done in those countries themselves. “A lot of it is just people documenting the recent past and trying to understand the society that’s been left to them, especially on their own terms rather than simply through received opinion. It was an evil totalitarian state, it was wonderful, it was a great empire — there’s all sorts of interpretations. There’s a lot of young people in these countries asking what it was all about, and one of the ways in which they’re trying to do that is by exploring it.”

Ignatov was born after the collapse of the USSR in 1996. “I don’t know any other world except post-Soviet Russia. I know it from the idealized tales of the older generation, and from works of art. For me, post-Soviet is living in the remains of something more ancient and powerful, some kind of perished civilization, from which there are only the broken pipes of factories and the ruins of cultural centres and palaces remaining,” he says. “But post-Soviet also means complete dullness and stillness of life on the periphery — the concentration of minds and creative forces in the big cities. It is a lack of jobs, no hope for a decent future, homophobia instilled by the state, poverty and abandonment.”

Post-Soviet means many things to many different people. There are universal elements, things that appear familiar no matter which part of the former USSR you visit, but there are also huge divergences. “The idea of bleak and monolithic landscapes has been around for as long as the Cold War,” says Hatherley. But there are also things like the awesome cosmic ruins highlighted in Frédéric Chaubin’s CCCP photography book. “I think that book really changed how people looked at these landscapes. People went from looking for grey and nondescript to looking for gigantic, sci-fi, space age structures.”

We see a little of both when returning to City 17. The Combine’s futuristic alien structures echo the Soviet Union’s massive brutalist buildings, while elsewhere, there’s a mix of more earthly architecture like the rows of “khrushchyovka” in the background. It’s in City 17’s public housing, industry, and infrastructure that we get this sense of nostalgia for childhood memories and what’s been lost. These ghostly elements are what makes post-Soviet settings so powerful: you can almost feel the past’s spectral presence. City 17’s architect, Viktor Antonov, once said that the reason they chose an Eastern European setting was “that it represents the collision of the old and the new in a way that is difficult to capture in the United States… there’s this sense of a strongly-grounded historical place.”

When I ask Ignatov whether he sees a connection between his games and Half-Life, he begins by comparing the buildings. The panel houses on the horizon bringing back a flood of memories.

“They’re the same houses that me and most of my friends live in,” he says. “When I was fairly young, I only really knew the big blockbuster games where the world was either in outer space or in America. With City 17 I suddenly saw all this familiar architecture, Cyrillic text and advertisements in the streets — it was a magical feeling, and made it feel like those events could all be playing out somewhere here in Russia,” says Ignatov. “I wish more games explored similar settings, but without simply exploiting the themes of the Cold War and the Chernobly disaster.” 

Ignatov tells me about something called “pазвесистая клюква,” a Russian idiom that refers to Western stereotypes of his home. Looking at the media landscape it certainly seems all too easy to slip into this mode of thinking about post-Soviet places. Ideas and images of cruel dystopias and mysterious zones aren’t going to disappear overnight, but there’s also so much more to see and explore.

Condensed into the first few minutes of one of the biggest games of all time is the entire essence of a genre. Minecraft presents you first with a lush, almost infinitely large world, and then it allows you to instantly set about transforming it.

You chop down trees and dig down through dirt and stone, each tapped block and mined resource disappearing forever. But you also add to the world, reconfiguring it to your needs and wants: a small shelter to see you through the first night; later, a mountaintop fortress just to make a statement. At the same time, you’re advancing technologically, like human evolution played in fast-forward. From stone to iron to something altogether new and fantastical.

Since the release of Minecraft, which has an estimated 112 million monthly players, building games have risen to unseen heights of popularity. Players build cramped shelters from little more than mud and sticks in grim survival games like The Forest and Green Hell. In the online multiplayer Rust and ARK, ragtag clans build huge communal forts and bases. Being able to build permanent habitats even helped No Man’s Sky move past a rocky launch period. 

JC Hysteria is a No Man’s Sky builder who’s made the most of the game’s complex building tools. Many of his creations are cooperatively constructed, and like his Marine Observatory or Space Station, they often stretch what the game is capable of to its very limits. For JC, building is less about setting up a practical base of operations and more of an artistic vent. “It’s a creative outlet,” he says. “I have a wild imagination… and building allows me to express that.”

But Minecraft and No Man’s Sky aren’t just about the freedom and creativity that the building tools bring. Unlike Lego, there’s an entire world and ecosystem (rather than just a carpet) to ground our actions. Building can be a way of reconnecting and developing a closer relationship to the surrounding land and materials. A lot of us are already estranged from these things in our everyday lives — we might even feel as though there’s something missing — and so returning to the virtual earth can feel immensely rewarding.

These are places where we feel like part of the world, where we can work with our hands and see the tangible effects and even the progress of our labor. This new wave of building games brings players closer to this feeling, thanks to a shift in perspective.

For most of gaming history, to talk about building was to talk about strategy titles like Sim City, Age of Empires, or one of the Tycoon games. But where once we strictly built from a zoomed-out, god’s-eye perspective, planning and looking down upon our creations from the clouds, there now exists the option for more embodied first-person experiences. Cities and shelters are still being constructed, but there is now a keen need for building to feel a little more hands-on. 

Coffee Stain Studio’s Satisfactory is one example that encapsulates the shift we’re seeing away from top-down strategy games. In Coffee Stain’s factory builder, construction is planetary in scale. Buildings are skyscraper-big, complexes look like metropolises, and the twisting production lines often make you feel as though you’re trapped in a labyrinth. It’s easy to imagine Satisfactory being played out from a more strategic perspective. (Construction would be tidier and more manageable for a start.) “The first person perspective was picked because we wanted a more personal experience. Playing from this perspective really puts an emphasis on it being you who does things, and not just an avatar,” game director Oscar Jilsén explains.

Jilsén also believes that playing in first-person “helps convey and strengthen the idea of verticality… You get to play with more than just two dimensions. Being down there in the thick of it allows you to experience scale in a whole different way. One of the best feelings in the game is walking down the walkways to get across to different production floors and then looking up and seeing the belts and other overpasses criss-cross the gaps.”

With the move from top-down urban planning to boots-on-the-ground construction comes a certain loss of control. Jilsén and his team appear to want you to feel lost at times, even insignificant when dwarfed by all of the surrounding machinery. But the closeness that first-person brings can be empowering in its own way. It’s about getting your digital hands dirty — procuring materials and erecting monuments in a more intimate and granular fashion.

In No Man’s Sky, one of JC Hysteria’s recent projects, Replicant Alley, which he built alongside players ER Burroughs and Action Pants Gaming, showcases a similar kind of scale and verticality. JC feels there’s “greater personal connection” with first-person games. “You can relate to your in-game character more and even begin asking whether or not you’d actually live in the place you’ve built.” 

“I don’t think you could’ve planned this journey.” – Hello Games’ Sean Murray on the state of No Man’s Sky

André Bengtsson, artist and CEO of Redbeet Interactive, was also willing to trade distance in favor of a closer perspective. For his survival adventure game Raft, Bengtsson says that whilst “a top-down view could very well be preferable for a building game focused heavily on management,” for him and his team, a more attached first- or third-person view was “essential” in helping the player become immersed in the world.

It’s not just about building, either. There’s a real desire to dwell and inhabit virtual worlds. In Subnautica, a survival game where you eke out an existence in the depths of an alien ocean, feeling at home — even if just temporarily — is important. Game director Charlie Cleveland tells me that it’s all about the “feeling of building a habitat. First-person is important to convey the emotion of what it’s like for you to build that new home.” This personal element is important. These aren’t just buildings you click and watch instantly materialize. There’s hard work and a process behind it. There’s also a far stronger connection to building when you can occupy them, even make them a home.

“The main loop in Satisfactory is to expand,” says Jilsén. “There’s this interaction with the world where you replace nature with constructs of your own — you convert the natural world into something appropriate to your goals.” Jilsén describes this transformative process as “converting the unknown into the (useful) known.” Many of these kinds of survival / building games drop you into dangerous and mysterious worlds, and it’s up to you to establish safe zones and habitats, places you can then go to launch larger expeditions. “As you do this you bring in the useful things you find to expand your home and its capabilities. Human beings are very creative and nurturing creatures, and we’re driven to try and make circumstances better for ourselves and each other.”

Leaving our mark on the world is this very anthropocentric urge, but the power to change what’s around us can also turn destructive. Subnautica’s Cleveland tells me that it was important for them to not allow players to “exert their power over the environment. You can survive for longer, slowly mitigating your fear, but you can never dominate your surroundings. This was a very conscious desire for us. We didn’t want to make a typical game that involved gaining power and taking things over. It’s one of the reasons we removed terraforming from the game.”

Compare this to Minecraft, where whole ecosystems can be carved up and exploited. Dan Olson, in his recent video “Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism,” lays out the idea that these virtual spaces can “harken back to the colonial frontier,” with new regions unfolding simply in order for the player to explore and conquer. “The player arrives in the world, like Robinson Crusoe, into a terra nullius,” a blank slate which they are then encouraged to improve and where the native inhabitants are often obstacles in the way of development.

With Raft, there’s much more of an emphasis on salvaging. Its oceans and islands are littered with resources, but many of these are scrap or flotsam. Your creations — be it useful tech to help you on your journey or the raft-habitat itself — are an elaborate form of cleaning up, or at least putting previous human waste to good use. With all of these games, it’s worth considering exactly what your relationship is to the world you’re inhabiting and the precise effects your actions are having on the land around you. For example, Eco is a game where your building can cause immense and lasting damage to the world. Even Satisfactory, which eventually allows you to power manufacturing with nuclear energy, ensures that waste builds up and becomes an issue that players cannot ignore.

In all urban societies, there’s a growing wish to escape, return to the land, work the earth, rewild, and get back to basics. On YouTube, among the gaming celebs and popular makeup artists, there are the surprise-hit wilderness vloggers, building and surviving with what’s directly at hand. This same impulse to reconnect to nature plays out within the new wave of building games. 

While Satisfactory is very much about rapidly building large-scale, high-tech structures, Jilsén tells me that during playtesting, they found it was important to have players begin with very little and work manually. “You simply appreciate the automation of item production more if you know what it takes to make each thing by hand.”

“The idea of returning to nature definitely relates to what first intrigued us about Raft,” says Bengtsson. “There’s something enticing about the idea of living in the woods or out in the ocean. At times we looked at wilderness vloggers for inspiration. We often try to ground our game in reality.” Like many of these building games, there’s a tangible physicality to both Raft’s crafting and building. Even in Subnautica, where the sci-fi setting necessitates far fewer hammers and nails, there’s still a meticulous clarity to the act of phasing in vehicles and modular habitat pieces. Just as you feel part of the world, the building feels material.

“It sounds like [wilderness vloggers] are tapping into the same primal urges as Subnautica,” says Cleveland. “I think there’s a lot of people today who feel overwhelmed by [the abundance of] information and todo lists… so they love the simple tactile challenge of survival at any cost. I used to know a programmer who would go home every night and do nothing but make bird houses. I personally spend a lot of time cooking for the same reasons. It’s just me, the ingredients, and fire.”

Jilsén agrees that there’s a real “longing for non-abstract work,” which is something that survival fantasies and the concrete building projects that take place within their worlds try to address. JC Hysteria tells me that, for him, building is a form of medication, his “own personal release from the world.” It’s about escape. Simultaneously, it’s about connection: connecting to the world in closer and more intimate ways as well as to other people in the case of multiplayer games like No Man’s Sky.

“There’s a quote from another YouTuber, CobraTV, that has always stuck with me, and sums up the community aspect perfectly: ‘we are a constellation,’” he explains. “The feeling of connection fills a void for many of us.”