A cult shooter in a dead Soviet Kyiv
You Are Empty: Absolute Edition is a first-person shooter set in an alternate history 1950s Soviet Kyiv. Most of the city's population has vanished, and monsters now roam the empty streets. You move through the city and its surroundings to find out what caused the catastrophe. The locations include collective farms, the Metro, an opera house, city rooftops, and secret laboratories. The enemies are grotesque creatures inspired by Soviet themes, born from propaganda, science, and madness, and the tone mixes horror with dark comedy and satire.
Your arsenal is made of classic weapons: the C96 Broomhandle pistol, the PPSh submachine gun, the Mosin rifle, a double barrel shotgun, Molotov cocktails, and experimental retrofuturistic weaponry. The campaign is linear and singleplayer, played from a first-person view in a straightforward old school style.
Playing together over Remote Play Together
The Steam feature listed for this game is Remote Play Together, which lets friends join in over a network session. The Absolute Edition also adds controller support for modern and legacy controllers with three presets to choose from, so people playing from a couch can use a pad rather than a keyboard and mouse.
What the Absolute Edition changes
This is a reworked release of the original game, updated for modern systems while keeping the intent of the first version intact. Rendering bugs and crashes from the original were fixed, loading times were cut by roughly 800%, and the code now supports modern and widescreen resolutions, so the HUD, menus, weapons, and videos no longer stretch. You get an adjustable field of view, an optional FPS limiter, up to 8x MSAA and 16x anisotropic filtering, consistent frametimes, improved windowed mode, and matching rendering across Nvidia, AMD, and Intel GPUs. Achievements are included, along with all official localizations.
Options worth checking before you start
The HUD can be toggled with a hotkey and fades out when you are not shooting, and camera bobbing can be reduced. Molotovs got a higher minimum throw distance so they do not blow up in your face on a light tap. Sprinting was added after criticism of the original walk speed, but the game was not designed around it, so pacing can feel off in places if you leave it on. Try it both ways and keep whichever suits you.