Chernobyl Girls

What is Chernobyl Girls?

Atomgrad-7 has a problem it is not allowed to admit. The fictional Aurora of October plant has had an incident, and thirty of the city's women now carry mutations that are impossible to miss: a third eye, a spare pair of arms, a second head, a tentacle, a mermaid's tail. The player takes the role of the surgeon at Special Hospital No. 7, and General Pokazukhin wants every last patient cured before the official parade photograph is taken. The newspaper's line is that nothing happened, which is exactly where the joke sits.

The framework is an area-claim arcade game in the lineage of Qix and Gals Panic, dressed in 1950s Soviet propaganda-poster art and calendar pin-up glamour. It is a 2D singleplayer release that runs in an HTML5 frame in the browser and as a Windows build, published on 25 October 2026 and free to pick up.

How to play

Each patient is split into two rounds. In the first, the board hides her mutated silhouette and the job is to cut it free. Carving into her shape pulls the Geiger counter down; spending time on empty background pushes it back up, and letting it top out sends the plant into meltdown. The counter works as a deadline that only rewards accurate cutting.

The second round presents the cured version of the same woman in the same pose, with no mutation left, and this time she speaks. Both rounds have to be won before her Official Poster unlocks: a full propaganda pin-up carrying a slogan written for her alone.

The roster is not made up entirely of ordinary patients. Mutant bosses are seeded through the run, among them a radioactive aspic, Zmey Gorynych, an armoured train and mutant bears. General Pokazukhin, a medal-covered bureaucrat, comments on each mutation as it appears, so the game keeps talking back between boards.

Controls

Play is built around two input options: a keyboard or a gamepad. The game is singleplayer, so nothing about the board depends on another player joining. Ten languages are included, which matters because much of the humour lives in dialogue; the inspector whose nose grows with every all-normal form she signs only lands if you can read her.

The HTML5 build runs inside a playable frame, which is the quickest way to test a round before committing to anything. A Windows build exists as well, and both are free. Beyond choosing an input and a language, the game does not ask for setup: the board arrives in front of you and the Geiger counter starts moving.

Tips for your first run

Treat the Geiger counter as the only meter that matters. Time spent slicing open background is time the needle climbs, so go for the silhouette rather than tidying the field.

The second round is not a formality either. Once the cured patient starts talking, the board stops being the whole scene.

• Cut into the patient's outline first; the counter rewards contact with her shape and punishes wandering.
• When the counter fills, the plant goes into meltdown, so accuracy beats coverage every round.
• Expect the tempo to shift in round two, when the cured version of the same pose does the talking.
• Bosses sit inside the patient list: a radioactive aspic, Zmey Gorynych, an armoured train or mutant bears can turn up between the thirty women.
• Pick a language you genuinely read. Running jokes such as the nose that grows on every signature, or the two-headed traffic cop with two opinions, are the reward for clearing a board.

Content and replayability

Thirty patients make up the roster, and each arrives with three things attached: a mutation, a job and a satirical story. The inspector's nose grows each time she signs off that everything is normal; the traffic cop has two heads and two opinions to match; the statistics clerk has gone invisible after dropping out of the records. Those three are a sample rather than the whole set.

Persistence comes from the collection layer. Patient files are requested from the Ministry as matryoshka dolls that open one rank at a time, so each file is a small reveal rather than a stat sheet. The State Lottery hands out vodka, iodine pills, paperwork, or the flat answer to come back tomorrow. Winning both rounds of a patient adds her Official Poster, complete with her own slogan, to the set.

Thirty stories, thirty posters, ministry files that open rank by rank and a lottery with a joke for a payout give the arcade loop something to accumulate beyond a high score. Ten languages and a singleplayer structure mean the whole thing can be worked through at your own pace.

Presentation and performance

The look is specific: 1950s Soviet propaganda posters, printed rather than rendered, with pin-up glamour layered over the top. The pin-up art follows the classic calendar tradition and stops short of nudity; every character is a fictional adult. Colour runs high across the sprites and poster backgrounds, and the tone is comedic and retro rather than grim.

The score is a thundering Soviet march. Character art, backgrounds, posters and sprites were produced with generative AI tools and then curated, edited and integrated by hand; music and sound effects came from AI audio models, with dialogue, translations and code written with AI assistance. Design, direction and selection are credited to LumaxSoft Games, and the game runs on the Waifu's Panic!! engine.

Four screenshots are available before you start, and the browser frame lets you judge the pace on your own machine rather than trusting a trailer.

Who should play it

Anyone who has lost an evening to Qix or Gals Panic will recognise the shape of this immediately: a bordered field, a cutter, and a patch of territory to claim. The two-round structure adds a payoff those older games never had, because the board you clear becomes a poster you keep.

The satire aims at bureaucracy, propaganda and cover-ups rather than at the people caught up in a real disaster, which makes the joke safe to laugh at. Players who like their arcade games loud, colourful and a little silly will get more from the general's running commentary than from any score.

The pin-up framing is deliberate and suggestive without nudity, so it is aimed at adults who enjoy that calendar-art tradition. If the appeal is a fast, free, singleplayer browser game with a gamepad option and ten languages, this is a low-risk click.