A dead man. A borrowed name. A case no one wants reopened.
Wild East: The Straw Man is a story-driven 2D point-and-click mystery set in the wild 1990s of Slovakia and Czechia. It follows two young reporters, Marek Varga and Eva Svobodová, as a routine report about a company director's death opens the door to a case built on borrowed names, suspicious documents, and people who would prefer the past to remain closed.
Marek works in a small Slovak newsroom. Eva is a Czech reporter following the same trail from the other side of the border. Answering-machine messages, old files, witness stories, locked doors, and uncomfortable favors gradually connect their investigations. The dead director was not the person in control. He was a straw man: a name and signature used whenever somebody else needed to remain invisible.
A childhood dream
Making my own point-and-click adventure has been a dream of mine since childhood. I grew up playing games such as The Curse of Monkey Island, Agent Mlíčňák, and Simon the Sorcerer. I loved the feeling of entering a hand-built world, examining everything, talking to unusual characters, and slowly understanding the strange rules of a new place.
Years later, that love of classic adventures met another idea: the growing nostalgia for the 1990s and for a world that has almost disappeared. Wild East became a way to bring those two interests together. It is not an attempt to copy the games I played as a child. It is my own mystery, set in a place and period that still feel close enough to remember but distant enough to explore.
“Making my own point-and-click adventure has been a dream of mine since childhood.”
Why the 1990s?
I wanted the decade to be present in more than the plot. The architecture, interiors, street furniture, and everyday objects are all designed to evoke the period. One small but familiar example is the PNS newsstand — the kind of place where newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, and fragments of daily life met in a single window.
The people matter just as much as the buildings. I am trying to capture their expectations, compromises, humor, and particular approach to life during a turbulent decade. Wild East looks back with nostalgia, but it does not present the period as perfect. The game combines fond memories with dry humor, investigative tension, and reminders of how uncertain everyday life could feel.
“I wanted the 1990s to be present in more than the story.”
Why two reporters?
Independent reporters felt like natural protagonists for this setting. Many suspicious cases of the period were left unresolved or were never investigated with much determination. When institutions stopped asking questions, independent journalists often continued. They followed documents, spoke to witnesses, connected names, and brought neglected stories into public view.
That gives Marek and Eva a reason to enter offices, apartments, archives, stations, and back rooms without turning the story into a conventional police procedural. They are curious rather than powerful. They have to persuade people to talk, notice contradictions, and decide which favors are worth accepting. Their different sides of the border also let one case reveal two closely connected perspectives.
Take your time. Read the room. Follow the paper trail.
Wild East uses classic point-and-click interaction, but the investigation is deliberately slower and more atmospheric. Progress comes from conversations, observation, documents, answering-machine messages, witness accounts, and inventory puzzles. A locked door may matter as much as a suspicious sentence, and a small detail in a room may change how the next conversation feels.
Dialogue choices allow the player to shape how Marek and Eva approach people, while the mystery remains focused on one grounded case. The game values attention over speed. It asks the player to read, listen, compare accounts, and understand the social logic behind the evidence. Dry local humor sits beside themes of crime, fraud, corruption, and death without turning the investigation into a graphic story.
A solo project
Wild East: The Straw Man is my solo project. Building it means bringing together the story, investigation, locations, characters, puzzles, and overall direction into one coherent adventure. It is a long process, but it is also the realization of the same ambition that began when I first discovered point-and-click games as a child.
My goal is simple: to create a mystery that feels specific to Slovakia and Czechia, recognizable to people who remember the 1990s, and inviting to players discovering that world for the first time. I want it to feel nostalgic, funny, uneasy, and human — a journey into a period when the official version was rarely the complete one.
