Kursk, the game based on a 2000 Russian submarine disaster, will be out this year

Kursk is a game about a nuclear-powered Russian submarine that was lost along with its entire crew in the year 2000. Developer Jujubee first mentioned it in 2015 and then went quiet, but in a blog post this week it revealed more details about what type of game Kursk will be and confirmed a 2018 release date for PC.

Jujubee said it'll be the "first fully fledged adventure-documentary game in history". A bold claim, but not particularly revealing. However, they also said it'll be a first-person sandbox game about exploring the ship and uncovering its secrets through a variety of gameplay mechanics. "The game takes advantage of an entire collection of mechanics and solutions that have been worked out by the game industry over the years, and uses them to tell a specific story." Players will be met with new ideas throughout the ten-hour story, it said.

The circumstances of the real-world disaster have not yet been fully explained, which allows the developer some creative wiggle room. You'll control a spy who is trying to gain information about Shkval supercavitating torpedoes, which Jujubee said were "of interest to all major intelligence services in the world at the time". Most of the game will take place on the Kursk submarine, but you'll also visit Moscow and the garrison town of Vidyayevo.

The game will shoot for "realism" and make the player "feel like a member of a submarine crew", which presumably means you'll have to actually help pilot the thing at some point. You'll also have moral choices to make that will affect the story and steer you towards one of a number of endings.

The team also detailed two DLC packages that will come post-release: the first, called Kengir, tells the story of one prisoner's escape from the Soviet Kengir labour camp in 1954. Essentially, it'll be a completely different story in a different setting. The second DLC will introduce VR support.

Scroll down for a few extra screens from the game, which is being made in the Unity engine.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.