THE HOBBY BECAME A HUGE SOLO SUCCESS, INTRODUCING THE WORLD TO ZAGREBELNYY’S INFLUENCES There’s nothing quite like Mudrunnerfor cooling the blood, to paraphrase the classic Flanders and Swann number. There’s something meditative about plunging a truck into brown soup, then spending ten minutes wiggling the left stick and attaching winches to trees in a gradual and patient attempt to free your wheels from the quagmire. It’s a premise that would be considered ponderous or perverse by conventional game design standards, which hold that players should be swept along and kept busy at all times. But Mudrunnerdidn’t come from conventional game design – it came from the mind of Pavel Zagrebelnyy.
Zagrebelnyy was born in St Petersburg, Russia, the world’s northernmost metropolis. It was a grounding that would give him access…
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PC Gamer United Kingdom (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2021