HUTA’79

A Lenin statue just went up in smoke.
You’re the prime suspect — and you can’t remember whether you did it.

A narrative RPG in production at Fables Forge.

We’ll let you know when there’s something to play

What it’s about

You play Tadeusz, an information broker in a city where information is the only currency worth holding. The Milicja, the opposition just finding its footing, the black market — each of them pays a different price for the same fact, and every trade pulls you closer to one of them.

The trouble is you don’t remember yesterday. The medication you take cuts days out of your head the way a censor cuts paragraphs out of a newspaper — what’s left is the shape of what used to be there.

A few days ago the Lenin monument on Aleja Róż was blown up. Your name turns up in the files more often than it should. The game will not tell you whether you did it. It will only tell you who you become while trying to find out.

What we’re building

The information trade

You can sell the same fact to the Milicja (the regime’s police), the opposition or the black market — and each of them pays differently. Who you sell to matters: it changes who trusts you and who starts asking questions. There are no good choices. Only consequences.
A memory you can’t trust

The blackouts aren’t a cutscene. The world starts to look like a newspaper with the important sentences struck out — and you make your decisions from whatever is left.

If you’re reading this, it means that this time you remembered who you really are.
Nowa Huta, not “somewhere behind the Iron Curtain”

Aleja Róż, the Nowa Huta meadows, the bunkers, the steelworks. A district rebuilt from archives, books and conversations with people who were there — not from an idea of what communism looked like.

Why here

If Nowa Huta rings a bell at all, it’s probably as “that rough part of Kraków”. It’s an old label, and the least interesting thing you can say about the place. Nowa Huta is a city built from scratch to prove that socialism works — which then turned against the people who built it.

It was socialist social engineering: a workers’ city meant to outweigh conservative, educated Kraków. Farmers from the surrounding villages lost some of the most fertile land around, and in 1949 work began on the steelworks that would soon carry Lenin’s name.

Read on

Next to the steelworks grew a communist utopia: a city laid out on the drawing board around Plac Centralny, with green housing estates, schools, a theatre and cinemas within walking distance. It was meant to give the worker everything. There were just two things it was never supposed to have: God and a past.

Then the utopia started pushing back. The workers it was meant to raise fought for years for a church — the Ark of the Lord was consecrated in 1977. In 1973 a Lenin monument went up on Aleja Róż; in 1979 somebody really did try to blow it up. A year later the steelworks went on strike, and through the eighties it was one of Solidarity’s strongholds.

To us it’s a ready-made game map: a place where every second story is about somebody trying to live alongside the plan. Half the team lives here or comes from here, and when writing the script we rely on the memories of people who lived through those years — not just on the dusty books in Kraków’s archives.

A Milicja riot water cannon truck, scratched with graffiti, parked by the steelworks Administrative Centre in Nowa Huta — Photo: Marcin Wojnar

Where we are

Now: Vertical slice in production — roughly an hour of play, showcasing mechanics and part of the story. The greybox is standing; art direction and narrative are in progress.
What’s missing: A Steam page. We’ll open one when there’s something on it worth looking at, and not a day sooner.
How long: Three to five years, we estimate. We’re doing this alongside day jobs — and we’d rather say so now than explain it later.

Ironworks Theme work in progress · music by Wojciech Kozdrój

Volume 0:00

Press

Nowa Huta – miejsce dobre na życiową grę

Wciśnij „Start”

To właśnie w cieniu kombinatu, na nowohuckich alejach, placach i osiedlach grupa młodych przyjaciół postanowiła osadzić akcję swojej debiutanckiej gry wideo. To ich największy życiowy projekt – gra Huta ’79, w której każdy z członków ekipy w innej warstwie buduje własną narrację.

Ewa Winiarska

“These young people from Fables Forge are turning their visions and dreams, with great passion and talent, into a production meant to be not only an engaging RPG but also an interactive monument to Nowa Huta itself.”

Ewa Winiarska, “Press ‘Start’”
Lodołamacz issue 9 (54), September 2026, p. 18 — Dom Utopii

Quote translated from Polish.

The article will be published online in November, two months after the print. Until then, you can grab a free copy distributed in Nowa Huta.

Who’s making it

Nine people in Nowa Huta: writers, engineers, artists, a composer. We started as a game jam team and we still work together, carving our own path into gamedev.

Meet the team →

The Fables Forge team in studio T-shirts, posing with a guitar, headphones, a keyboard and a laptop in front of an arcaded building — Photo: Tomasz Synek / Lodołamacz

HUTA’79

The information trade

A memory you can’t trust

Nowa Huta, not “somewhere behind the Iron Curtain”

Press

Wciśnij „Start”

You’ll hear it first