One of the toughest games to review or write about in recent times has got to be Remember Gulag from groundbreaking developer Nolimit City. The studio has built up an enviable reputation for exploring themes others wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole and stacking them with insane features while they’re at it. Remember Gulag is possibly the most dramatic example to date of the studio’s double whammy combination of provocative subject matter and intense gameplay.
Due to circumstances outside their control, Remember Gulag underwent a few changes before it was released, but one thing no doubt remained the same throughout – its ability to go mental under the right conditions. There really couldn’t be much better a showcase of the stars aligning than this short, intense slap to the chops big win clip right here.
Before getting to the good bits, let’s spend a few moments setting the scene. If you’re unfamiliar with Remember Gulag, its largely monotone grimness might be the first thing you notice. Nolimit City has taken the opportunity to use Remember Gulag as a sort of reels-based history lesson. To do so, the game transports players to a time period, where the wrong words, actions, or associations could see someone sent to a prison camp for years on end. Many never returned. As such, Remember Gulag can be a heavy slot, but it also has lighter moments as well and is absolutely unique in what it does.
Onto the clip, and you’ll notice that two of the reels are covered in barbed wire to begin with. Landing a scatter symbol unlocks the fifth reel while landing a second scatter unlocks the sixth. The next good piece of news is the xNudge symbols on reel 3 turn the reel entirely wild while creating an x2 xNudge modifier in the process. So far, so good.
However, the real magic is performed by the hammer and sickle xSplit symbol on reel number 6. This symbol slices its way to the left, turning the two scatter reels completely wild, then doubling wild symbols on reels 1 and 3. Basically, a lot of wilds are created, and with the help of 14,400 ways, Oligarch Level: Achieved is complete. This occurs when the game’s win cap is struck, which in Remember Gulag equates to 30,000x the bet, or in this case, six thousand British Pounds.
As well as the size of the bet multiplier and resulting payout, a couple of things stand out. First of all, the player in this clip hails from the UK, so there’s not a single bonus buy in sight. Secondly, it didn’t even happen in the bonus game, but on a regular paid spin, costing 20 pence a pop. The magnitude of such a base game spin may or may not ignite discussion about feature buys in general, but, it did bring to mind a quote; ‘A human being is all hope and impatience,’ from Nobel Prize winner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. They might be exceptionally rare occurrences, but this video shows that those unicorn base game max wins are out there for the lucky few.
