1981: After completing a tour of duty at the pole, Alexander Nesterov was supposed to board the Arktika-class nuclear-powered icebreaker North Wind near the North Pole. However, he finds it's been shipwrecked since 1968 and its dead crewmen have undergone bizarre metamorphosis. The game tells the story through flash backs, narrations of Maxim Gorky's fairy tale "The Flaming Heart of Danko" (which parallels what happened to the ship and its crew) and its unique puzzle solving mechanic: the Mental Echo, which allows the player to relive experiences of dead crewmen in order to correct their mistakes and save their lives, as well to clear passage and progress through the game. The game lacks a soundtrack, but it just adds to the atmosphere of loneliness and desolation of the wreck, also health packs were replaced by a heat meter that gets drained by damage from the enemies and contact with the polar weather, so the player must pay attention to every heat source he will be coming across.