Saint Kotar: The Yellow Mask is still labeled early access

The prologue traps two characters in a village steeped in superstition, then cuts the story off right where it would get interesting.

A village that prays too loudly to be innocent

Saint Kotar: The Yellow Mask arrived as the prologue to a larger game, and it still sits in the store under an early access label. The earliest reviews in the dossier date to August 2020. The most recent ones already come from 2026, and the tag never changed from one end to the other.

It's the prologue to the full game Saint Kotar: a grisly string of murders, foreshadowed by rumors of devil worship and witchcraft, in the small rural town of Sveti Kotar.

You steer two playable characters, Benedek Dohnany and Nikolay Kalyakin, each with a storyline of their own, and your dialogue choices bend the path the two of them follow. The campaign runs no longer than three hours — not much for hand-painted art, full voice acting and an original score, yet enough to plant the questions that only the full game promises to answer. The game is credited to the studio The-Mark Entertainment, which also handles publishing; this version reached the store on February 9, 2023.

The Orthodox, claustrophobic mood wins over even the skeptics

If it's the mood that draws you in rather than the action, you're in good company: in the reviews posted on the game's own GOG page, the people writing back in August 2020, in the thick of the studio's crowdfunding campaign, praise the same two things — the claustrophobic atmosphere and the hand-painted art, something you rarely see in point-and-click games.

A March 2021 comment is reminded of the first Black Mirror, only with an extra helping of Slavic folklore and nods to Orthodox Christianity — for anyone who buys into that tone, the two leads win you over despite their character flaws. One of the first players to try the demo, back in October 2020, notes that the team answered bug reports quickly — the kind of responsiveness only a game still in development can offer.

Not every compliment comes clean: a German review from December 2024 calls the setting promising and, in the same breath, gripes about the sluggish pace of the prologue.

The same complaints come back year after year

On the flip side, if two grating protagonists are enough to spoil the whole thing for you, the most repeated complaint cuts straight to it: the pair of main characters. An August 2020 review calls for a full rewrite of the dialogue. Another, from January 2021, sums the experience up as torture — 30 minutes were all it took to give up on both leads.

A Polish review from November 2020 objects to how much one protagonist, whom it finds dull, drones on about religion. A November 2025 review flags clumsily translated dialogue and voice work that feels out of sync with the script, even while crediting the actor's effort.

The sharpest criticism, though, is structural: someone who came back in December 2024 complains that the story stops exactly where it would get interesting, and that seeing the rest means paying for the full game. In February 2026, another player asks for a refund on the same grounds — having realized too late that this was a demo, not the whole game.

It's for anyone willing to wait for the answer

If you like a slow story thick with religious symbolism and don't mind waiting for an answer that only lands in the full game, this is the right antechamber: the village of Sveti Kotar, the two leads and the cult mystery seeded in the opening all hold up through the handful of hours on offer. By the time the prologue ends, you already know whether you want to come back for the rest.

Anyone who wants to finish the story in one sitting, or who trips easily over theology-laden dialogue and voice acting that still needs polish, will hit the same wall the 2026 reviewer hit: the prologue does what it promises, delivering atmosphere and mystery, but it withholds the ending — and asks you to buy the full game to get it.