A demo of Dread Fields from Ukrainian studio Podoba Interactive has appeared on Steam. It’s a horror game set in a Ukrainian village in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
A demo of Dread Fields from Ukrainian studio Podoba Interactive has appeared on Steam. It’s a horror game set in a Ukrainian village in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
As reported by Mezha.media, the demo was released as part of the Steam New Release Festival. The Steam page states that this is a separate release of Dread Fields Demo from Podoba Interactive, which was released on February 23, 2026, and the full version of the game currently has the status «coming soon». Steam also states that it supports the Ukrainian language for the interface, voice acting, and subtitles.
According to the description of the demo, the player moves from a big city to a remote farm to start a quiet life, but is confronted with the dark history of the former owner of the house. In the gameplay, this is presented through everyday activities: mowing the grass, milking the cow, feeding the chickens, collecting eggs, fishing, harvesting firewood and other household chores. It is on the contrast between the rural routine and strange events that the main tension of the game is built.
An important point for context: Dread Fields is not a random experiment by the studio. Podoba Interactive has already worked with the Ukrainian rural setting in previous projects, and the visual style of Dread Fields is also built on a low poly aesthetic with references to games from the late 1990s and early 2000s. For this game, this is not just stylization, but part of the idea, because the plot itself and everyday mechanics are tied to this period.
Back in January, Podoba Interactive announced Dread Fields as a new horror project with a Ukrainian setting, and now the studio has moved on to public testing via the Steam demo. This is an important milestone for the Ukrainian indie scene, as the game receives not only a store page, but also the first player reviews before the release of the full version.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Denis Klevanny, the author of the Telegram channel «GRAY» dedicated to video games, announced the «DO NOT PLAY» extension for Chromium-based browsers. It marks Russian studios and publishers on the game’s page on Steam.
