This collection of YouTube shorts boasts very impressive CGI work; fun, quirky humour and charm; neat allusions to Russian, Soviet and international pop culture; and as a special ingredient, this kind of Russian soulfullness that might just make the name "birchpunk" more than just a lame branding variation on "cyberpunk". Indeed, this series plays with the core cyberpunk idea of "high tech, low life" in a quite fun way: instead of the life being explicitly bad for the majority due to the suffocating dominance of the corporations, this Russian cyberpunk has a somewhat more optimistic vision: life is bad, because it's always kinda bad, if you concentrate on these aspects, but people make it work, and the advances of technology certainly enable higher highs even if the lows stay low.
For all of its positive aspects, the series falters whenever it tries to have a deeper level of story and worldbuilding than as just a collection of gags. Whenever it goes beyond firing off one-off jokes or placeholderish believable dialogue (made quite fun by juxtaposition against the unbelievable setting), the writers really stumble, and can only write incoherent, cliched narratives that only worsen the experience. These shorts for sure work better as guided tours into this world than as narrativised stories, so I'm somewhat dreading looking into these creators' longer-form effort, "Kibierdierievnia"
Still, this great shorts collection is well-worth anybody's time, and is possibly a must-watch to people from Russia and the near abroad, who are best poised to enjoy the setting.
