Lenin Street Geek Shop’s free demo trades Torn Away’s war for a 2000s pirate-CD kiosk

Most shop simulators are about the till: margins, restocking, the small dopamine hit of a completed sale. perelesoq has always been more interested in the people on the other side of the counter. The Moscow-based independent studio made its name with Torn Away, a narrative adventure that followed a child through the Second World War, and its new project shrinks the frame to a single kiosk in a snowed-in town at the turn of the millennium. Lenin Street Geek Shop is a story-driven simulator, and its free demo is now live on Steam.

The premise runs on millennial memory. You have dropped out of school to mind the town’s first geek shop, and the shelves fill with the contraband of a pre-streaming childhood: pirated games and bootleg music, anime and movie DVDs, toys, crisps, cigarettes and beer. The parody brands do a lot of quiet worldbuilding. The studio’s announcement lists Friendzone gum, three-in-one instant coffee and Max Ouch CDs among the stock, and the store screenshots show an Orcraft box sitting in the display case where a certain orcs-and-humans strategy game once lived.

A pixel-art snowy street with a kiosk and a dialogue window in Lenin Street Geek Shop — Image: perelesoq

What sets it apart from the counter-sim pack is that the shop is a stage. Customers talk, and the player decides how to answer: befriend the local geeks, look out for the younger kids, flirt, or fall out with friends. Rumours travel fast in this town, and what you choose to put on display decides what kind of crowd walks through the door, and what the neighbours say about the place. Making money is its own improvisation, from cooking cup noodles to burning pirated CDs, and the screenshots alternate between a warm, cluttered 3D interior and pixel-art street scenes in the snow.

The demo covers four in-game days. In the announcement, perelesoq promises street fights, love dramas, angry customers, an outbreak of Pixel Pox among the neighbourhood children and beatboxing lessons, along with story situations and items that, according to the studio, can only be found in the demo. A special quest closes the slice, and its reward is a secret cartoon.

Young customers wait at the shop counter piled with gum, snacks and CDs in Lenin Street Geek Shop — Image: perelesoq

That reward says something about the studio’s priorities: the prize for finishing a quest is a story, not a stat. The full game frames its long arc in the same personal terms. Beyond buying and selling, you customize the shop, shape the lives of its quirky regulars, save up some cash and, in the studio’s words, make your mom’s dream come true.

The Lenin Street Geek Shop demo arrived on Steam on October 5, 2026, and is free to download. The full game is listed for Windows, macOS and Linux with English and Russian language support, and its store page still reads “coming soon” rather than offering a release date. Its original Russian title translates roughly as The Kiosk on Lenin Street, which is exactly the scale the game is working at.

Torn Away asked what a war looks like from a child’s height. Lenin Street Geek Shop asks what a decade looked like from behind a counter, one customer at a time.

Tags: game demos, Lenin Street Geek Shop, perelesoq, shop simulators, Torn Away