#kosmopolska

The one major exception to things going smoothly is my dearly beloved Kosmopolska, which I've only been able to get running through a Windows 95 emulator, and even then not entirely stably.

Greetings, Programs! I’m “Coupleofdays”!

I might be genderfluid, I still haven't figured it out completely. I go by she/her pronouns on Tumblr, mostly just to see what it feels like. If you see me elsewhere online, I might have other pronouns (most likely he/him). You can read my explanation for this here.

Yes, I’m over 18 years old. I will occasionally be writing post on “adult” subjects, such as sex, but it’s not the primary focus of this account.

Important news for all you fans of the cult classic Swedish PC game Kosmopolska: The Museum of Drawings in Laholm, Sweden, will be having an exhibition of art by Mattias Adolfsson, who created most of the graphics for Kosmopolska. The exhibition will be going on between January 31 and May 24, 2026, and Adolfsson himself will be present when it opens!

Even if you're not interested in the game, Mattias Adolfsson is an amazing artist, just check his website for some of his beautiful work.

I wish that more people could play one of my favorite video games: The fascinating multimedia adventure game/RTS hybrid Kosmopolska. Of course, I understand why not many people have. It’s an obscure CD-ROM game from the 90s that was only released in Sweden, only in Swedish language. It’s tricky to get it to run on a modern computer, and even if you’re able to do it, the game is quite buggy and prone to crashes at certain points.

I’ve done what I can to make it available to non-Swedish speakers, mainly by doing a subtitled translation of a video that walk throughs the entire game, from beginning to end, so it’s possible to see what it’s about even if you can’t play it. As a supplement to this, I’ve created a website about the game, available in both English and Swedish, where there’s additional information about it, including explanations of the gameplay and the puzzles, and additional media related to it that I’ve managed to dig up.

One of the reasons I wish more people knew about the game, and had played it, is because I don’t think I’m able to analyze it from every possible angle that it deserves. I think there are some interesting themes in the game storyline, about trauma, abusive relationships, unhealthy codependency, imagination and escapism. But I don’t feel like I’m equipped to analyze these themes deeply enough, to figure out what the story is trying to say. There are plenty of well thought out explorations of stories like this that I’ve found online, and I wish that someone would write something similar about Kosmopolska.

When I first played the game, many years ago, I didn’t get very far into it, just far enough to become fascinated by the mystery of the story. For many years, I couldn’t figure out how to get it running again, and the mystery, the wish to reach the end of the game and get some kind of explanation, haunted me. And then, I was finally able to play it through to completion, and got to see the ending… And while it did reveal the shocking secret behind the main mystery of the story, it still left me wondering what the game was trying to say, what the message was. I’ve kept on thinking about it, and I feel like I’ve been able to grasp some clues, but a satisfying explanation still eludes me. Maybe there is one, maybe there isn’t. But if more people knew the story, maybe we could figure it out together.