the menu is the squat

Open Escape from Tarkov and you do not arrive in a game. You arrive in a room. The stash screen is a tall grid of muddy inventory slots, weapons half-serviced, ammunition sorted by penetration value, a load bar somewhere resolving at its own pace. The palette is the color of wet concrete. Nothing pulses, nothing celebrates, nothing guides you toward the next click. The interface does not greet you. It waits with you.

This is usually filed under “bad UX,” and by the conventions of mainstream design it is. But the more time you spend inside it, the more the slowness reads as deliberate — not a developer’s failure to streamline, but a posture. Tarkov’s menus belong to a recognisably Eastern European relationship to time, work, and reward, and once you see it there you start seeing it elsewhere: in the long-form films of Eastern European adventure creators, in a whole sensibility that treats friction not as waste but as the substance of the thing.

The menu as place

Most game interfaces are corridors. They exist to move you from intention to action as quickly as possible — press play, skip the cutscene, queue the match. The design goal is transparency: a good menu, the thinking goes, is one you barely notice.

Tarkov’s menu is not a corridor. It is a place. You go to the hideout and you tend it. You service the weapon because an unserviced weapon jams. You sort the stash because space is scarce and every slot is a decision. The load screens are long enough that you feel them. You do not pass through this interface; you wait inside it, and the waiting is not punishment. It is the texture of the world the game is asking you to inhabit — scarce, bureaucratic, indifferent to your convenience. The menu reads less like software than like a cold apartment you are sitting in, doing the necessary small work, before you go back out into something dangerous.

Friction as a value, not a defect

The dominant convention in Western consumer design is to compress the boring parts. Minimise friction, shorten the loop, deliver the reward as soon as possible and as often as possible. Skip intro. Auto-save. One-click. The boring middle is treated as dead weight to be engineered away, and the measure of good design is how little of it the user has to feel.

This is a genuine preference, not a neutral baseline — and it is worth naming as one. A design culture that optimises away every moment of waiting is making a claim about what waiting is for: nothing. It is overhead. The work explored here makes the opposite claim. The friction is not in the way of the experience; it is the experience. Strip Tarkov’s slowness out and you do not get a better Tarkov. You get a different, lesser thing — a shooter with the world sanded off.

The squat

There is a single image that holds this posture, and it comes from the street rather than the screen: the squat. Heels flat, knees out, going nowhere, the low resting position of post-Soviet street culture. It is not a pose of leisure and it is not a pose of labor. It is stillness inside hardship — patience without an agenda, endurance rather than comfort. You squat because there is nowhere better to sit and no reason to hurry, and you make that posture your own.

Read as a cultural frame rather than a caricature, the squat describes a way of being in time that does not treat slowness, difficulty, or plain waiting as a problem to be solved. Tarkov’s menu is a squat. You lower yourself into it. You do the small necessary work. You wait, without the interface promising that the waiting will soon be over.

The journey is the content

Widen the lens past games and the same grammar appears in an unexpected place: the work of Eastern European adventure and exploration creators. shiey, gifgas, and the broader scene around them — urban exploration, train-hopping, freight rides, long walks across borders and through backcountry — build films out of material that mainstream content convention would cut entirely.

The footage is not a highlight reel of payoffs. It is the journey: the cold, the boredom, the logistics, the long hours of moving and waiting and moving again. A mainstream travel edit would open on the destination and backfill the effort as a montage. These films do the reverse. They give you the effort in something close to real time — the wait for the right train, the wrong turn, the hours that produce nothing — and let the duration do its work. The grind is not edited down to reach the good part. The grind is the part. And then, as punctuation, the reward arrives — a sunrise seen from the open door of a moving freight car, a vista at the top of a climb that took all day, a quiet stretch of stillness earned by real effort. The beauty lands precisely because the difficulty in front of it was not hidden. The hardship is not the price of the content; it is the content, and the beauty is what it earns.

Set this beside Tarkov and the two stop looking unrelated. Both insist on process over payoff. Both treat the long way around as the honest way. Both withhold the reward until the effort behind it is real — and both trust the audience to find that withholding meaningful rather than tedious.

Intensity and calm; work and reward

The unifying pattern is a rhythm: high effort or high stakes, then earned stillness. Tarkov’s core loop alternates the raid — fast, lethal, total concentration — with the long deliberate calm of the return: sorting the loot, healing up, servicing the gun, sitting in the stash. The calm is load-bearing. The decompression registers as meaningful only because the intensity was real. This is the same beat that organises an entire class of Eastern European content: the descent into the tunnel and the climb back to light, the all-night ride and the morning it delivers you into.

It is tempting to call this a pacing choice or an editing style, but that undersells it. It is a relationship to time and reward. The implicit claim is that calm without prior effort is empty, and reward without prior difficulty is cheap. You earn the stillness. You earn the view. The work refuses to grant either on demand, and that refusal is the whole ethic.

Why it reads as European

None of this is a claim about documented developer or creator intent. It is a reading — but a credibly placed one. The lineage is there in the surrounding culture: the bureaucratic, indifferent interfaces; the harsh, washed-out atmospheres of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro; the post-Soviet exploration scene that turns hardship into honesty rather than spectacle. These are works made by and for people for whom waiting, scarcity, and difficulty are not exotic — they are the ordinary water the fish swims in.

What makes it read as distinctly European is the refusal to flatter. Western mainstream design tends to reassure: everything is fine, this will be quick, you are doing great. The work here does not reassure. It presents difficulty plainly and lets the difficulty stand as a kind of respect — for the world, and for the person experiencing it.

Conclusion

What mainstream design treats as waste — friction, slowness, the squat, the long way around — is exactly what gives this work its weight. The cold menu you wait inside, the freight ride that takes all night, the gun you have to service before you can carry it: none of it is in the way of the experience. It is the experience, and the calm and the beauty on the far side of it are not delivered to you. They are earned. That is the posture the squat describes, and once you recognise it in the menu, you recognise it everywhere.