Thesis: the reason so many late 1990s/early 2000s strategy and survival games take place in the former USSR is because Brutalist architecture is more amenable to low-poly rendering.
early modernist architecture was a boon to graphics developers
and no one else
oh come on, who wouldn’t want to live in an unadorned cube, the most perfect of all the solids
ah, so that’s why they call it the eastern block,