ASPIS Andrey Explained: Backstory, Goals, and the Two Endings

ASPIS Andrey is the emotional center of Dream Wire Games' Soviet-era horror game: an engineer who volunteers for a machine that might let him see his dead family again. If you want to understand what the game is actually about ahead of its planned October 23, 2026 release, his story explains more than any trailer. The ASPIS Andrey backstory links the 1987 experiment, the Institute of Cybernetics, the reality-bending worlds beyond it, and the two endings into a single arc. Here is what the official material confirms about him — and where the developers have deliberately left the answers out.

Who Is ASPIS Andrey?

Andrey is an engineer and one of six volunteers connected to ASPIS, an experimental system built to predict historical events. The setup is dated explicitly: the USSR, 1987. One year later, not a single volunteer has woken up.

That detail matters for how you read him. Andrey is not a soldier or a chosen one. He is a technical professional who understood the machine well enough to trust it, and who signed up anyway.

• Role: Engineer, and one of six volunteers in the ASPIS experiment
• Setting: The late-1980s Soviet Union, beginning in 1987
• Starting location: The Institute of Cybernetics
• Stated motivation: A single chance to see his deceased wife and daughter again

The game itself is described as a story-driven first-person horror title, so Andrey's perspective is the lens for everything: the institute corridors, the documents, the terminals, and the places the machine was never supposed to reach.

Why Andrey Entered ASPIS: Anna, Liza, and the 1987 Experiment

The official description names his family directly. Andrey's wife, Anna, and his daughter, Liza, are both deceased. His reason for joining the experiment is not research funding or career ambition — it is the possibility of seeing them once more.

That promise is where the horror comes from. ASPIS was designed to generate controlled predictions, not to open doorways. Instead of a contained simulation, the system creates a path to locations its creators never intended to reach.

For ASPIS Andrey, this means the experiment and his grief are the same thread. The deeper he travels, the more tightly the machine's behavior becomes tied to the reason he agreed to enter it in the first place. The Steam listing also carries an adult-content notice flagging themes of death, loss of loved ones, and experiments on consciousness — a fair warning that his motivation is treated as subject matter, not background flavor.

A grief story dressed as science fiction

Everything documented about the plot keeps circling the same idea: a man who wants one more moment with his family, and a system that answers with far more than he asked for. That framing is why the game's intrigue holds up even without full answers — a reviewer excerpt featured on the store page notes that ASPIS builds mystery by leaving plenty of questions without direct answers.

Andrey's Journey: From the Institute of Cybernetics to Ancient Worlds

ASPIS Andrey starts in a recognizable place and then leaves it behind fast. The journey begins at the Institute of Cybernetics and gradually pushes him away from familiar reality in three stages:

1. Distorted versions of recognizable places — environments that echo the world he knows but do not match it.
2. Ancient structures — architecture that predates the experiment by a wide margin.
3. Worlds that existed long before ASPIS was ever launched — the clearest sign that the machine found something rather than created it.

The narrative is delivered environmentally rather than through exposition dumps. You explore, find documents and records, interface with OGAS terminals, and assemble the events of the experiment from what the world leaves lying around. Character encounters and cinematic scenes carry the rest.

For players who like to reconstruct a plot from evidence, that structure is the main hook. The institute is the tutorial in how to read the game — once you understand what the terminals and records are telling you, the stranger worlds become legible too.

Playing as ASPIS Andrey: Makarov, Melee, and the PEP-01

ASPIS is played in first person, and the campaign follows Andrey through both exploration and combat. The confirmed toolkit is small and specific.

**Combat. Some opponents can be fought with a Makarov pistol or in melee. Ammunition and other resources have to be found along the way. The official sources do not document ASPIS purchase, restock, or respawn behavior for those resources.

The PEP-01. This device is the most distinctive part of the kit. It lets Andrey interact with Energy X: capturing and transferring it, powering machinery, and changing the state of specific mechanisms.

Astral windows. The PEP-01 also opens windows between different layers of reality. Objects that are unreachable in one state of the world can be seen and pulled from another. This is the backbone of exploration and spatial puzzle solving — if a path or item looks impossible in the current layer, the answer is usually to shift layers rather than to search harder in the same one.

Read those two systems together and the loop combines spatial-puzzle tools with combat against some opponents. Official sources say ammunition and other resources must be found along the way, but they do not establish a finite supply, purchase rules, restock behavior, or a required last-resort strategy.

The Cat, the Director, the Devil, and Andrey's Choice

Andrey is not alone inside ASPIS. The official description lists several encounters, and the pattern is consistent: everyone he meets knows more than they are willing to say.

None of them hands over the full explanation. The Cat knows the ancient pathways; the Devil appears in one of the worlds; the Director is present inside a system his own institute built. Each one is a partial source of truth, which is why assembling the plot from documents matters as much as talking to anyone.

The finale narrows everything to a single decision. According to the official description, the player makes one choice that determines Andrey's fate and leads to one of two endings. No further detail on those endings is published, so treat any specific ending breakdown you see elsewhere as unverified until the game is out.

Release context for Andrey's story (October 22, 2026 snapshot)

As of October 22, 2026, the ASPIS Steam store page listed a planned release date of October 23, 2026, and indicated the game had not yet unlocked. The same page showed no user reviews at that time, Xbox controller support, and interface and subtitle support for English, Russian, French, Ukrainian, and Japanese, with English and Russian audio. It also states that AI tools were used for select music tracks, voice-over lines, and visual assets, while the world, environments, mechanics, and visual identity were designed by the developer.

FAQ

Is ASPIS Andrey the character you actually play? Yes. ASPIS is a first-person game and the campaign follows Andrey — the store description frames the story entirely through his journey, the people he meets, and his eventual fate. There is no indication of a separate player-created protagonist.

What happened to Andrey's wife and daughter? Anna and Liza are described as deceased, and seeing them again is the reason Andrey volunteers for the experiment. The official material does not explain how they died, so any specific cause you read elsewhere is speculation at this point.

How many endings does ASPIS have? Two. The finale presents a single choice that determines Andrey's fate and leads to one of two endings. The developers have not published what separates them.

When can I start playing as ASPIS Andrey? As of October 22, 2026, the Steam store page listed October 23, 2026 as the planned release date and showed the game as not yet available, with no user reviews. Check the official ASPIS Steam page for the live release status and current pricing rather than relying on any snapshot.