Ivan Tsarevich, the third son who walked into the forest

Alexander Gorbenko · 21 October 2026 · 4 min read

Russian fairy tales have a habit. A tsar has three sons. The older two are clever, or proud, or both, and the youngest is the one nobody would bet a kopeck on. He is also the one who comes home with the Firebird. The tales call him Ivan Tsarevich, Ivan the tsar's son, and he is the hero of Forgotten Eras.

Our Ivan

Our Ivan is the king's third son, and he left the palace long before the game begins. Court life never interested him and the quiet of the forest did, which is where he met Avena, a rusalka. The old pact between gods and people forbade a love like theirs. When Ivan refused to give her up, his own father knocked him out and put an ancient headband on his brow, to hide him from the shamans who were coming for him.

So the game opens with Ivan waking up alone in a cold forest. He has three questions and nobody to ask. How did I get here? What is this symbol on my head? And what is that howling?

The kingdom has lost its memory along with him. A shaman's ritual pulled the runic magic out of the world and took the kingdom's memory with it, and what Ivan brings back, or chooses to leave buried, decides how the story ends.

Ivan Tsarevich lunging with the sword Kladenets, rendered from the game's 3D model

Ivan as he moves in the game, rendered from his 3D model.

Light on his feet

When we wrote Ivan's brief for the animators, the note was short. Young, energetic, confident, ready for adventure, light on his feet. He is not a soldier, and he should never move like one.

His clothes follow the same idea. Straw-blond hair and green eyes, a cream linen shirt, red trousers, and a moss-green cloak with no hood. No shoulder armour anywhere. Around his forehead he wears a dark red headband with a single amber disc, and on the disc is the mark of Veles. In his belt pouch, if you look closely at the sculpt, there is a wooden spoon.

Kladenets, the bow and the rune

Ivan fights with a sword, a bow and runes. The sword is Kladenets, named after the mech-kladenets of the tales, the magic sword that waits hidden somewhere until the right hero comes for it. Linguists still argue about the word. It may come from klad, buried treasure, or from an old word for tempered steel, and we like that it could be either.

Hold the rune of Veles and you are Ivan, with the sword, the bow and rune magic. Let it go and you are the Grey Wolf. The switch is one button, and it is also the map: a wall stays a wall for Ivan, and the Wolf picks up the scent trail behind it.

A misty pine forest with a stone path, from the current build of the game

The forest, from the current build.

The tales behind him

The tale our game leans on most is "Ivan Tsarevich, the Firebird and the Grey Wolf", number 168 in Alexander Afanasyev's collection of Russian folk tales. A wolf eats Ivan's horse, then offers to carry him instead, and from there the wolf does most of the work. He wins Ivan the Firebird, the horse with the golden mane and Elena the Beautiful, and when Ivan's brothers murder him, the wolf brings him back with the water of death and the water of life. Every time Ivan ignores the wolf's advice, it goes wrong.

Ivan Tsarevich turns up in plenty of other tales. In "Marya Morevna" (No. 159) he loses his wife to Koschei the Deathless and has to tend Baba Yaga's mares for three days to earn a horse fast enough to win her back. In "The Frog Princess" he marries a frog.

In 1889 Viktor Vasnetsov painted "Ivan Tsarevich Riding the Grey Wolf": the prince and Elena on the wolf's back, racing through a dark forest. It hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and it is probably the picture most Russians see when they hear his name.

Why the third son

Ivan is my own childhood self. The whole game grew out of remembering how free childhood felt. A third son suits that: nobody expects anything of him, so he is free to walk off into the forest and find out for himself.

Ivan is the hero of the Forgotten Eras demo, which ends in a fight with the Domovoy. Wishlist the game on Steam to hear when it is out.

Sources: "The Tale as Told by the Fire", Forgotten Eras on Steam, 16 July 2026. A. N. Afanasyev, Russian Folk Tales, Nos. 159, 168 and 267. V. M. Vasnetsov, "Ivan Tsarevich Riding the Grey Wolf", 1889, State Tretyakov Gallery.