Walk St Petersburg out of the fog
Everything starts covered. St Petersburg was designed to be seen on foot at imperial scale, and it clears in long straight strokes.
Flat delta, enormous blocks
The city sits on the delta of the Neva and it is dead flat, which makes the walking physically easy and the distances deceptive. Everything was built to a plan and everything is oversized. Nevsky Prospekt runs about four and a half kilometres from the Admiralty out to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, crossing the Moika, the Griboyedov Canal and the Fontanka on the way, and walking its full length takes most of an hour without stopping.
Off the main prospekts the blocks are huge and hollow. Behind the street facades are the courtyards, including the famous narrow ones people call courtyard wells, and passages that cut through from one street to the next. Vasilyevsky Island is different again: a strict grid of numbered lines, laid out early and never softened.
An afternoon along the water
Start at Palace Square with the Hermitage behind you, walk out onto Dvortsovaya Naberezhnaya and follow the Neva embankment east past the Summer Garden. Turn inland along the Fontanka, then cut west on the Griboyedov Canal past the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, and rejoin Nevsky. That is a couple of hours, mostly beside water, and it lights the whole historic centre in one connected shape.
For something less obvious, cross to Vasilyevsky and walk the lines from the Strelka down towards the port, or go over to the Petrogradsky Side for the fortress and the streets behind it. Kolomna in the south west of the centre is quieter, more canals, fewer people, and it fills in fast.
How the fog actually retreats here
Because the plan is so ordered, your cleared ground appears as long straight strokes along the prospekts and canals, and the effect looks almost drawn. What stays dark for a long time is the interior of the blocks. If you only walk the streets, the map ends up as a lattice of lit lines around big black rectangles, and the only way to fill them is to go in through the courtyards and passages where you can.
The rivers cut the city into islands, so bridges matter. In the navigation season the main Neva bridges are raised in the middle of the night, which will genuinely strand you on the wrong side if you are walking home late. Plan the crossing before it happens, or accept a very long detour.
Season, light and practicalities
The walking year here is lopsided. Winter is long, dark and icy, with real snow and short days, and it puts a hard limit on how much ground you cover between November and March. June is the compensation: the white nights mean it barely gets dark, and you can walk the embankments at two in the morning in usable light. Most people do most of their covering between May and September.
Buildings in the centre are uniformly mid-rise rather than towers, so the trace tends to stay clean, though the deep courtyards can drop it briefly. Background exploring keeps revealing with the app closed and the screen off.
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Questions people actually ask
Does FOG work offline here?
The map lives on your phone. There is no account, no cloud and no analytics, and revealing depends on your position, not on a server.
Will the courtyards be recorded?
Usually, though a deep enclosed courtyard can briefly lose the fix. Passages between streets normally come through fine.
How do I know how much of the city I have covered?
City percent shows the share of St Petersburg you have lit up, for any city you have walked.
Is there a monthly fee?
No. FOG is free to explore and one purchase of USD 5.99 unlocks unlimited ranks, every character and history import. No subscription, ever.
Start with a dark map.
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