Each time Skif, Stalker 2: Coronary heart of Chornobyl’s protagonist, meets his finish, a menu display pops up that shows a private demise rely. By the point the participant’s a dozen or so hours into the sport, it isn’t uncommon for this quantity to method the triple digits. It is because the world of Stalker – an alternate historical past portrayal of the nuclear Exclusion Zone in Chornobyl, Ukraine – is harsh. A bullet will take Skif down in a short time, however he’s additionally simply killed by standing anyplace close to an exploding grenade, receiving the brunt of a shock cost from a mutant boar, or wandering into an invisible pocket of gravity-warping air.
If this makes the sport’s setting, dubbed ‘The Zone of Alienation’ or simply ‘The Zone,’ appear to be a fairly depressing place to inhabit, even nearly, that’s by design. Stalker 2’s world is one the place the ruthless and brutal thrive, the place the titular stalkers preserve themselves fed by braving near-certain demise to enterprise into the Zone and return with radioactive artifacts to promote. It’s a spot the place stepping off a fundamental highway would possibly trigger the telltale click on of Skif’s Geiger counter to develop violently loud as unseen radiation seeps into his garments and pores and skin. Due to this, the Zone looks like nearly some other apocalypse or survival game setting at first look.
Rugged figures in fuel masks and deteriorating fatigues roam desolated fields and forests, affected by rusting tanks and transport containers, attempting to find morsels of meals or weaponry. Gunfire recurrently pops within the distance and nuclear whirlwinds known as ‘emissions’ flip the sky blood purple at sudden intervals. The hazard, worry, and desperation that characterize the Zone make Stalker 2 seem prefer it ought to firmly belong to a camp of soul-draining style work that features The Final of Us, Dying Gentle, Frostpunk, The Strolling Useless, Days Gone, DayZ, or Metro – a collection whose developer even consists of veterans of previous Stalker video games.
It’s when the participant talks to different characters, although, or spends extra time poking into the corners of the Zone’s crumbling buildings, that Stalker 2’s singular tone makes itself clear. There are extraordinarily harmful individuals all through the wasteland – dispassionate killers desperate to shoot each other and loot ammunition and cans of meals from their corpses. Simply as importantly, although, there are pleasant individuals wandering the Zone, too.
There are bases the place stalkers and troopers belonging to the sport’s numerous factions collect, enjoyable subsequent to campfires, buying and selling sources, or ingesting in makeshift bars. Even whereas trudging by way of the Zone, Skif would possibly run right into a fellow stalker who, as a substitute of attacking, presents a greeting or asks for assist crossing a tough stretch of terrain. Come again from a life-threatening tour, bloodied and irradiated from a mission’s perils, and the pleasant face of a weapons vendor or the sight of a cot left vacant for a weary vacationers’ relaxation seems like a ray of sunshine following a vicious storm – like Darkish Souls’ Firelink Shrine.
There’s one thing very human on this tonal forwards and backwards, between the expression of our worst and finest impulses within the midst of a collapsed society and an more and more violent pure world. Probably the greatest examples of the sport’s tone is available in an early, elective mission that requires Skif to recuperate a household memento – a non secular icon – from a area lined in poppies.
These poppies stretch throughout a gently sloping valley in a beautiful sea of wealthy purple petals. Strolling by way of them, particularly if the in-game clock coincides with the solar rising or falling to wash the scene in purple gentle, is as idyllic as nearly any location in videogames. The sector can be lethal. The flowers’ narcotic impact causes Skif to develop drowsy, nodding off and, finally, mendacity all the way down to die fully if he takes too lengthy trying to find the icon. A close-by stalker calls out, providing recommendations on survive the poppies and even the placement of the icon itself, however will solely assist if Skif runs a probably lethal errand for him first.
All of Stalker 2’s tone is current on this mission: The lethal fantastic thing about the surroundings; the useful stranger who really needs one thing for themselves; the sentimentality of a person providing the identical cash he may use to eat to retrieve a functionally ineffective memento.
There’s no scarcity of apocalypse video games that goal for the same complexity in tone. However they largely fall extra neatly into considered one of two camps: The somber subgenre talked about above, or the absurdist fashion of recreation typified by Borderlands, Rage 2, Sundown Overdrive, Useless Island 2, or sure Fallout entries.
Stalker 2, for its half, refuses to spend too lengthy in both mode. Whereas Fallout highlights the absurdity of a world replicating the identical mercenary authorities and financial methods that introduced it to a nuclear disaster within the first place, Stalker 2 presents a world the place a societal crash has already arrived and there’s nothing left to do however make the perfect out of a grim actuality that looks like it could be everlasting.
Even the character of the Zone itself, which is seen by the sport’s characters as – relying on their outlook – a land of alternative, a violent nightmare, or the location of nuclear-borne miracles, belies the same old expectation {that a} post-apocalyptic panorama must be straightforwardly hellish. The anomalies that seem as Skif explores would possibly flip a couple of sq. meters of panorama right into a gauntlet of crackling electrical energy, jets of flame, tiny items of flesh-ripping glass, or effervescent swimming pools of acid. However the truth that these unusual phenomena exist in any respect – typically accompanied by wound-healing or injury-protecting artifacts – is proof that there’s extra to Stalker 2’s apocalypse than sheer devastation.
There may be unusual marvel, too. There may be alternative for psychological, bodily, religious, and scientific discovery. The sport’s creator clearly sees magnificence within the ruins, within the means of humanity to search out pleasure in depressing circumstances. That is what makes Stalker 2: Coronary heart of Chornobyl stand aside from the opposite apocalypse video games it resembles.
It makes an attempt to painting the total dimensions of individuals in a nasty place, exhibiting that even the horrifying drama of a world that’s succumbed to catastrophe can nonetheless see its inhabitants do greater than battle each other to outlive. Irrespective of what number of instances Skif’s demise rely goes up, in any case, Stalker 2’s participant all the time has cause to load their final save and enterprise again out into the Zone once more, perhaps to see in the event that they’ll encounter one thing higher than they did earlier than.
