Each time Skif, Stalker 2: Coronary heart of Chornobyl’s protagonist, meets his finish, a menu display screen pops up that shows a private dying depend. 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,’ seem 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 maintain themselves fed by braving near-certain dying to enterprise into the Zone and return with radioactive artifacts to promote. It’s a spot the place stepping off a primary 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 every other apocalypse or survival recreation setting at first look.
Rugged figures in gasoline masks and deteriorating fatigues roam desolated fields and forests, suffering from rusting tanks and transport containers, looking for morsels of meals or weaponry. Gunfire usually pops within the distance and nuclear whirlwinds known as ‘emissions’ flip the sky blood pink at sudden intervals. The hazard, concern, 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 Lifeless, Days Gone, DayZ, or Metro – a collection whose developer even contains 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 desirous 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 varied factions collect, enjoyable subsequent to campfires, buying and selling assets, or ingesting in makeshift bars. Even whereas trudging via the Zone, Skif would possibly run right into a fellow stalker who, as a substitute of attacking, affords 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. Among the finest examples of the sport’s tone is available in an early, elective mission that requires Skif to get well a household memento – a spiritual icon – from a area lined in poppies.
These poppies stretch throughout a gently sloping valley in a stunning sea of wealthy pink petals. Strolling via 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 sphere can be lethal. The flowers’ narcotic impact causes Skif to develop drowsy, nodding off and, ultimately, mendacity right down to die totally if he takes too lengthy trying to find the icon. A close-by stalker calls out, providing tips about the right way to survive the poppies and even the placement of the icon itself, however will solely assist if Skif runs a doubtlessly lethal errand for him first.
All of Stalker 2’s tone is current on this mission: The lethal great thing about the surroundings; the useful stranger who truly needs one thing for themselves; the sentimentality of a person providing the identical cash he might 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 one among two camps: The somber subgenre talked about above, or the absurdist type of recreation typified by Borderlands, Rage 2, Sundown Overdrive, Lifeless 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 very best out of a grim actuality that looks like it is likely to 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 standard 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 – generally 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 surprise, too. There may be alternative for psychological, bodily, religious, and scientific discovery. The sport’s creator clearly sees magnificence within the ruins, within the capability of humanity to search out pleasure in depressing circumstances. That is what makes Stalker 2: Coronary heart of Chornobyl stand other than the opposite apocalypse video games it resembles.
It makes an attempt to painting the complete 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 struggle each other to outlive. Regardless of what number of occasions Skif’s dying depend goes up, in spite of everything, Stalker 2’s participant at all times has purpose 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.
