Let's have a look at STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl, a spooky action-adventure from 2007. In its day STALKER
was an ambitious, atmospheric adventure game that rewarded exploration and
experimentation. It was scary, brutally hard, often frustrating. It
looked great, it had artificially intelligent non-player characters,
and at the time it felt like the future of gaming.
In fact for several years STALKER actually was the future of
gaming. It was announced back in 2002, with release planned for 2004, but
despite a steady flow of teaser videos development dragged on. Circa 2006
there were rumours that the publishers were going to
dismiss the original developers and hand the project over to a separate
team, but eventually the game came out in March 2007. To the developers' credit it still felt like the future of gaming, despite being five years old at that
point.
Sadly STALKER was not the future of gaming. The actual future of gaming was Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which came out a few months
later. Modern Warfare was the direct
antithesis of STALKER. It was a story-driven action game where the
action sequences were essentially interactive cutscenes. The player had very
little freedom of movement and the single-player campaign had essentially no
replay value, which explains why the game is mostly remembered today for its
multiplayer component.
It's easy to crap all over Modern Warfare. The story was engaging, at times subversive, and it only really became
ridiculous in the sequels. The franchise as a whole went on to become
synonymous with the process of squeezing the juice out of an intellectual
property until it was a dried-up husk and all the developers were dried-up husks, but it didn't have to be that way.
I don't want to
disparage Modern Warfare's juice. It had good juice. Juice that worked. Juice that
was palatable to a wide audience. Juice that ran well on a modest PC. Juice that was also released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360,
whereas STALKER was PC-only.
After all these years I still remember.
STALKER required a top PC, and even then it was plagued with technical problems. For every drop
of good juice there was a drop of bad juice. And even when it worked the game
had a niche appeal. The difficulty level was off-putting. Dying a lot in unfair ways is realistic, but people play video games to get away from real life.
It was obvious that the developers had, at one point, been
ordered to get the game out of the door immediately, because the final levels
were just linear shooting gauntlets. Furthermore the storyline was told with blocks of text that were poorly-translated from Ukrainian. At times STALKER bordered on
Eurojank, at other times it was the dictionary definition of Eurojank,
sometimes it was Eurowine. Sometimes its juice was wine, and sometimes its juice was just juice.
Some games cleverly weave the story into the flow of gameplay. STALKER says no.
Hovering over STALKER is the spectre of what might have been. The
game had a famously lengthy development process that left behind a tonne of
unimplemented ideas, but for every alternative world where the development
team's original plans came to fruition there is another world where the
distributors pulled the plug, leaving us with nothing at all. The spectre
hovers beyond our reach, intangible. We can study it, but all attempts to
embrace it have been met with failure.
Why am I writing about STALKER? I recently
built a new PC
so that I could run Windows 11. After installing Steam I realised I had three
new games. Enhanced editions of the STALKER trilogy, given
away for free by the publishers for people who owned the original games. I
decided to see how well Shadow of Chornobyl had aged. As well as Gillian
Anderson, or as badly as cheese?
The answer is Gillian Anderson, but a kind of wonky Gillian Anderson. Not a
sentence I ever thought I would write, but here we are. Everybody knows the story
of STALKER. Circa the turn of the millennium Ukrainian
development studio GSC Game World had a big hit with Cossacks: European Wars, a top-down strategy wargame. But first person shooters were hot, so they
decided that their next project would be a sci-fi shooting game
called Oblivion Lost, starring an army man with a minigun.
After building a simple engine the team realised that the end result was
boring, so circa 2002 they decided to create something more ambitious,
something more mythic. In the meantime GSC kept the money coming in with a
mixture of budget titles (including Codename: Outbreak, which used
elements of the cancelled Oblivion Lost) and sequels
of Cossacks.
On the back of an effective pitch the team arranged an international
publishing deal with THQ, at which point the problems started. The pitch sold
a game that would be ambitious even today. After going on a tour of Chernobyl
and Pripyat the team decided to make an open-world survival action game set in
the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, initially
reusing the Oblivion Lost name.
For the benefit of younger readers, one of Chernobyl's nuclear reactors suffered a major accident in
1986, spewing radioactive waste into the environment. The cloud of
radioactivity spread over Sweden and as far west as Wales. The damaged reactor was eventually
covered in a huge metal shroud, while the rest of the plant continued to
generate electricity.
The surrounding area became too radioactive for
long-term habitation, so the town of Pripyat - which had been purpose-built to
house the families of plant workers - was evacuated. The nearby town of
Chernobyl was also evacuated, although to this day it still houses a few people who work at the plant.
The game was going to take place in a series of huge maps. The player would
have to eat and sleep, and carefully avoid environmental hazards as they moved from place to place. In this universe, which drew inspiration from the
look of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker and the setting of the
Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic, a second Chernobyl disaster
in 2006 had rewritten the rules of physics, littering the area around the
reactor with radioactive, gravitational, pyrokinetic, and chemical anomalies
that spawned mysterious, occasionally beneficial artefacts, which fetched a
high price in the outside world.
Into this environment scavengers, trespassers, adventurers, loners, killers,
explorers, and robbers were willing to risk their lives for a bit of
cash. And perhaps even enlightenment, because there were rumours that the
reactor might have the power to grant wishes.
The player would share the game world with deadly anomalies,
dangerous mutants, anarchists and bandits, and also artificially intelligent
bands of loners powered by GSC's custom-made A-Life engine. The other inhabitants of STALKER's world would traverse the
environment independently, getting into fights that the player could either
participate in or avoid. The original pitch mooted the possibility that there
would be radiant quests, and that the non-player characters were smart
enough to complete the game without the player's intervention.
The game would also track the passage of time through dawn, day, dusk, and
night, with changing weather and occasional radioactive storms. The player
could duck into shelter, and perhaps trade artefacts for some food or
ammunition. Did I mention that STALKER is technically an
acronym? I think I alluded to it a couple of paragraphs up the page. I'm not typing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. more than once, no sir.
All of this was was heady stuff. Heady and also powerfully appealing. Circa
2003 the concept came across as a blend of the big open maps and realistic gunplay
of Operation Flashpoint with the character interaction
of The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, in an interesting and unusual
setting.
This was also a time when the stereotypically grey, post-Soviet
look of Eastern Europe was incredibly hip in the West. A year later the
realistically drab City 17 of Half-Life 2 felt fresh and new,
at a time when the audience was getting bored with sci-fi and fantasy games, and STALKER took the grimness up a notch.
Even today there isn't much like the STALKER games. Fallout 4 and The Outer Worlds are similar, but they're set in a
parallel universe and the far future respectively, not the world after tomorrow. DayZ closely resembles STALKER,
but it doesn't have much of a story, and The Long Dark doesn't have artificially intelligent NPCs. Or lovingly detailed recreations of the Russian AS VAL suppressed sniper rifle.
And of course all of those games were fifteen years or so in the future back
in the early 2000s. Circa 2003, 2004 or so the only similar games that mixed exploration and action were Trespasser, which was already fading into
legend, and Far Cry, which was essentially a corridor shooter but
with incredibly large corridors and also very narrow corridors.
STALKER's development went through three stages. At first the team
struggled to build a new engine, because contemporary Unreal and Id Tech were no good at huge outdoors maps. The X-Ray Engine ended up with dynamic
shadows, ragdoll physics, simulated ballistics, wide open levels with integral
indoors sections, and even at one point driveable vehicles, in addition to the
A-life artificially intelligence engine.
Once that was finished the team found
themselves with an enormous, amorphous mess of a game. Several of the levels
had been designed in the expectation that the player would traverse them in
cars, but the end result was a bunch of large, mostly empty driving maps that just filled up space. Eventually THQ got sick of the process
and sent a chap called Dean Sharpe to get something out of the door as quickly
as possible, as described in this classic Eurogamer article.
With Sharpe in place the team cut and cut and cut again, then assembled what
they had left into a coherent story, at which point THQ paid for some
admittedly quite nice albeit generic cutscenes. The game's large blocks of
text largely came about because the storyline wasn't finished until near
release, leaving no time for fully-voiced dialogue or in-game cutscenes. In
March 2007 the game was released to good-but-not great reviews, but the sales figures were surprisingly strong for a PC-only title.
I like to think of STALKER as a spiritual brother of Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and Far Cry, albeit that it was released a few years later. Those three games came out in 2004, at
a time when games publishers seemed to be losing confidence in the PC as a
major gaming platform. Nonetheless they were at least initially PC-only, and their technically advanced engines felt like a collective vote of confidence in the PC. To the great relief of PC gamers they were big commercial hits. Half-Life 2 is still regarded as one of the best video games ever made.
Eventually the three games were ported to games consoles, in one form or
another, but STALKER remained PC-only for over a decade. It went on to
sell over two million copies by 2009 and has presumably sold more in the years
that followed. I have no idea if it made a profit. I waited a couple of years
and picked it up in 2009 as a budget re-release:
I had completely forgotten that there was a multiplayer mode. The game had a
number of bugs, some of which were dealt with by a series of patches released
in 2007 and 2008. Perhaps because I was patient I never experienced any truly
game-stopping problems, and the physical release worked on Windows XP and
Windows 10, although eventually I bought the
three STALKER games digitally as a Steam bundle.
In 2008 GSC self-published a standalone prequel, Clear Sky, and in
2009 they published a semi-sequel, Call of Pripyat. I'll write
about them later, but suffice it to say that Clear Sky was a
curate's egg, while Pripyat was very good, although it didn't
have the same air of creeping dread as the original game.
The STALKER trilogy is odd, in the sense that the three games feel like
variations on a theme, as if three different development teams had been given
a design document and some shared resources, and had been told to make a game
independently without talking to the other two teams.
In 2010 GSC Game World announced a full-blown sequel, STALKER 2, but in
2011 the company wound itself up and fired all its employees, amid rumours
than the Ukrainian government - who were, back then, the bad guys - had tried
to take over the company. In late 2013 and 2014 the government of Ukraine
became so bad that the people of Ukraine threw them out, after which Russia
sent in troops to occupy Crimea because we can't have nice things in this
world.
Do you remember when games in the 2000s had pre-smartphone PDAs, even though they were
set in the future?
Throughout the 2000s one of Ukraine's major tourist attractions was the
exclusion zone around Chernobyl and Pripyat. The area also featured
in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, where it was the setting for a
memorable level involving snipers. In 2018 I concluded that if I wanted to see
Pripyat the window of opportunity was closing, so I booked a tour, hence the photographs
dotted throughout this article. I always wonder what happened to the tour
operators. A few months after I came back the award-winning TV show
Chernobyl brought the disaster into the public consciousness again,
so presumably the tour people had a flood of work before the lights went out forever. I hope they banked their
earnings while the money was still coming in.
Pripyat was unexpectedly beautiful in the October sunshine. The Chernobyl
nuclear plant is much smaller than it appears in STALKER. The
spookiest part of the trip was the town of Chernobyl, which was still used as
a dormitory for plant workers. As a result it
hadn't been overtaken by nature, but at night there were no streetlights, and
yet here and there lights shone from occupied houses. Perhaps over time
the inhabitants will evolve so that they no longer require eyes to see.
Russia launched a lightning invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq were often derided in the West as media spectacle put on to entertain the population, viz Jean Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. In contrast the invasion of Ukraine has taken three years and Russia has lost around a quarter of a million soldiers, in the process turning the eastern part of Ukraine into a muddy graveyard strewn with mines, wet wipes, and skulls.
Sadly Jean Baudrillard is no longer with us, but I imagine she he would argue that the invasion of Ukraine has sent a powerful message to the warmongering fat-cats of the United States and their complacent media-saturated population, or something.
But still. GSC re-emerged circa 2014, and in 2018 the company announced that
the development of STALKER 2 was back on track, although the
Russian invasion of 2022 resulted in most of the development team relocating
to Prague. At least one developer, a chap called Volodymyr Yezhov, on whom a character from Call of Pripyat was modelled, joined the armed forces and was killed in combat. The invasion is also the reason why the first game is now Shadow of Chornobyl and not Shadow of Chernobyl. I have to admit that I was
sceptical STALKER 2 would ever appear, but it was eventually released in November
2024, to generally positive reviews and
apparently strong sales. Why do I keep writing Chernobyl? Force of habit. I'm British. Splendid isolation.
But what of the original game? What's it like to play in 2025? Surprisingly
good, is the answer. It has held up surprisingly well. Some elements are
still, in 2025, ahead of the curve. A-Life, for example. The game takes
place on a set of large maps, each of which contains a bunch of invisible
checkpoints and waypoint nodes. Periodically groups of monsters, bandits, lone
stalkers, and military types spawn at one of the waypoint nodes and make their
way on foot from checkpoint to checkpoint. If they meet along the way a fight breaks
out.
Or sometimes the groups greet each other and go on their way, and the NPCs end
up relaxing by a fire, playing guitar. The A-life system runs all the time in
the background, so it's possible for the player to meet someone early in the
game in one map, and then find their corpse several hours later in a
completely different map. Most games imitate a living world by drawing a
bubble around the player and only animating things within the bubble,
but STALKER runs the whole world in real time. It's more advanced and feels more real than for example The Outer Worlds, which came out more than a decade later.
The game fakes things a little bit - some of the distant gunfire and screams
are just ambient background sounds - but there's enough actual AI for the game
to feel like a genuinely living, breathing world. Occasionally I stumbled on some random corpses and wondering what had happened. Or there
were some corpses mixed in with the bodies of mutant monsters. There must have
been a desperate fight for survival, but it was somebody else's story. There is something both chilling and comforting about the sound
of distant gunfire.
This does lead to one of the game's long-standing bugs, though. AI NPCs are
programmed to spawn around campfires, where they sit and sing jolly tales of
roaming the wilderness. But sometimes they spawn inside the actual fire, and
die.
You'd think the developers would have made the NPCs fireproof. Or added some
code so that fireplaces deal a different kind of fire damage to flame-spewing
anomalies. But no. Gillian Anderson, and cheese.
When I first played the game back in 2009 I was expecting something akin
to Operation Flashpoint, in which a single bullet is
lethal. STALKER isn't quite that hardcore. It's a lot more
bullet-spongy. Enemies generally die to a headshot, but it can take a lot of
bullets to put some of the baddies out of action. Health-wise it's a kind of anti-Modern Warfare. Injuries cause wounds, which sap the player's strength unless they stop the bleeding with bandages. Then health slowly regenerates, but nowhere near quickly enough to help in a gunfight.
The game has a tutorial
of sorts that demonstrates how the combat works. There's a little bit of
stealth, but for the most part combat involves pumping the enemy full of
bullets and then taking cover and reloading. The mutants are often incredibly
frustrating, because they run around erratically, and it occasionally seems as
if the baddies know where the player's crosshair is pointed, but replaying the
game in 2025 I was still impressed with the combat AI.
Baddies often get stuck on walls or end up trapped in action loops, but when
it works the AI is both merciless and fair. They're smart enough to
double-back and creep up on the player, or hide just long enough that the
player can't simply wait for them to pop out of cover. The baddies are also no more
immune to monster attacks than the player, and it's incredibly satisfying to
break up a bandit attack by dragging some dogs in their direction.
I was also impressed with the general flow of the story, although the writing is perfunctory. There's an effective escalation from an initial
skirmish, to a series of increasingly large set-pieces, followed by a
memorable dynamic shift where the player escapes from a hectic gunfight into a
spooky cavern where the only sound is a squeaking light.
At that point the game plays its other card. It can do horror as well as
action. In quick succession it introduces an invisible monster and a creature
that can suck out the player's consciousness. The game is very good
at horror dynamics. There are a couple of sequences where the player is asked
to explore some ruined laboratories, expecting trouble, but nothing happens,
but then suddenly a random piece of furniture flings itself at the player. Or, after infiltrating an otherwise-empty
underground complex and flicking a switch, the player's radar lights up with
hostile contacts.
A lot of the game's quiet-quiet-BOO! tricks appeared in Doom 3, but that game
deployed them in a hamfisted, repetitive way,
whereas Chernobyl is more subtle. Which is surprising given
the chaotic development process.
On the downside the storyline boils down to grabbing a bunch of meaningless
documents, then flicking some switches, then backtracking almost to the
beginning of the game, then flicking more switches etc. The actual plot is
almost meaningless. It's something about a group of scientists using the cover
of the exclusion zone to run mind control experiments, but none of that really
matters. There's an underlying quest to find and kill a man called Strelok,
which can be completed surprisingly quickly. The game also has a bunch of
different endings, depending on the choices the player makes throughout the
story, but in practice they're all overridden by the actual true ending, so
they're immaterial.
But on the upside STALKER is incredibly evocative. One entire
level, the Bar, has almost no combat at all, but it's fun to explore, and even
though NPC interaction consists of monosyllabic conversations and perfunctory
trading the game has a peculiar sense of community spirit. I empathised with
these desperate scavengers, even though they aren't real.
Alas it falls apart towards the end. In the first few levels there are
side-quests and interesting little architectural details that reward
exploration and simple side quests, but beyond a certain point the game turns
into a straightforward linear shooter.
The Pripyat level is particularly disappointing. It has a detailed recreation
of the town, with the general layout shifted about for gameplay purposes, but
it's just a shooting gallery. An entire role-playing game could have
been set in Pripyat, but the game does nothing with it. The developers created a base for one of the enemy factions, but it's just a side detail that the player never has to visit.
The final battle takes place in and around the power plant. The first part is
timed, so the player barely has a chance to see anything. The second part
isn't timed, but it's just a series of combat gauntlets. In the game the power
plant is a massive complex, whereas in real life it's much smaller, but
perhaps in this parallel world an anomaly made the place huge. The detailed
background objects are neat, but they're just scenery.
The game needed one final QA pass. The only remnant of the survival aspect is
a vestigial requirement for the player to eat food every now and again. This
was carried into the sequels. I don't know why. The player doesn't have
to drink, or sleep, or for that matter hunt animals or cook anything. The camp
fires are just for show. The player can run around at night in the driving
rain just as quickly as they can during the day. They don't feel the cold.
Radiation sickness is a minor annoyance immediately cured with medicine.
Weapons and armour degrade with use, but there's no way to repair them, at
least not without using an exploit. The game has a number of unique, powerful
weapons, but I found myself never using them because they would only wear out.
Stalkers are drawn to the exclusion zone in order to hunt for rare artefacts,
but the game spawns all of the artefacts out in the open at the beginning of
the game, so the player doesn't have to hunt for them at all. The system that
was supposed to make them spawn over time didn't work, so it was turned off. It wasn't properly fixed until the third game in the series.
The maps were cut down to make travel less onerous, but there are still a
couple of points where it's easy to jump over the fence surrounding the world,
at which point the player ends up trapped in nowhere land.
The game was finally ported for modern consoles in 2024. The games were given
a very mild graphical makeover that mainly improved the look of rainy
surfaces. Thankfully the enhanced edition retains the X-Ray engine instead of
porting the game to Unreal 5, with X-Ray upgraded to take advantage of 64-bit
memory. Some fans have complained that the visuals are now blurry, but I
didn't have a problem.
Content-wise the enhanced edition removes some references to Soviet
iconography. I'm not keen on this, given that the Soviet Union and modern
Russia are really two different things, but I'm not going to argue with the
people of Ukraine. One of the later levels has a spooky Russian voice in the background that is now a spooky English voice. The original games are still available.
Games, I said games. As mentioned earlier there were three STALKER games. Shadow of Chernobyl was followed in 2008 by Clear Sky, which was sold at full price as a prequel. This time the player is a chap called Scar, who is asked to track and eventually stop an incautious Stalker from interfering with the Chernobyl plant and possibly triggering an apocalyptic cataclysm.
It's a curate's egg. Shadow has a simple faction
system whereby various groups battle for control of the exclusion zone. The
player can choose to help one or other faction. There's the militaristic Duty,
who want to protect the world from deadly anomalies and dangerous mutants etc,
plus the anarchistic Freedom, who want to leave the zone open for regular
Stalkers, plus bandits who have a loose chain of command, and some scientists
who keep themselves to themselves.
The player can gain a reputation with one or other faction, but it's a very
simple system, and in practice each group remains locked into a certain part
of the map and there's no real benefit to helping anyone. The original
publicity talked about wide-ranging factional warfare, but this didn't appear
until Clear Sky.
Clear Sky adds a system whereby the player can side with one group
and conduct a multi-mission, multi-map war against their immediate rivals. It
almost works. The game begins on a large, brand-new map set in a swamp, which
is divided into a series of capture-the-flag zones controlled by bandits. It's
fun, and surprisingly engaging. The swamp itself feels like a prototype of the
larger maps that appear in Call of Pripyat.
Unfortunately the rest of the game simply reuses maps from Shadow of Chernobyl, but they're too small to accommodate a war, and in any case the system is
buggy. I often found myself advancing ahead of my allies and wiping out the
other side, only to end up standing alone in the enemy base, because my
colleagues had got stuck at a map boundary. The developers had access to a
bunch of large-scale maps cut during development, and it's a shape they didn't
dust them off.
The factional war doesn't stick - the enemy eventually respawns - and the only
rewards are some guns and armour, so it feels pointless. Clear Sky is much more action-packed than Shadow, and it finally
gives the player the option to maintain and upgrade their kit. The player
actually has to hunt for artefacts with a special detector.
But it has some of the same problems as the original. The
interesting character bits and missions are all packed into the first few
levels, and beyond a certain point the game turns into a linear battle that rushes the player through the game. Again
it ends with a detailed city map that could have supported multiple quests but
is wasted as the backdrop for a series of gunfights, and the final map is a confusing shooting gallery.
Clear Sky is generally dismissed as the least interesting game of the trilogy. It's simultaneously a bunch of out-takes from the original game, plus a trial tun for the next game in the series, Call of Pripyat. In the third game the player is Major Degtyarev of the Ukraine military, who is asked to investigate the disappearance of a helicopter task force sent to secure the perimeter of the reactor. Pripyat is unusual in that Ukraine's military is portrayed in a positive light, whereas in the first two games soldiers are the baddies, and the player can slaughter them with impunity.
Call of Pripyat had a much better reception than its predecessor. As with Clear Sky it reuses the guns, baddies, suits of armour etc from the first game,
but it takes place on three brand-new maps plus a couple of never-before-seen
out-takes. The levels are divided into anomaly fields, open space, and
important buildings. The game feels much more polished than the other two
titles. It has a simpler but more coherent story, told this time with dialogue
and cutscenes. The maps are large enough to feel epic, diverse enough to reward
exploration, but not so big that they're tedious. The game progresses
logically through the three maps, but the player can still return to the
earlier parts of the game in order to hunt for artefacts and carry out side
quests.
There are also some surprisingly, nay legitimately good beginning and ending slides, which are reminiscent of Fallout 3. For a series that is notorious for poor voice acting and unsentimental toughness I found myself warming to Major Degtyarev and the people he met.
There are two downsides, though. Clear Sky almost entirely
eliminated the horror elements of Chornobyl and almost all of the
underground laboratories in favour of broad comedy and
action. Pripyat brings back some of the tension, but it's
nowhere near as scary as the first game. It has its moments, but it feels
bland in comparison.
And yet again it ends in a detailed recreation of a city that's wasted as the backdrop to a straightforward set of missions culminating in a big fight. It's not as bad as its predecessors in this respect, but playing it
again I didn't feel much of an incentive to explore Pripyat itself, and I can
barely remember it. While playing
it again for this blog post I discovered a surprisingly large basement underneath
one of the buildings that I hadn't spotted in all the years I owned the game.
For the record it took me 24 hours to finish STALKER, 28 hours to
finish Clear Sky - I wanted to give it a fair chance - and 26.2 hours to finish Call of Pripyat, but I knew where everything was and what I had to do, so it'll take you longer. There is a helpful
STALKER Wiki, plus an entire site dedicated to Call of Pripyat called The Zone Survival Guide, which has some excellent interactive maps. In a rational world GSC should
have bought it up and launched it as an official tips website. The games are
available individually or as a trilogy, which is awkward
- CoP is
Aliens, SoC is Alien, but CS is Back to the Future II - and at least if bought
through Steam they come with the original, unaltered versions of each game.
The games had a huge modding community that still lingers to this day. In my experience most of the mods
simply throw in lots of guns, plus some partially-finished monsters, and a bunch of poorly-thought-out survival elements that don't work. Some of
them try to turn the game into a big, open-world RPG, but the maps simply
aren't large enough and there isn't enough content. One of the most
interesting mods, in theory, is Lost Alpha, a standalone title that tries to replicate the pre-intervention version of
the game. It has some huge, attractive maps, but there's no A-Life, so it feels dead and empty. The story is uninteresting and the
enormous size of the maps makes some of the quests tedious. With a bit more
work it might have been salvageable, but the developers game up on it several
years ago.
And that's STALKER. Have I stood in the shadow of Chernobyl? No,
when I visited the reactor it was midday. I have not stood in the shadow of
Chernobyl. I think it's a metaphor. There was however a clear sky when I was there. It was surprisingly pleasant for a nuclear wasteland.
I did not receive any calls from Pripyat. The dialling code is apparently 4593. The place reminded me of an old science fiction story by Ray Bradbury called "I, Mars". In an abandoned city on Mars the last remaining inhabitant keeps himself mentally active by programming the telephones to call him and play pre-recorded messages. All goes well until one day the telephones start arguing with him. I don't want to spoil the ending, but
