S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - The Definitive Review
Always. Be. Coping.
There’s a perverse joy in learning to cope. It often feels horrible, yet the sense of strengthening it promotes carries a value that’s almost indescribable. We cope with all sorts of shit in our daily lives and if you want to be brutally reductive, much of adulthood is about finding ways to cope with external stressors in ways that work for you. Yet we don’t really expect that challenge from our videogames unless it’s explicit. SURVIVE THIS, FUCKERS! may be a suitable subtitle for a whole genre of cultish survival games but for it to break out into the AAA mainstream is a genuine rarity. Here, in the consumerist plane of mollycoddled, frictionless flattery, players expect to be treated nicely and to be shat upon in a way that feels comfortably safe and perhaps simple to avenge by merely nodding along with the narrative arc or by grinding away at progression systems to make the already relatively easy, relatively easier. Not so with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, a game that seems to have largely ignored a good seventeen years of consumer appeasement to happily pick up the torch from where it left off and proceed headlong down its own path. If you want the short version of what I think, then I’d say I’m frankly overjoyed that my GOTY candidate landed in Q4 of the year in question.
I remember back in 2002, or 3, or whenever GSC Game World was making its first round of PR forays into the gaming media with the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. , that I was kinda sceptical of what the company was proposing. It seemed so grandiose that the promises were surely undeliverable. On the announcement of a PvP multiplayer mode, I remember commenting on the official forum that it all seemed too much to deliver, that none of it could live up to expectations given how much had been promised and how many delays there’d been. Yet when the tech demo leaked and I got my mits on it, I was silently stunned. It had something incredibly important - a unique sense of place. The tech demo was extremely limited but the environment it plonked you in had the sense of being so tangibly «European Countryside» that I was delighted. It was my first hint that some real magic lay in the heart of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. proposition, that at the very least it would be somewhere amazing to explore. Some years later, I’m at a friend’s house watching him start the full game on his PC. I’m still sceptical that the game is any good, and wandering around the opening village hub I’m suitably impressed by the assets and that sense of atmosphere, but waiting to see what the action is like. My pal takes a mission to clear some bandits from a farmhouse. Armed with a pistol, he cautiously approaches. Of course he’s spotted before he’s ready, and of course a firefight ensues. But it’s different. It’s so different. What unfolds is a panting, scrappy running battle. A desperate, amateur skirmish that darts between rooms, between indoor and outdoor, that leaves my friend victorious but out of ammo and bleeding. He hasn’t breathed for nearly a minute and we look at each other, almost shocked at what just happened. “That was intense”, he comments. I agree. This was new. It had a grit that we’d never seen before. We’d gone in as naïve newbies and fought exactly as a naïve newbie would. What had actually happened is we’d been through a fight that had leapfrogged the fiction of realism to instead approach something better: naturalism.1 And this was enough - I got hold of a 2nd-hand graphics card to bump my aging PC up to spec and embarked on my own S.T.A.L.K.E.R. adventure. It was, in fact, the last of the big PC releases I ever played before turning into casual console scum.
Naturalism was the abiding memory I had of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., as I spent a lot of time touring the various maps to see all the sights. I was constantly impressed by how correct everything felt. From those small farm buildings to the large radioactive junkpile at the far end of the opening map, it all felt incredibly lifelike. It was an environment that seemed well beyond the likes of Half Life 2’s outdoor areas, and even outpaced class leaders like Oblivion. There was something in the palette choice, the lighting, in the shading and texturing that brought everything down to earth. It made everything else, no matter how photoreal, seem inauthentic and hyperbolic. And perhaps S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s greatest achievement was in maintaining this, right up to the sarcophagus itself at the game’s climax. I struggle to recall many of Oblivion’s landmarks, instead falling into remembering a homogenous collection of greenery and sky and bone-white structures that felt realistic enough in situ, but still had some painterly or illustrative, non-real quality that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. happily superseded. But man, I remember the rotting junkyard of Garbage, and guiding a scientist through it in a frantic escort mission, as if it was yesterday. I remember finding the mobile lab while close to death after being on the run from mutants and zombies, and breathing such heavy sighs of relief as I stepped inside. I remember entering the Red Forest and marvelling at how it felt.2 I remember sniping other Stalkers from a crack in a huge grain elevator overlooking abandoned farmlands. I remember the X-numbered labs and their incredible details as supreme digital urb-ex playgrounds, I remember the lone buildings that would hide a poltergeist, or three, but offer such useful loot to find. I remember walking the perimeter of the Agroprom institute with grey skies and the pitter-patter of rain that was directly evocative of my quasi-legal teenage explorations of rural biotech firms in the Cambridgeshire countryside. There is some indefinable quality in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. that encodes these memories more indelibly than other games with, on paper, equally impressive environments. Environments that I loved just as much, but somehow didn’t touch my soul in quite the same way. But then again, if the original game was famous for anything, it was that peerless atmosphere and the sense of being somewhere. The contrast, for there was SUCH a contrast, was that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. came with peerless glitchiness in the gameplay.
It was somewhat oddly comforting, then, that in the opening minutes of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, my controller started drifting. As I munged through the opening tutorial missions, I was constantly flicking the left stick to stop an inexorable anticlockwise rotation. My first firefights were just as amateurish and scrappy as those in the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R., only now seasoned with this additional drift to add even more chaos to the mix. But the funny thing was that I began to manage the drift instinctually. Somehow my thumb accounted for it, adapted to it. I had begun to cope. Reading various threads about the game, I saw someone who’d bought it at full price and upon falling foul of the same drift, announced indignantly that they uninstalled immediately and wouldn’t touch the game again until the bug had been fixed. How weak, I thought. This is a game that, more perhaps than any, challenges you to look beyond its shortcomings, for the riches that lie at the game’s heart are more than worth it. The game is deliberately harsh and unforgiving, this much is part of the series’ reputation and is mentioned in nearly every review’s straplines, but it’s fun to consider the extrinsic privations as being as much a part of the experience as those intrinsic to the design. I came to think of that drift as some long-standing injury or other, some weakness in the arm from a bullet lodged some seventeen years ago. It fits. It fits the vibe, it fits the world, it fits the design. And the design was refreshingly pure, seemingly almost unchanged from the 2007 debut. After finishing the tutorial and making it to the first safe haven, I found myself wrapped in the formalism of the original as if it was second nature; brief forays to tick off objectives with conservative searching for loot, forever mindful that the journey home may be more dangerous than the missions themselves.
For all the ways the game stacks odds against you, all the systems that conspire to make your journey difficult and objectives hard-won, the thread you can weave of personal survival is something to take pride in. It’s a game where the systems are glitchy and thus chaotic enough that being caught in a fight for your life is often a surprise, and you’re forced to improvise, forced to wear down your equipment and resources. It’s unbalanced and unfair, but then isn’t that the truth of nature and survival anyway? In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, this can make a simple run to gather up ammo, or just things to sell for equipment or upgrades, a personal nightmare of terror and skin-of-the-teeth escapes. It was in just trying to reach a side mission location that I found myself caught in a series of dogged firefights, ending up with me taking refuge underground while dodging grenades and shotgunning enemies as they tried to rush in. The night closed in and instead of pressing on, I made the wise decision to return to the safety of Hamster’s shop and the bed and stash therein. Making it back, I didn’t feel like I’d failed to make any progress, despite not earning any XP, getting any skill points or opening a fast-travel icon. Instead I felt like I’d survived. I’d been assaulted by the game and coped enough to get home, and that was a reward in itself. I’d always admired how the original had eschewed any formal RPG mechanics in favour of making your gear the progression system, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 simply carries this on. In fact, there was such a sense of wonderful familiarity once I was installed with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s loops that I felt oddly like I’d returned to some long-forgotten place and was remembering how great it was.3 For those familiar with my perverse peccadillos in such open-world games, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 has an acquisition curve like no other. All too aware of the fragility of the firearms, my acquisition of a scoped assault rifle in good condition was like finding genuine treasure. It sits in my inventory as a rare instrument for very special cases, and I haven’t treated an in-game weapon like that for quite some years. Probably seventeen, if I’m honest about it. Likewise clothing and other equipment, for I remember the strictness of the original, and how finding the good shit brings a palpable sense of value that simple numerics or currency can’t relate. Looking at the vast open-world map, the tantalisation is extreme. There’s so much to explore, so much to find. And it’s all modelled with that same, enduring sense of the natural, of the environmentally correct.
This really is a testament to the clarity of vision at the core of GSC Game World. I am frankly overjoyed with what this game is, even in its current buggy and glitchy state. Of course we have to pay respects to the context that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was developed in, and the team members that died in that war, but in a way, it’s almost as if the game continued despite all of that. It obviously colours the ruins of the Zone with a different legacy perhaps. I can’t exclude the idea that the original may have been so resonant because of how much 90s footage I saw from the former Yugoslavian and Chechen wars, where equally leafy and green European landscapes were torn apart by nationalised, feral violence in much the same manner as eastern Ukraine is today. Perhaps if you removed all the supernatural content, the game would be far starker and more crushingly evocative of a real war-torn existence amongst the ruins. But that’s not the story that GSC wants to tell, even if it can point to the war as some mitigation for its technical shortcomings. Again, it’s perhaps more a statement of how to cope with such things.
However, that which is valuable in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 far outweighs any petty annoyances, and I am constantly rewarded for playing the game properly, with sensible judgement and wise caution. Again, it recalls the original so provocatively in expecting you to behave like an adult trying to survive, and it punishes the brash and the childish. Maybe it’s my fault for not indulging in the Metro series or the post Day-Z rush of extraordinarily punishing First-Person Survival sims, but the link to the original is so tangible that for me, it’s a triumphant declaration for the AAA mainstream to ignore at its peril. These systems and this philosophy was designed nearly 20 years ago, and as a concept it’s still great and it’s still underutilised. In this sense, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 suffers perhaps from being a continuation more than an evolution, but when the basic premise and its structures have this degree of soul and spirit, that’s no crime. Especially in a marketplace forever marred by blandified copyists and design-by-metrics customer appeasement. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 gives me so much more of what I never knew I missed that I can’t fail to be overjoyed. To return to a personal idol’s philosophy on game design, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is cuisine in Dinga Bakaba’s parlance. This is not fast food, it is fine dining, and we do not wolf this down like mere fodder, as we would a roadside picnic. We savour every fucking bite.
[21]
In cosmology and fundamental physics discussions, the idea of what is 'real' is rarely mentioned. Instead, 'natural' tends to be the watchword, for it describes what is expressed in nature itself. 'Real' is our constructed interpretation of nature, and as such 'reality' can depend on which philosophy or physical interpretation you subjectively choose to follow. When it comes to games, realism is often the pitch between what literal nature is, and what the developer or player expects nature to be. I'm reminded of my friend and erstwhile critic Mark Sorrell's reflection on the late, great Project Gotham Racing series. It wasn't a naturalistic simulation, but tempered plausibility. As Mark put it, PGR understood how the players would expect the exotic cars to behave, rather than how they really would. And it was a testament to Bizarre Creations' extraordinary skill in how brilliantly it executed that delicate balance.
The forest had, again, a naturalism that impressed me no end. Prior to that, I can only remember the mission After Montignac in Operation Flashpoint, where you start as the lone survivor of your unit, stranded in a forest. Your mission is to simply reach a far-off evacuation point. Laying prone in the undergrowth as the enemy patrol sweeps by, then dashing along the treeline until you had to cross an open field as enemy patrols and vehicles search the area was an incredible experience. As you would a lone soldier or a lone fox on the run from hunters, the forest felt like a sanctuary of hiding places and the field an arena of certain death. Interestingly, Bohemia Interactive also managed to capture something magical about the European countryside with Flashpoint, and that mission in particular made you pay real attention to the terrain and the foliage. Being powerless against the enemy and having the reptilian hindbrain imperative of getting to safety as your objective was unbelievably intoxicating. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 operates on nearly the same level.
I would normally chide a game for not expanding on its design despite seventeen years of progress, but the purity of concept here is more than forgivable. When the idea and the interactive design is so poorly served by the market, I can’t blame the best exponents of it for making it bigger and prettier.