S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s Ending: The Definitive Review

Always. Be. Stalkering.

Coming in at a weighty 80+ hours, my run through S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 came to a suitably terminal and abrupt ending with me not really having much choice over how it would play out during the final mission. There was something entirely refreshing about the final chunk, which had a notable lack of mutants and lots of very taut, claustrophobic gunplay against top-tiered human opponents. Doing a fair bit of location-hopping, It did see fit to lob not one but two overpowered, silly-armoured major-NPC boss fights into my lap, and it has to be said that one of them was colossal bullshit that I really could have done without. I guess that’s quite a small price to pay for the 79-odd hours of pure sublimity (by and large) that the game had provided me prior. It also set me up for the crushing inevitability of a narrative-led ending that felt both utterly artificial and remarkably old-fashioned. Dumped back to the main menu after the non-interactive cutscene played out, the ending’s narrative weight felt as hollow as they usually do, only here the sense of severance, of being ejected from a world that I genuinely love, carried a grim weight of a distinctly different timbre.

I often think of writing some painfully embarrassing manifesto to ‘save’ videogames, if only for the comedic value in trying to force anyone to abide by it. If I actually do manage to cobble one together, it’ll be a list of commandments more than some instructional credo. And one of the top edicts will be: for any given open world, any ‘main’ narrative should not be given more importance than the player’s life in that world. This is absolutely where S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 falls into line with other greats of the irreversible main-story-ending orthodoxy. I now have a rabid belief that if your narrative ending is sufficiently grandiose that the player cannot be returned to the open world afterwards, then it is a bad ending despite whatever narrative streams it ties up, be that satisfactorily or otherwise.¹ Much like another beloved world of mine, Cyberpunk 2077, the ending as a terminus for the player’s journey does the world a tragic disservice. Night City, much like The Zone, has far, far more value as a place to live in than as a canvas for the main story that parasitically exploits it. Of course you can argue that the world only exists to tell the authored narrative, but I deny this reality; in play, the modern open world vastly outstrips the story, for the worlds we get these days are fucking amazing. The stories, however, are merely much the same old bullshit. Writing as a profoundly tone-deaf ludosupremacist, there’s always more value and joy in inhabiting a place and using its systome than there is in undertaking whatever gameplay-based page-turning is required to be allowed to passively experience the next tidy little package of narrative content. Especially when you consider how much time you put into the world over the time you spend paying attention to the storyline. My utter ambivalence to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s factional melodrama meant I reached the end with very little understanding of why things were happening, but of course the real comedy here is that I really couldn’t give a shit. But then that’s the knee-jerk reactionary response I have when any game insists its cutscenes are so important that they cannot be skipped, a cardinal sin that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 deploys from the off. I got an ending that seemed kinda OK, but given the history of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. endings in general, I didn’t expect it to turn out as off-keyly optimistic as it did. Seems that perhaps I had made some good choices along the way, even if I didn’t realise I was making them.

You can probably point to my blinkered, savant-like instinct for acquisition as why I didn’t pay attention to the story but in reality, the problem was the story was mediocre hookum spaffed across a world in fragments, rather than a story that utilised the world as best it could. While it had seeds of intrigue, the denouements all to often fell into standard fare, to the point where it all felt wholly familiar. Now, I can absolutely praise the story missions of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 for the journey they carved in criss-crossing the Zone, as in geo-experiential terms it’s fucking magnificent, but I think that kind of experience can be done equally well without the masculine stereotyping and egocentric pomposity. Instead of a succession of flashpoints on a ride to DETERMINE WHO HAS ULTIMATE CONTROL OF EVERYTHING, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s world is asking a different question and for the player themselves, it sets a very different challenge than that of arbitrarily rebalancing regional geopolitics. As I wrote back in my very first review, the game’s opening chapter is about learning to cope with the Zone, about adaptation and contingency. It’s about balancing the reward of accruing loot with the cost to acquire it and going out into danger to get stuff and returning home to safety - an almost primal, in-the-genes hunter-gatherer instinct. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 does this unbelievably well, but the nomadic push from the main story means your sanctuaries change every five-to-ten hours or so. Yet my sentimentality means I grew to really love some of those hubs. There’d be times where a story mission would send you to a location far from your current home and leave you closer to a sanctuary you’d left far behind, days ago. In the post-mission trudge, you find yourself back at an early-doors settlement and feel a certain warmth for the place and its people, even if it’s just for the ease of offloading loot and undertaking vital repairs. That warmth is, of course, earned in precisely the opposite way to the main story’s demand that you respect/fear/admire/despise/sympathise with key NPCs because that’s what the authors insist. The story insists things constantly², the world does not. There are sanctuaries that get abandoned as the story progresses, but that story cannot come close to the sense of empty dereliction you feel when stopping off to access a private stash.³ One in particular is such a safe haven in the second quarter of the game that when you get an opportunity to revisit it in the third, its emptiness is profoundly resonant. I wondered what I had done wrong, or why I hadn’t been able to keep the place populated. When I found out, it was actually crushing.⁴ What emerges for me is a frustration, much as did from Cyberpunk 2077, that you can’t really help anyone other than yourself or whichever factional head the story wants you to bum around with. If S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 had no main plot but instead set you the task of visiting all the settlements and picking one to help, then I would feel like my investment in foraging had meaning beyond making my life easier and the killing more fun.

There’s a specific settlement in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 that undergoes a catastrophe as part of the main story. It gives the place a particular plight, and hence conjures sympathy from the player. I felt a genuine sadness for the traders, for they had helped me so much earlier in the game that to see their homes destroyed felt tangibly tragic. The worst part of this is that on revisiting the ruined settlement, you cannot help repair it. The story doesn’t care about that and yet coded into the world, on a cellular level, is the idea of survival and persistence. It therefore makes no sense that the settlement remains fucked right up to the closing of the narrative. Surely the dudes would be trying to fix some of the damage? Seemingly not, even though there’s plenty of junk around to make that possible, and this touches on another commandment: no narrative should ever ignore the truth of the world and the player’s experience of it. The truth of the Zone is that they worked collectively to make these settlements secure, so surely they’d rebuild as soon as they could. And I’d say there’d be far more emotional value in playing a part in that as the player, especially if you have complete choice in which places you help and to what extent. This mission of helping instead of following some melodramatic arc of male silliness, fits the world so much better. You can immediately imagine the network of possibility that emerges; clearing trade routes to other settlements, foraging for shop stocks, sanitising resource dumps of baddies, clearing secret labs for research blueprints - all prime justifications for the fabulous S.T.A.L.K.E.R. loop. The factions don’t even have to change, nor does the balancing of factional supremacy. And in a settlement-oriented S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the idea of undermining or covertly exploiting certain factions to aid others is a delicious prospect. It builds out all sorts of possibilities for trust metrics and maybe even forging fragile, temporary alliances to achieve settlement goals. In short, I hope you can see how much more fertile this is a basis for an open-world videogame.

As with Cyberpunk 2077, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is as much a victim of the main character, ‘segmented action movie’ orthodoxy as so many other AAA open worlds, yet with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 it seems a more tragic waste of an incredible opportunity. Especially considering how one of the factions is risking it all for ULTIMATE CONTROL OF THE ZONE because they specifically love the Zone and feel it’s the only way they can protect it - and yet the fruits of all this toil will never actually be seen, only alluded to in a closing cutscene. With Cyberpunk I remarked on how that city would be so wonderfully utilised as a place to build biographies. With S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, the same applies only with an added dimension of assisting settlements, the biographical aspect applies to the environment too. To create an arc for the Zone itself would be wonderful, particularly if it means being able to cleanse a region of mutants, for example. Or find research in secret labs that allows you to harness the kinetic and electrical anomalies to provide power or defences for your chosen sanctuary. In reality, a tiny shift in perspective and motivation opens the floodgates of creative possibility, yet the main story’s primacy remains assured. Is it unassailable because main stories are the only way moneymen can understand the product? Is it because creative directors are too hamstrung by tradition to abandon them? It is a recurrent complaint for me, and I’m sure I’ve already written too many words of criticism about it, particularly when it comes to games where I’ve really loved the systome and the environment. Cyberpunk, Starfield, my beloved Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, all marred by ultimately silly stories, all with desperately under-utilised worlds.

Upon getting ‘an’ ending, I felt pretty deflated that the game had given up. But in tribute to the Redditor I mentioned in the last piece on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, I immediately loaded my point-of-no-return save and booked a guide to fast-travel to a settlement I hadn’t visited for ages. The story mission might hold no more interest, but the map still does. I had plenty of question marks to visit and a bunch of upgrades to add to the last pristine assault rifle for my collection. There was better work to be done than leaving the petty drama of the Zone’s ownership to one of four bellends. Funnily enough, this was the same experience that I had in the glory days of Fallout New Vegas. The wasteland holds so much more than the dam, just as the Zone holds so much more than the ||C-Consciousness’s secret lab||. The one thing to take from this is that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 haunts me deep in my soul, but didn’t get there through its storyline and its glossy set-pieces and its AAA-standard cutscenes. It got there by the way it let me exist in its world. You can have the ego-on-ego showdowns in implausibly large lab chambers with inscrutable equipment as much as you like, you can make the characters look more realistic, you can have superb Ukrainian voice acting from real humans, you can have the lighting as spectacularly moody as you like. It makes no difference, for it carries none of the game’s real value. That lies in the simplicity of being. It’s in the terrain, the weather, the traversal and the player’s persistence. It’s about those cooldowns from a nerve-shredding scrap around some ruined cottage, the peace that fills the air as you loot the corpses and tend to your wounds. Sitting under cover as the rain pitter-pats the roof, looking out to overgrown farmyards and grey skies. Looking at the map to consider your route home. Could you have a quick look at some unexplored buildings on the way? You’ve got another 5kg before you’re really weighed down, so why the fuck not? After all, that is the only true way of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

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1. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 very much has the same Meet Hanako At Embers vibe of Cyberpunk 2077. Either you complete that mission and leave the world, or you ignore it, reload an old save and carry on doing what you really value.

2. Yes, if you must, it insists upon itself.

3. The stash box is a fucking godsend for genuine Stalker operatives, and I will fully detail why in my upcoming book; Learning To Love S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, A guide for ungrateful Millennials who love Naughty Dog and Mass Effect.

4. It was, of course, empty because of dramatic storyline reasons. So it did carry an additionally mournful charge from the narrative, as it goes. It’s the exception that proves the rule, OK? Don’t believe me? Fuck you. Play the fucking game.