Anomalous Sunrise: My First 15 Hours With S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2
The Zone is a fickle mistress, indeed.
It’s early Tuesday morning, and the sun is rising over the Zone. I should clarify: it’s 12:48AM on Tuesday morning, and I have been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 since 8:00PM. The sun is rising over the Zone, though, and if I were younger, I’d still be playing when the sun rose over Nashville, too.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is the fourth game in a series of hybrid FPS/Immersive Sim/Survival games developed by Ukrainian studio GSC Game World, which debuted in 2007 with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl1. In the games, the player controls a stalker, someone who ventures into the ‘Zone’ in search of powerful artifacts which have been imbued with its weird energy, combating (or avoiding) mutated creatures, navigating bizarre anomalies, and trudging trough a tangled web of warring factions along the way. The ‘Zone’ refers to the Exclusion Zone set up around the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant following the meltdown of the No. 4 reactor in 1986. This disaster and its aftermath form the basis of the events in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series.2
I have played about fifteen hours of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. In that time, I have grappled with many of the Zone’s signature anomalies and even more of the series’ signature jank. Enemies have regularly spawned directly in front of me, quests have bugged out and are unable to be progressed, NPC behavior has often been bizarre and inexplicable. Stealth is busted. I have been attacked in supposedly safe areas and detected by enemies through walls. Sometimes these individual bugs harmonize into a warbled choir: an enemy spawns on the other side of a wall, detects me instantly, and attacks me through the wall while I am in conversation with a friendly NPC in a safe area. I have also been largely unable to distinguish any of the Zone’s factions from one another at a distance, and most of the NPCs I have encountered out in the wilds have shot on sight.
Previous entries to this series are not exactly known for being shiny, well-polished experiences. They are textbook examples of ‘Euro-jank’, a term lovingly used to describe Eastern European games with lofty ambitions and wonky construction. These games have always had a charming level of jank, but they were not this fundamentally broken. Entire systems in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 seem to be out of order. Why, then, can I not stop playing?
We love to throw around the word ‘immersion’ when discussing video games. I won’t pick too hard on that tendency, but I will ask this: when was the last time a virtual world enveloped you so thoroughly that you forgot you were playing a video game? True immersion is a rarity. A truly immersive game world is magical; it requires a holistic design language to be spoken across every facet of its presentation: art direction, environment and level design, sound design, lighting, writing, narrative structure, and, of course, mechanics. If one or more of these things is out of balance, the illusory 4th wall is easily toppled. The gestalt of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s design language, though, absolutely sticks the landing. The Zone oozes atmosphere. The art direction is sublime. The desolation of the Zone is as evocative as it is ominous. The sounds of the earth sift, crack and snap beneath your feet, shouts followed by gunshots echo in the distance, and the low drones of gravitational anomalies hum densely as walk past, nearly sucking you in. The use of lighting and weather systems, too, are some of the best I’ve ever seen. Just watch the clip below, which I captured as a storm began to roll through the Cordon:
The sky darkens; wind tears through the scene, tossing the trees into a frenzy and scattering leaves over the landscape. Lighting shrieks across the sky. A few seconds after I stopped recording, lightning struck a few feet from my body and set a small patch of grass ablaze. Just as the scene threatened to become too dreary and oppressive, the storm broke, the sun began to peek through the clouds, and, for just a moment, there was total silence. I wish I would have captured that moment. The ambience of the Zone is unmatched.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s equally gorgeous and foreboding atmosphere is distinctive, but it is only a singular facet of the game’s cohesive brilliance, and one which interlocks critically with its embrace of player friction. The endeavor of many big-budget video games is to provide the player with a frictionless experience. Each freshly baked iteration of *insert AAA behemoth here* introduces a smattering of spit-shined marquee features born straight out of marketing team’s collective fever-dream: more fluid traversal, slicker-feeling guns, more ‘seamless’ worlds. The results can be a lot of fun, but they are often so glossy smooth that there is a clear sense that you are interacting with a product. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, on the other hand, is built on friction. Your character, Skif, moves through the Zone with laboured heft. Guns jam up if not repaired regularly, forcing you to reload in the middle of a clip. It may have removed the loading screens that separated its major areas in previous entries, but its seams are very much showing. The economy is unforgiving. Repair costs are high, forcing you to scavenge weapons off of enemies in the early game before you are able to reliably hunt for artifacts to earn coupons. Guns weigh a lot, and your carry capacity is not particularly generous. You want to repair your newly-acquired SMG, or patch up your body armor? Well, you might have to hoof it from the outskirts of Garbage into the Slag Heap, completely encumbered by shitty guns you intend to sell, creeping forward at a snail’s pace just to offload your haul and earn enough to fix your gear. You better hope you don’t cross paths with a Bloodsucker or get caught in an Emission on the way there. It can be grating, but the friction of each toilsome slog across the Zone adds texture to the experience.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s brutally grounded mechanics serve also to reinforce the central themes of its world: the Zone is a utilitarian dreamscape, built on a results-driven ethical ecosystem that lays bare the value of human suffering. Betrayal is not taken warmly, but its virtue is honored. No stalker is surprised to be double-crossed by another, but if you’re going to fuck someone over, you best fuck them over real good, lest they live to make you regret it. Survival in the Zone is earned, and other stalkers are quick to let you know where you stand. This is a place where greatness is not achieved without a high human cost. Stalkers respect and fear not only the Zone, but one another’s instinct to survive. There is a reverence built on the shared misery of life in the Zone; whether enemy or friend, all stalkers are woven into the same fabric. There is something vital here. Stalkers do not merely respect or fear the Zone, either: they exalt it as one would a higher power, a god in an obviously godless place. This contradiction is at the heart of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. universe; its relentless pragmatism is often paired with its unconditional faith in the omnipotent will of the Zone.
The many components of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 are part and parcel, immutably bound to one another by a comprehensive design philosophy. It is thanks to this that I am more wholly engaged by this world than I have been by another in some time. Sure, the game probably wasn’t ready for a large audience. I don't want to sound overly sympathetic, because this practice of releasing games in such a sorry state plagues the industry en masse, but! Before we decry the fucked up state of this particular game on release, consider the fucked up conditions that befell its development. This isn’t some multi-billion dollar studio complex in London, Los Angeles, or Tokyo. GSC Game World was, until the later stages of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s development, located in Kyiv. They relocated after Russia invaded Ukraine, and resumed development from there. A former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series developer, Volodymyr Yezhov, fought against the Russian invaders. He died defending the city of Bahkmut. I can only imagine what these people went through. They were able to relocate, but they likely all had friends, colleagues, and families still living in occupied or contested zones. While the game was not released in an optimal state, this dev team was not thwarted by a full-scale invasion of their home country mid-development, so I don’t think that the task of post-launch support is going to keep them from delivering on their vision. For me, this brings the state of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 into focus. I have full faith in the dedication and resilience of this team to eventually polish this thing up and deliver on the promise of what is already here. And boy, what’s already here shows such promise. Experiencing this world from the start has been a great joy, even amidst its many frustrations. The Zone feels animate; each bug an anomaly to be navigated to the best of the stalker’s ability, and each patch an Emission, reshaping the Zone into something new entirely. I’m eager to see what shape it will take from here.
On that: a patch has arrived today, and it’s quite beefy. According to the patch notes, it appears that it addresses many of the bugs I mentioned above. I look forward to losing many, many more hours of my time and sleep to the Zone in the coming weeks. The Zone giveth and the Zone taketh away. May its blessings rain down upon you, too, stalker.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is available on PC via Steam, and on Xbox Series X/S via the Microsoft Store. It is also available on both platforms via Game Pass.
Yes, the city in question has two English spellings. Chornobyl is the Ukrainian transliteration, while Chernobyl is the Russian-derivative spelling. In light of recent global events, GSC Game World has opted to use the Ukrainian transliteration for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Out of respect for that choice, I will also use their preferred spelling except when referring to the previous entries of the series, which are officially titled with the Russian-derivative spelling.
The series also takes heavy inspiration from the 1972 Soviet science fiction classic Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, which introduced the term and concept of ‘stalkers’, as well as Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film adaptation, aptly titled Stalker. The source material and its film adaptation are both excellent, and I would earnestly recommend them both. I will be writing a longer piece which examines these influences and dives deeper into the lineage of the series, so watch out for that.