W.hen Ukrainian developer GSC Game World released apocalyptic adventure Stalker in 2007, it was considered a grimly improbable piece of speculative fiction. Heavily inspired by the cult novel Roadside Picnic, he imagined an alternate timeline in which a scientific experiment in 2006 caused a second Chernobyl disaster and a vast irradiated zone filled with powerful space-time anomalies, in which the only inhabitants were Mutants and the titular Stalkers: Men who roamed the wastelands in search of valuable artifacts.
The sequel, however, arrives in a very different world, as its long development period was affected by both the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now Stalker’s vision is much less improbable and his speculation has a much greater sense of urgency and authenticity.
As if to illustrate this point, Stalker 2 begins with an apartment building destroyed by a large explosion. As a consequence, the now-homeless main character, Skef, is lured to the Zone, carrying powerful scanning equipment that could aid him in his quest for revenge and escape, until he is beaten unconscious by an unknown gang and awakens to discover that the scanner has been stolen and he is now alone in the irradiated wastelands.
What follows is a relentlessly challenging survival adventure in which you must navigate monster-infested landscapes and marauding bands of savage warriors, searching for your technology and trying to stay alive. The odds are constantly against you: your weapons often jam and require constant repair, your food and ammo run dangerously low, every building you come across could be full of vital resources or mad dogs or booby traps or all of the above. . Scattered around the map are several safe houses where stalkers and ne’er-do-wells gather, offering trading opportunities, weapon upgrades, side quests, and other resources. You gather everything you can before returning to the unknown.
The world of Stalker 2 is absolutely beautiful: a dangerous, ever-changing mosaic of grasslands, swamps, and forests; the natural world is overtaking the remains of civilization. One moment you’re wandering down a rocky path under a blinding sun, and the next, a storm is approaching and a howling wind sends leaves and debris swirling into the darkening sky. Everywhere you go you will encounter anomalies (sometimes blobs of floating antimatter, sometimes exploding mini volcanoes in your path), all of them deadly if you don’t learn to spot and avoid them. Like Death Stranding, this is very much a game of solitary exploration; of wandering for many minutes with a backpack too full of loot and energy waning, hoping to find a hut to hide in for a few quiet moments. It’s so tense, so immersive, that you can’t help but get caught up.
The plot is its own kind of swampscape. There is so much history – so many warring factions, religious cults and paramilitary organizations – that your head spins and all the characters, plots and loyalties become completely incomprehensible. It’s not helped by some terribly stiff voice acting and tone-deaf dialogue, nor by the fact that this is a world almost entirely populated by cranky bald men with identical goatee beards. It’s like being trapped in a post-apocalyptic real beer festival. When I finally found a woman after several hours of playing, it was like coming across an oasis in the desert.
I also encountered dozens of bugs in the lead-up to release, from incomplete character models to side quests that didn’t trigger their end states to cinematic sequences that slowed to a near-stop. Major patches have since fixed many of these glitches, although I can’t imagine the game running completely smoothly for another few weeks.
But the thing is, I played through them, often late into the night, transfixed by this flawed, idiosyncratic universe. There is, perhaps more than any other dystopian fiction the industry has produced in recent years, a raw sense of underlying despair and tragedy in this game. It’s hard to wander through the bushes, past the skeletal remains of destroyed villages, past downed helicopters and the rusted remains of tanks, and not think about what the creators of this game have seen and experienced. For those who have doubts, GSC Game World commissioned a documentary, war gameto explore the process.
Has Stalker 2 become an allegory for the Russian invasion? Well, one of the main military factions in the game, called Ward, has invaded the Zone, claiming it will bring stability but is actually more interested in annexing the land to their own state. Interpret that however you want.
At the very least, the game is an exploration of trauma that resonates with a fury similar to Elem Klimov’s Come and See and Michael Herr’s Dispatches. As you progress, discover new weapons, upgrade them, make new allies, open new centers and areas of the map, the narrative brings you closer and closer to the heart of the Zone and the terrors that await you there. The sense of foreboding, the atmosphere of loneliness and the image of humanity hanging by a thread are somber and astonishing.
Stalker 2 is a strange, brave, and sometimes broken paean to resilience in the face of overwhelming obstacles. His vision is absolutely uncompromising, often to a fault, enveloping you in his dark spell of science, violence and chaos. Certainly, if you loved Dragon’s Dogma 2, which similarly verged on self-parody with its unconventional systems, eccentric characters, and general insanity, you’ll deal well with this game’s technical and narrative inconsistencies. In fact, just like the bullies who inhabit their damaged world, you can shrug your shoulders, improvise, and move on. If you thought developers weren’t making vast, extravagant, and utterly unique open-world games anymore, you were wrong: they are. And some of them have gone through hell to achieve it.