Every time Skif, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s protagonist, meets his end, a menu screen pops up that displays a personal death count. By the time the player’s a dozen or so hours into the game, it isn’t unusual for this number to approach the triple digits. This is because the world of Stalker – an alternate history portrayal of the nuclear Exclusion Zone in Chornobyl, Ukraine – is harsh. A bullet will take Skif down very quickly, but he is also easily killed by standing anywhere near an exploding grenade, receiving the brunt of a surprise charge from a mutant boar, or wandering into an invisible pocket of gravity-warping air.
If this makes the game’s setting, dubbed ‘The Zone of Alienation’ or just ‘The Zone,’ seem like a pretty miserable place to inhabit, even virtually, that’s by design. Stalker 2’s world is one where the ruthless and brutal thrive, where the titular stalkers keep themselves fed by braving near-certain death to venture into the Zone and return with radioactive artifacts to sell. It’s a place where stepping off a main road might cause the telltale click of Skif’s Geiger counter to grow violently loud as unseen radiation seeps into his clothes and skin. Because of this, the Zone seems like just about any other apocalypse or survival game setting at first glance.
Rugged figures in gas masks and deteriorating fatigues roam desolated fields and forests, littered with rusting tanks and shipping containers, hunting for morsels of food or weaponry. Gunfire regularly pops in the distance and nuclear whirlwinds called ‘emissions’ turn the sky blood red at unexpected intervals. The danger, fear, and desperation that characterize the Zone make Stalker 2 appear like it should firmly belong to a camp of soul-draining genre work that includes The Last of Us, Dying Light, Frostpunk, The Walking Dead, Days Gone, DayZ, or Metro – a series whose developer even includes veterans of past Stalker games.
It’s when the player talks to other characters, though, or spends more time poking into the corners of the Zone’s crumbling buildings, that Stalker 2’s singular tone makes itself clear. There are extremely dangerous people throughout the wasteland – dispassionate killers eager to shoot one another and loot ammunition and cans of food from their corpses. Just as importantly, though, there are friendly people wandering the Zone, too.
There are bases where stalkers and soldiers belonging to the game’s various factions gather, relaxing next to campfires, trading resources, or drinking in makeshift bars. Even while trudging through the Zone, Skif might run into a fellow stalker who, instead of attacking, offers a greeting or asks for help crossing a tricky stretch of terrain. Come back from a life-threatening excursion, bloodied and irradiated from a mission’s perils, and the friendly face of a weapons vendor or the sight of a cot left vacant for a weary travelers’ rest appears like a ray of sunshine following a vicious storm – like Dark Souls’ Firelink Shrine.
There’s something very human in this tonal back and forth, between the expression of our worst and best impulses in the midst of a collapsed society and an increasingly violent natural world. One of the best examples of the game’s tone comes in an early, optional mission that requires Skif to recover a family memento – a religious icon – from a field covered in poppies.
These poppies stretch across a gently sloping valley in a gorgeous sea of rich red petals. Walking through them, especially if the in-game clock coincides with the sun rising or falling to bathe the scene in purple light, is as idyllic as just about any location in videogames. The field is also deadly. The flowers’ narcotic effect causes Skif to grow drowsy, nodding off and, eventually, lying down to die entirely if he takes too long searching for the icon. A nearby stalker calls out, offering tips on how to survive the poppies and even the location of the icon itself, but will only help if Skif runs a potentially deadly errand for him first.
All of Stalker 2’s tone is present in this mission: The deadly beauty of the environment; the helpful stranger who actually wants something for themselves; the sentimentality of a man offering the same money he could use to eat to retrieve a functionally useless memento.
There’s no shortage of apocalypse games that aim for a similar complexity in tone. But they largely fall more neatly into one of two camps: The somber subgenre mentioned above, or the absurdist style of game typified by Borderlands, Rage 2, Sunset Overdrive, Dead Island 2, or certain Fallout entries.
Stalker 2, for its part, refuses to spend too long in either mode. Whereas Fallout highlights the absurdity of a world replicating the same mercenary government and economic systems that brought it to a nuclear catastrophe in the first place, Stalker 2 presents a world where a societal crash has already arrived and there’s nothing left to do but make the best out of a grim reality that seems like it might be eternal.
Even the nature of the Zone itself, which is seen by the game’s characters as – depending on their outlook – a land of opportunity, a violent nightmare, or the site of nuclear-borne miracles, belies the usual expectation that a post-apocalyptic landscape should be straightforwardly hellish. The anomalies that appear as Skif explores might turn a few square meters of landscape into a gauntlet of crackling electricity, jets of flame, tiny pieces of flesh-ripping glass, or bubbling pools of acid. But the fact that these strange phenomena exist at all – sometimes accompanied by wound-healing or injury-protecting artifacts – is evidence that there is more to Stalker 2’s apocalypse than sheer devastation.
There is strange wonder, too. There is opportunity for psychological, physical, spiritual, and scientific discovery. The game’s creator obviously sees beauty in the ruins, in the ability of humanity to find joy in miserable circumstances. This is what makes Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl stand apart from the other apocalypse games it resembles.
It attempts to portray the full dimensions of people in a bad place, showing that even the horrifying drama of a world that’s succumbed to disaster can still see its inhabitants do more than fight one another to survive. No matter how many times Skif’s death count goes up, after all, Stalker 2’s player always has reason to load their last save and venture back out into the Zone again, maybe to see if they’ll encounter something better than they did before.