S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a daring, worthwhile game that reeks of innovation, delivering on a good portion of its potential. It stands above its many problems, outshines the dark spots, and that makes it something special.
Magical Mystery Tour
Imagine a place that has been … fundamentally changed. Changed so much that it has the power to change you. Something horrible happened here long ago, and it altered the site’s relationship with reality. There are things of value here, but soldiers patrol the borders and will shoot you on sight. In the center of this territory, past miles of contaminated landscape, looms a concrete structure no one can approach. Inside is a room, but to enter it, even for a moment, means death. Lying in the room is a sphere made of gold. And if you could enter this place, if you could avoid the sharpshooters and the unnatural radiations and all of the dangers of the land, if you could locate the structure and get inside, if you could find a way to reach the room and penetrate the golden sphere … all of your wishes will come true.
That’s a paraphrasing of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made it into a movie called Stalker in 1979. Tarkovsky (Solaris, Nostalgia, Ivan’s Childhood) is best described as the Russian Terrence Malick, which is a film grad’s way of saying that his movies are beautiful but really hard to stay awake during, and the 163-minute Stalker is no exception. Ironically, the film ends with a shot of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, humming away, its doomed Reactor Four not yet constructed.
It’s a circuitous and highly literary route of inspiration for a revolutionary Ukrainian shooter, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is indeed loosely based on book and movie. Developer GSC Game World simply substituted Chernobyl’s forbidden Zone of Exclusion for the alien-altered Zone from Roadside Picnic, and the rest just sort of fell into place.
Nothing else about STALKER’s development “fell into place,” though; this game has been a laughingstock for years, the victim of so many delays, publisher changes, and embarrassing vaporware accusations that few industry professionals believed it would ship at all. And if it did, it wouldn’t bear much similarity to the grandiose promises made back in 2001. No, we thought, STALKER will be a big disappointment.
But guess what! It isn’t. STALKER is a daring, worthwhile game that reeks of innovation. It is able to stand above its many problems, to outshine the dark spots, and that makes it something special.
I’m Not Dead Yet
In the game’s fiction, a second explosion at Chernobyl (more likely than you might realize, actually) has spritzed the region with bizarre anomalies that alter gravity, thermodynamics, radiation levels … whimsically named deviations so dangerous that even going near them is risky. But their strange energies have a side effect: anomalies “throw” artifacts with fabulous physical properties, objects of great value to scientists and collectors. But with the military guarding the borders of the Zone, and the dangers inside, only a few heavily armed treasure hunters dare risk the hazards to collect them. These men (no women are stupid enough) are called Stalkers.
Stalkers are as dangerous as the terrain they stalk. Armed to the teeth, with little to lose, they maintain a very wild-west environment in their ramshackle encampments and faction strongholds. They’re here for money and adventure, and the persistent rumor of the Wish Granter. Most would kill you as soon as look at you.
“You” enter the game roughly, thrown from a truck hauling the day’s corpses out of the Zone. A Stalker finds your unconscious carcass and drags you back to an artifact dealer named Sidorovich, and together they rifle through your stuff in search of answers. You’re obviously a Stalker; “S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” is actually tattooed on your forearm, though the word isn’t usually an acronym so they have no idea what it might mean. When Sidorovich flicks on your PDA, its eerie blue phosphorescence glows out a one-item to-do list, a chilling note-to-self that drops the temperature a few degrees: KILL THE STRELOK.
There is, it transpires, a Stalker by this name, up north near the crumbling concrete Sarcophagus that entombs the ruins of Reactor Four. Whether or not he’s your target is anyone’s guess, but it seems a good place to start. The car accident has left you with amnesia, so Sidorovich christens you “Marked One” on account of the tattoo and offers his aid. It’s a loaded proposal, but you’re really left with no choice. And so begins the Marked One’s quest for identity in the Zone of Exclusion, and an open-world shooter quite unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
Gloomtown
The developers at GSC exhaustively mapped the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (there’s a tour you can take, it’s reasonably safe if you stay on the pavement), only to strip a good portion of it out in the rush to finally finish the game. Some liberties are taken, but the vast majority of what you see in STALKER is actually there in the real world, and it’s a tribute to GSC’s art direction that they capture the bleak, lonely feel of the place so effectively. There is a … forlorn-ness about the Zone, an eerie, almost haunted quality that is perfectly realized in this game. The Zone evokes a strange sensation, a feeling that you’re an unwelcome visitor in an obscene and unreal place. It is the Zone of Exclusion, after all. It’s not part of this world any more.
Nor should it be. Even without the fictional anomalies and mutated creatures that populate the game, the Zone of Exclusion is the most toxic place on earth. To enter it, even briefly, is to risk experiencing one of the most exquisitely hideous deaths a human can endure. You’ll soon get used to the soft clicking of your Geiger counter, but ignore it at your peril. Anomalies, too, bring speedy demise to those who aren’t careful where they step. Many are nigh invisible, and none are there for your health. The air itself hums with radioactivity in some places; a few minutes in this game world and you’ll understand how crazy Stalkers must be to brave this bleak landscape.
Since there are no stats in STALKER – you get “stronger” based on equipment and weaponry – the environment is always threatening. Atmospheric dangers aside, even a well-equipped Stalker can be killed by a pack of wild dogs or razorback boars, and other Stalkers will happily take potshots at you if they want something you’ve got. The game world is a very real-seeming, very creepy, very dangerous place, and it feels that way from beginning to end.
Severe Days
STALKER walks the line between super-tactical shooters like Rainbow Six, where one bullet ends the game, and lead-spitting ones like Prey, where a thousand don’t. It works, because it forces you to outwit the monumentally outstanding, seriously, I’m not even kidding enemy combat AI, without being overly frustrating. For the first time in a shooter, you’ll find yourself darting from cover to cover, seeking elevated assault points, employing grenades to flush and disorient foes, and coordinating your attacks with the occasional AI-controlled allies, along with more pedestrian tactics like sniping and headshots.
Like other RPG-element shooters such as Deus Ex and System Shock 2, this is a good choice for players who prefer adventures but are willing to dip their toes into something different. It will be very hard for you at firstdeath comes on swift wings in STALKER, and even pros will be challenged early on. The lack of a quicksave and the paucity of autosaves are irritants you must overcome by training yourself to save often, unless you enjoy retracing your steps. But you never feel that STALKER is cheating. If you die, it’s because you screwed up or got careless, and in time the game trains you to be a better player.
The biggest and wonderfulest difference of STALKER is the concept of a linear storyline tacked onto a living world. While STALKER doesn’t use the “open world” concept nearly as well as it could, it does create a freeform setting where you’re pretty much at liberty to perform tasks in whatever order you choose and explore in a thoroughly nonlinear fashion. This is disorienting at firstthere are many where-the-heck-do-I-go moments. However, once you get used to the world of STALKER (about three hours in), it becomes much more comfortable. You always have an overarching goal, and tasks pertinent to that goal, but you can also get as sidetracked as you want with other stuff.
There are parts of STALKER so primordially frightening that fragile gamers may fear to press on. Elsewhere there’s white-knuckled action, and in still other places you’re as lonely as lonely can be, going hours without pulling the trigger. STALKER does a great job of managing many moods and genres, taking advantage of the Zone’s size and inherent explorability. Exploration is one of the major facets of STALKER, as there’s always something new and cool to check out over every hill. Unfortunately, this is also kind of a problem.
STALKER’s “open world” is open in the sense that you’re not on a rail and that a lot happens around you to make you feel like you’re part of, rather than the center of, the action. And there’s plenty to explore. But exploration for its own sake quickly becomes dull. Money is never a problem, and the best equipment is found in the Zone anyway, not at the handful of ill-placed shops. Side quests are humdrum, one-stop excursions that generally devolve into finding, delivering, or killing something. The artifacts thrown by anomalies can be equipped on your own person to augment your capabilities in various ways, but as trade goods they’re essentially worthless; money is weightless, artifacts are not. You’re limited to no more than 57 kilograms of inventory, and that’s quickly taken up by necessary equipment. So there’s no reason to explore the Zone for treasure.
Partly because the real treasure of STALKER is ammunition and medical supplies. So when you crest that hill and see a derelict factory or a labyrinth of abandoned cleanup equipment, you’re faced with a pretty basic choice:
- Check it out even though there won’t be anything of value and the visit will cost you precious ammunition and meds
- Don’t.
GSC built a wide-open world that you’re essentially discouraged from exploring. They made matters worse by falling into the same gamers-are-idiots trap that Oblivion did: click a task on your PDA and a marker appears on your Zone map telling you precisely where to go, even if you’ve never been there, even if finding it is part of the objective. In a game where exploration is part of the fun, this is a near-unforgivable mistake. Let’s hope developers don’t make a habit of believing we’re all so slack-jawed that we need to be led by the hand to every objective.
So what it boils down to is that you follow STALKER’s linear storyline, which is okay since the story is told compellingly enoughand meted out in sufficiently tantalizing bitsto keep you guessing and driven to learn more. The game’s fantastic, Gore Verbinski-esque cinematics are stunning and artistic, and frankly I could have done with more of them and fewer of the lengthy and often poorly translated chunks of text narrative stored in the Marked One’s PDA. The game is occasionally incoherent, especially at the beginning when it seems to assume that you know a whole lot of stuff you don’t. It’s like starting a really complex TV show in the middle of the third season. Eventually you’ll pick it up, but it’s confusing for a while.
That lack of coherence manifests elsewhere in the game as well. The instructions are so useless that they might as well not have been included; documentation leaves out elephantine chunks of information and explains the rest so poorly that the game comes off as baffling. The interface, though simple enough once you get used to it, is clunky and obtuse at first. And NPCs, supposedly AI-controlled and often integral to the story, are never developed and rarely have direct impact on the storyline. This is exacerbated by annoying Stalker factions that bring whole new meanings to cliché.
These problems are real, and they’ll probably really annoy some people. But they didn’t annoy me that much. Every game has troubles, and STALKER’s are much more rooted in what could have been rather than what was done wrong. Most things about this game were done right but could have been better. While occasionally disappointing, I don’t really consider that a hang-worthy offense.
X-Ray Hindsight
GSC foolishly chose to develop a proprietary engine for STALKER, despite the fact that there’s nothing about it that Source or Gamebryo couldn’t handle. The X-Ray Engine delivers graphics on par with Half Life 2 and pleasantly large zones separated by reasonable loading times. But like all proprietary engines, it also delivers a badly optimized and unstable renderer, dubious support for major graphics cards, strange visual bugs, and serious performance issues on midrange machines. Had they chosen to license a third-party engine and focus on game development, STALKER would have shipped two years ago and been game of the year for sure. As it is, it’s got pretty significant tech problems, not to mention a legion of broken side quests and other minor glitches.
The A-Life artificial intelligence system so trumpeted prior to release is, like Oblivion’s Radiant AI, underwhelming in actual practice. While the combat AI in this game is second to nonedon’t even get me startedthe actual “living world” stuff doesn’t deliver. Despite the fact that each Stalker (about a thousand) is controlled by this super-advanced AI, very few of them move around or behave that intelligently outside of combat. The wildlife is very realistic, but how hard is it to code an AI that tells wild dogs to eat you if they’re in a pack and run away if they’re alone? No, A-Life is impressive in some ways but doesn’t deliver in many others, though at least GSC produced a demonstrably superior AI to that in most games.
Physics, especially gun physics, are superbtake cover behind an empty oil drum, then squeal in terror and bolt for better cover when it flips headlong from a bullet impact and rolls away. Guns themselves fire and sound very realistic, even delivering parabolic trajectories over long distances. In some cases, the accuracy of “inaccurate” guns is almost ridiculously bad, but I’m sure future patches will refine what is essentially a well-implemented gun system. Firearms could really only be improved if there were more of them, and if there weren’t so obvious a linear progression from good to better to best. I’d rather it were a matter of taste which guns you use.
Game audio, from the melancholic violins of the title theme to the distant snatches of Russian pop songs to the bark of wild dogs and coo of the wind, is similarly outstanding. STALKER is all about atmosphere, and audio has a lot to do with that. Positional sound implementation is shaky, though; it’s often hard to determine where a shout or gunshot came from, and considering the celerity with which you’ll die early in the game, that can be a bit of a problem.
To those buying STALKER, my advice is simple: make sure you have a strong machine that at least matches the recommended specs of 2.8 GHz, 1 GB RAM, and 256 MB video, and patch the damn game. The earliest patch breaks saves, and my own experience with STALKER was pretty stable, so I chose to forgo it, but if you’re getting started, you absolutely should run the update routine from the main menu. A lot of people, particularly Radeon owners, are having serious technical difficulties with this game.
In the Room
The title of the Strugatsky brothers’ book refers to the leftovers from a roadside picnic. While people are there eating, the lower creatures cower in fear. But when the humans leave, all of the ants and mice and other scavengers come out to pick at the remains. Such is the way of STALKER, a game set in a poisoned world worth risking only because of these delicious leftovers, crumbs left behind by an awful violation. What’s in the room with the golden sphere? Some say God; some say it’s just a myth; some say it’s the “ultimate artifact,” a device that can make your dreams come true. But the price you pay for those dreams is shockingly high and ruthlessly collected. What you choose to do at the end of STALKER, along with decisions you make throughout, will lead you to one of the game’s seven endings.
I was not expecting much from this game. I wanted to expect a lot, but the delays and feature subtractions made it difficult to hold out hope for anything other than an eviscerated shadow of its former promised glory. Indeed, after the most recent spate of delays that saw its release move from 2006 to 2007, I began to doubt that it would ever arrive at retail.
Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong. STALKER has its share of problems, but anything this innovative, this unique, is likely to. It is, I hope, the spearhead of a bold new direction in shootersin gaming entirely, actually. The living, open world controlled by an AI of staggering breadth and power: this is the future of video games. The days of scripted sequences and preplanned decision trees and heavy-handed progression are coming to an end. And STALKER is one of the firstand as such one of the most flawed and primitive but nonetheless worthwhilerepresentatives of that new movement.
A game that shows us where games are going. That’s exciting.
Steerpike is a sucker for Eastern European accents. Croon something to him in one at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
Developer: GSC Game World Publisher: THQ Release Date: March 2007
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[…] nobody@flickr.com (graftedno1) wrote a very interesting post today. Here’s a quick excerpt:My greatest fear is to be trapped alone in a confined space with a blind human, in total darkness. They have a heightened sense of smell and hearing, and. […]
Lewis, you made me think of the scariest moments I’ve experienced in gaming, and we’re very similar people.
Bioshock had two moments – the dentist and the flooded room filled with mannequins.
Thief had Return to the Cathedral, which was terrifying to me. Thief 3 had Shalebridge Cradle, which is so scary it ought to be fined.
System Shock 2 kept me on the edge of my seat, but it was more lonely panic than true fear.
Korsakovia was so scary that I uninstalled it.
And STALKER. Oh, god, the haunted labs in STALKER. The latter two games don’t have scares like that. Few games do.
It’s especially rare for a game to have more than mere “moments” – for a game to be scary from beginning to end, that’s a triumph.
Wonderful article. As if Gregg’s review wasn’t enough to convince me that Penumbra is not something I have the courage to play!
I’m with you Lewis … I’m a bit of a puss. I just have a hard time wrapping my head around the idea of dread as entertainment.
Still, I’m drawn to dark stories when they have something interesting to say, whether it’s a game like Thief or a film like, say, Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible. So I’ll push through, sometimes peering through my fingers.
The trouble with games, though, is that if you look through your fingers, you’re probably just going to have to play through the scenario again. :~)
I wanted to play this game. I downloaded the demo but the controls were just too wonky for me to get my head around. I liked the atmospheric vibe a lot. I think I’m a bit desensitized from an overdose of horror movies in my youth so I don’t so much get the dread thing from these games as a nice creepy vibration. If only the controls were better…
@ Mike, what’s wrong with the controls bud? As someone who despises poor control schemes, Penumbra’s is just like any other FPS, except to examine things you right click on them. To use things you left click. I’m not sure that can be considered difficult 🙂
@Steerpike: Yeah my greatest shit-scared moments were with those games too. A few spoilers below people, so beware.
Bioshock – Haha, I remember the dentist. I didn’t really find the game that scary overall but the bit where you go into the wine cellar and notice a mannequin facing the wall and after upgrading your weapon it’s stood directly behind you motionless and quiet just for a moment before attacking you. I shat a brick. I also missed that bit originally until Lew told me about it.
System Shock 2 – same as you really, more unremitting tension all the way through rather than specific terrifying moments. Oh actually, theres a bit where you call a lift and it breaks then you realise a service droid is coming to fix it… I do remember having sleep issues after my first encounter with the cyborg ninjas though.
Thief: The Dark Project – The Sword and Return to the Cathedral and Down in the Bonehoard and well, loads of them. The Sword made me break out into goosebumps though because there was a bit where you could hear this creepy giggling which seemed like it was following me about then it suddenly changed to this horrible throaty noise. What made matters worse was that the EAX (bless you Creative) made my foot steps sound like somebody else was there with me. That level was incredible, a bit too incredible as it seems I missed great chunks of it because I was so eager to leave.
Thief II: The Metal Age – Trail of Blood where you end up in that opening with those damn tree beasts. God the first time I saw one of those hurtling towards me I actually died shortly afterward. Do you remember that Mechanist child walking around on one of the levels? That was a little creepy.
Then there’s Penumbra: Overture – quite a few bits but I’m not mentioning them here.
Oh and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – The brain scorcher lab just because it was so damn quiet. My imagination seriously got the better of me there. Those stuffed animals and heads I’d seen in various buildings led me to believe that those creatures were lurking somewhere in the Zone, specifically that lab.
@Mike: My control setup was perfect after some tweaking (as well as the simple weapon swing fix). If you ever fancy giving it another go, give me a shout and I’ll let you know my setup.
I’m not sure why guys, but one of my starting paragraphs had gone missing, even though I copied it straight from the original source, and It was fine earlier.
Incase you missed it due to some technical issue you might want to re-read just after “Well no she wouldn’t in truth, but in Penumbra: Overture you don’t want to move anyway.” at the very start for those who’ve already read the article. Apologies 🙂
Lewis, it was the weapon swing. It had this terrible, unresponsive feel to it, like trying to hit through molasses. I couldn’t stand using it. I tried the .ini fix as mentioned in the review but it didn’t seem to help. Of course this was the demo…but that shouldn’t have made any difference. I might try the second game instead as I guess they did away with the weapons thing.
I’m see your first paragraph just fine. It’s the dialogue, right?
I like the argument that weapons can remove fear, but even loaded to the teeth with ammo in AVP’99 the Marine missions were frightful because the enemy was anywhere at any time.
As for Penumbra Overture, if the controls are anything like the original Penumbra they need to hack in some Wii-Remote 3d controls. I did not like using my mouse for 3d movements.
@Mike: I’ve read that many people avoided conflict altogether in Overture which incidentally is something forced upon you in Black Plague. As somebody who has been renovating a house over the last 6 months with no DIY experience I can safely say that swinging a hammer is significantly easier in real life than it is in Overture without the fix. The fix balanced that for me.
I’d highly recommend completing the first Penumbra because it’s one big build up to Black Plague which spoils the ending to Overture in the intro. And it’s a great ending too. Just so you know!
@ Steerpike, those moments you mention are all my worst too!! Do you remember the Robot labs in SS2? Absolutely terrifying, waiting for robots to burst out on you! 🙁 oh and have you ever player Condemned?
@ Mike, The use of weapons in Penumbra is different to say HL2, where the player is physically holding the weapon, as in Penumbra it floats slightly infront of you. However, if you change the control method to normal weapon swing, it’s no different! Speak to Greggi and he’ll tell you what to do 🙂
@ jdeuel, AVP the original and its sequal were scary however what type of fear do you think it is? I don’t think it’s anything more than sheer tension. Having a Smart Gun makes you feel incredibly powerful. I can honestly say in Penumbra the fear is sheer unrivalled terror, where you actually have to force yourself to play on. It genuinly is that scary! 🙂
It’s so true, an arsenal of weapons and ammo rapidly deflates any sense of horror or uneasiness in any game for reasons you already mentioned. Sakey, I thought Bioshock was more “lonely panic,” while I was pretty much always terrified in System Shock 2. I really, really, REALLY did not want to enter The Many’s nursery, and my weapons were so unreliable and ammo so scarce that I never felt safe.
Silent Hill was terrifying for the same reasons. Ammo was rare and I frequently had to rely on my pipe for self-defense. Even when I had ammo, the game mechanics prevented my character from being anything other than marginal with any firearm.
Fear had one moment for me: I was climbing up a ladder, and as I reached the upper platform, my guy briefly looked down as he climbed off. As my perspective looked up again, that Ring-esque little girl was RIGHT THERE, reaching for me. I screamed and she was gone.
What else…the original Aliens vs. Predator sent me into a locker room and I could only hear the facehuggers scurrying about somewhere within. I had to go in there. I advanced about three steps before the damn thing screamed and filled up my screen with its repulsive underside as it implanted me with its spawn. My roommate made fun of me for weeks for screaming like a girl child.
Korsakovia–meh. I was too annoyed and frustrated by the box rearrangement/jumping puzzles to be scared. I uninstalled it after an hour of play, I think. Maybe the scary parts were later, but I doubt it.
As for Penumbra, I did play through about half of it before other games distracted me. I remember unease and creepiness, but no sweaty fear. I think I’m to blame here, or, more precisely, my daughter, who was still an infant at the time and generally allowed me only to play during the day for 45 minutes at a time. I was denied total immersion and the fear effect suffered. Maybe I should give it another go after I finish Call of Pripyat since she sleeps through the night now. With any luck, Penumbra will keep me from doing the same.
I played the demo of F.E.A.R. but that ladder scare is the only bit I remember. Christ, that made me jump. I’m not too good with cat scares.
Also I felt exactly the same about Korsakovia. It was creepy at first but then it began to irritate me far too much and it just soured the experience. I stopped playing as a result. Not to mention, when I realised I could bash those smoke-things with my crowbar they didn’t bother me nearly as much.
Great article. I look forward to reading more in the future.