Developer GSC Game World Publisher THQ Format PC Release 2007
Come to STALKER: Shadow Of Chernobyl fresh from a younger open-world series and it may appear deliberately unfinished – an earlyaccess build that never made it to version 1.0. Set in a radioactive psychic hinterland based on the 1989 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, it’s a work of unvarnished post-Soviet miserabilism, a resolutely fun-averse shooter consisting of dreary geography full of loveless mercenaries, ethereal deathtraps and malfunctioning guns. While badged as a horror game, it’s more depressing than horrifying. And how much more miserable it seems in the context of games such as Horizon: Forbidden West, with their bright, exotic landscapes of smoothswallow quests and conveniences, their magnetic mission loops, crunchy ability combos and syrupy insistence that the postapocalypse is a place of possibility.
shares fixtures with these later games: it’s both their ancestor and their baleful adversary. It has trading outposts, enemy camps, and replenishing loot caches, the rudiments of a Ubisoft worldbuilding playbook. It has maps and minimaps,doesn’t link these elements together as fluidly and gratifyingly as the
