Before writing about GSC Game World's 2007 FPS STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl for my monthly Comic Commish feature, I had the intention of playing enough of the game to get a decent idea of what it had to offer and then moving onto something more in my wheelhouse than some gritty, deliberately-paced FPS across a series of barren post-nuclear holocaust environments in which 80% of the voiced dialogue was in a language I couldn't understand. At least, that was the intent. What actually happened is that the game sucked me in and wouldn't let go, much like one of its deadly gravitational anomalies, and I ended up playing it to completion. I'm even considering adding its sequels Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat to next year's Pile of Shame list (as with anything on Steam that's over a year old, I bought the rest of the series for next to nothing on a whim thanks to a bundle or one of the digital distributor's like-clockwork seasonal sales).

I elucidated on what appealed to me most about the game - largely its oppressive but immersive atmosphere and its borderline RPG traits of open-world exploration, inventory micromanagement and frequent equipment upgrades - but what really began to shine for me after that piece was written was the game's frequent forays into horror beats as a change of pace from the usual Call of Duty-style pitch gunfights with balaclava'd assholes. I've not seen a full-blooded FPS delve into horror too often, especially ones that start off as something a bit more straightforward with its early conflicts with bandits and the military. The only example I can immediately recall is Raven Software's Singularity; its crumbling ex-Soviet laboratory setting probably owing a fair deal to STALKER in retrospect. The game builds up to these spooky encounters, treating them as part and parcel of the game's secondary (though really primary) central mystery of what the Zone actually is and what exactly lies at its center.

Point is, the game is of that rare breed that become more engrossing and fascinating the further you get into it, rather than the standard inverse with longer games - and especially open-world games - where it often becomes a race between reaching the game's climax and completely losing interest and dropping out. To stop discussing the game only after experiencing its opening chapters, as the Comic Commish did, would be a disservice to the superior mid- to late-game scenarios it presents. What follows is an in-depth rundown of each section of the game - the setting of the Zone is broken up into discrete areas separated by narrow transition points, sort of like Xenoblade Chronicles or Borderlands, and each has a specific story-critical mission attached to it - and how the game will switch between its more gunplay-active, eerily suspenseful or stealthy infiltration (though never the forced kind, thankfully) modes.

Naturally, there will be spoilers for STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl out of the wazoo ahead; if you intend to play it yourselves first and just want a quick appraisal of the game's quality some eight years after the fact, check out the original Comic Commish (it doesn't leave the opening area, really) and bookmark this article for later. (Or... I dunno. It feels weird telling people to bookmark your content. Like one step removed of telling them to erect a giant statue in your honor.)

(Another disclaimer: After the Comic Commish, I took the advice of some of the commenters and installed the 2009 Complete Mod. As well as a big graphical boost and a better looking UI and HUD, it fixed a lot of issues I had with the game's more stringent elements, like having no way to repair gear without taking it to one of three vendors and paying an exorbitant sum. I imagine most of that mod went towards fixing the jank, in a similar fashion as the fan-made mods for Troika games, rather than giving me too much of an easy time with additional freebies. Not that I have any problem with an easy time; I am a wuss, after all.)

Cordon

The Military Cordon is where the game begins. I've talked about this particular area of the game in detail, but without the context of the areas to follow. Though it's barely any larger than any other area of the game, and is really just a straight line directly north, it feels a bit like the Hinterlands of Dragon Age: Inquisition in that you can find yourself spending a disproportionate amount of time there. You could credit this to the open-world game phenomenon of the "honeymoon period", in which an early infatuation (or, well, a mild curiosity) will drive you to do anything and everything there is available early on until you learn to be a little more judicious in pursuing content across an open environment jam-packed with it. You're also adapting to the game's mechanics in that time, and STALKER has a curious difficulty curve that starts and ends harshly but levels out in the middle (like a valley) in such a way that it encourages the player to grind a little for the cash reserves necessary for some strong weapons, a better suit of gear (which is probably the most vital component to one's load-out) and more than enough emergency healing supplies before braving the next few regions of the game.

Even though I spent a number of hours in the Cordon area, running back and forth from side-mission objectives and hit-and-run strikes on bandit bases and the military-staffed choke point to the trader for some necessary funds, it's a comparatively brief and unremarkable area of the Zone. There's an anomaly filled tunnel that you can use to sneak past the choke point creating an alternative route that relies on first-person jumping and careful pathfinding than trying to out-gun a superior armed force depending on which one you'd feel more comfortable tackling. There are fellow rookie Stalkers everywhere who work as makeshift vendors if you have a small amount of trash to unload. As with all good tutorial areas the Cordon teaches you all the basics you need to survive the later sections of the Zone. It wouldn't hurt to be prepared in the equipment sense too, though - STALKER has a natural progression of sorts in which later human opponents have better weapons for you to use, but it still takes some convincing (read: increasingly more difficult combat encounters) to collect those weapons from them.

Garbage

The Garbage naturally follows from the Cordon area and is essentially a wide-open space with four exits - making it the first hub of the game - and piles of garbage everywhere that contain huge amounts of radiation. There's little to worry about radiation-wise in the Cordon area, but the Garbage teaches you to respect radiation sickness fast. Like the poisonous swamps of the various Souls games, walking into the wrong place and continuing to walk there will prove fatal, either in the "slow and painful" sense or the "instantaneous death" sense, and neither of those are really any fun. The Garbage also has a higher proportion of bandit encounters: an always hostile human "faction" that is frequently at odds with the Stalkers in any given area. A large force of these bandits stand between Garbage and the first of the three alternate exits of a story critical nature, so even if the player's trying to be the stealthy sort, they'll still have little recourse than to help the Stalkers in the area repel these marauders.

There's not a whole lot else to say about the Garbage. The way it presents its four paths is an interesting design exercise in creating "broken bridges", in which the player will need to resolve an external objective before being allowed passage. Besides the South entrance from the Cordon area, the only other initially available exit is the aforementioned path through the bandit camp to the West. The East is filled with radiation, requiring a suit upgrade at the very least and possibly a few radiation-sapping artifacts for safe measure, and the North is blockaded by the no-nonsense Duty faction: a paramilitary group of Stalkers that have taken it upon themselves to prevent further access to the center of the Zone by the low-tier Stalker rubberneckers and neophytes who are ill-prepared to deal with its dangers. Naturally, they'll consider the protagonist one of these until the player's far enough along with the story missions for an important NPC to vouch for them. Future hub areas won't be quite as restrictive; presumably this is all in service to the player's still-fledgling status, refusing to drop them into any deep shit until they're a little bit better-equipped to deal with accidentally wandering into a high-level area - with a certain amount of experience and a bit of subtlety, the player can actually help themselves to high-level gear by risking a jaunt into an area they shouldn't be yet.

Agroprom Research Institute

As with the Cordon, the player is conditioned to avoid conflict with the military here. However, the Cordon offers a rare opportunity for a particularly bold player to gun down the handful of military personnel manning that area's choke point for some fairly decent early SMG/assault rifle hybrides. However, when entering Agroprom, you're drawn into a big gunfight with military types and must protect a certain NPC from harm from a handful of them. The game wastes no time raising the stakes and putting you into situations that, only shortly before, advised you flee from. This is what immediately follows the above scenario, in fact: after rescuing your contact, Mole, you're instructed to quickly leave the area before reinforcements show up and lie low for a while.

The military is shown as the one faction with limitless resources and manpower, and given their official status of protectors of the realm, it's not a good idea to constantly antagonize them: either mechanically, as they'll just keep coming, or ethically, as their true purpose is to stop the Zone from spreading and causing more mayhem to innocent civilians. They're always hostile as they're naturally inclined to shoot any Stalker on sight - the government has written off any unauthorized people in the Zone as criminals and opportunistic looters - but that doesn't make them your enemy, necessarily. The game, similarly, displays an equally layered "no black and white, only shades of grey" depth with the other factions of the game, and the player always has the option of eschewing any attachment to the game's factions for the default "loner" status. Given what we gradually learn about the protagonist, the loner label fits him to a tee regardless.

Agroprom also introduces the first of the game's underground areas: separate locations within a map of the Zone that are a bit more linear and a lot more dangerous. Within the enclosed space, anomalies become less like irksome random pitfalls on an open plain that you occasionally have to side-step around and instead become major obstacles that you have to figure out how to pass, often taking detours or jumping over with makeshift platforms in protracted games of "the floor is lava" (which is almost literally true, in the case of some anomalies). What's worse is that many of the game's more hideous creatures, which eschew sunlight for clearly evident reasons once you get a good look at them, tend to dwell beneath ground and this it is from these encounters that the game draws the lion's share of its tense horror moments. The Agroprom Research Institute's underground tunnel is actually just a passageway to a more important location: it takes you within the walls of the surface area's military base, creating an opportunity to sneak in and out with some story-critical military files without causing too much of a ruckus against the aforementioned "mostly on the side of good" armed forces.

These tunnels introduce you to the first of the game's more troublesome non-human foes: the Illithid-esque bloodsuckers. Bloodsuckers are mutated humanoids that will charge you with their sharp claws and tentacled mouths: a far cry from the simple and often non-hostile rabid dogs and bloated pig monsters you've seen so far. More so, they are incredibly fast and turn "invisible" (which is more a Predator-style shimmering transparency) when they sense your presence, making them not only difficult to gun down before they can Cuisinart you but terrifying in the low-light conditions underground where their opacity makes them barely distinguishable from the heat haze of nearby anomalies.

The game does such a good job unnerving you with these bloodsucker creatures - of which you only meet two here, but plenty later - that when it decides to throw a Controller your way you have no other option than to book it to the exit in a blind panic. Controllers are considerably more dangerous psychic humanoids that are able to pull you in from immense distances in an instant and slap you across the face; at least, that's how the game presents their attacks. It's possibly more of a psychic slam that the game chooses to represent in an abstract way by yanking you a hundred yards across the map (clipping through objects in the way) to stare into the monstrous faces of these Controllers before flinging you back with a huge health loss. These guys don't show up again until way later in the game, and then only sparingly, so to stand your ground with one this early on is asking far too much. With this first tunnel section STALKER instills within the player a Pavlovian revulsion to going underground, and entering each successive subterranean location is always accompanied by some degree of unease.

Bar

The bar area, which actually encompasses a fairly sizeable portion of what appeared to be an industrial warehouse district, contains all the amenities you need for the rest of the game. There's a vendor that acts as a locus for side-missions, information and new equipment as well as the Duty HQ which also offers its own share of objectives to pursue. There's two more exits which, including the irradiated path back in the Garbage, creates a superior hub for the mid- to late-game. It is here that you can spend the money you've been building up in the previous two areas (you ideally leave the Cordon with the best equipment money can buy, though that Stalker suit can be pricey) and finally get enough gear to survive the run to the irradiated location East of the Garbage: the Dark Valley. In a happy coincidence, this is also where the story sends you next: the notes you procured points to an underground lab that was abandoned by the military when the Zone formed.

However, the player can choose to take the past West of the Bar to reach the Wild Territory, and meet their first Mercs. Mercs are essentially empowered bandits, sporting high-level gear that suggests that they're getting funded by some lucrative outside interests, possibly an organized criminal syndicate or some rich, unscrupulous industrialist interested in monopolizing the artifact trade. Mercs replace bandits for most of the mid-game areas, and they have weapons far more powerful (and valuable) than the already major upgrades you find for sale at the Bar. If you're particularly brash you can run past the Bar without buying a thing and try taking down the handful of Mercs guarding the Wild Territory and start using their weapons instead. That's the sort of situation I love to see an open-world game: biting off more than you can chew and getting rewarded handsomely for what is essentially sequence breaking. I recall playing Risen with the same feeling of "okay, what I can get away with doing at this level?" and why later Bethesda games with their automatic level-scaling of enemies and treasure always fell a little flat with me. I've always loved sneaking into areas with enemies that could kill me with a look and spiriting away with a trinket far more powerful than I should be allowed to have.

The Dark Valley

Once you get past the portentous high levels of radiation blocking the Dark Valley, it's not all that bad. Well, besides for the toxic swamps and the enormous bandit fortress. The draw here is the underground labs which, once again, house some pretty spooky crap. Rather than the creature feature horror of the last place, the atmosphere in Lab X18 is far more suspenseful. It does introduce a new enemy type - the gas mask-wearing leapers called snorks, which like the bloodsuckers seem to be purpose-built for jump scares in dimly-lit, claustrophobic tunnels - but it's all about a malevolent psychic force that hounds you for the entire time you're down there. Whenever you pass by any object that might be beholden to physics, like an oil drum or a crate, it'll float ominously above the ground and fling itself at you.

It recalls to mind the Ocean House Hotel side-quest of Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines, which forewent the usual sneaking through human society and fighting rival vampire gangs for something off-beat and spooktacular. When you finally meet the pure energy being causing these paranormal shenanigans, it's in a frantic fight to the death with constantly spawning flame anomalies in a room filled with jars containing monstrous fetuses that presumably collectively created the wandering psychic being in an experiment gone awry. The through line with the Zone and its creation appears to be unethical science run amok (which, given the Chernobyl setting, is apropos enough) and the game continues to foreshadow what lies at the center of it all with these little field trips to laboratories.

Wild Territory

We've talked about the Wild Territory: it's a dilapidated industrial train depot filled with Mercs and all manner of mutated creatures. It's also a fairly big map and stocked with an abnormal amount of stash locations: stashes are hard to reach and otherwise obscure treasure hoards that fill up with useful items whenever you're fortunate enough to pick up its location from a dead NPC. I'm not sure if it's random chance or if certain NPCs carry particular stash locations, but most areas have about five to ten of these caches to pilfer. The Wild Territory has about double that for whatever reason: between the powerful gear the Mercs are sporting and the vast amount of items to find and cash to make here, it's as if the game's throwing the player a bone in terms of being all set for the challenges ahead.

This area separates the Bar from Lake Yantar, which is the next story destination after the Dark Valley laboratory. As before, you're being sent to find even more classified documents left behind when the labs were all abandoned after some calamity, though it seems as if an unrelated catastrophe occurred here. Due to its remoteness, all you hear about Yantar are vague horror stories and the news that the military has set up its scientists in a base in the dry lake to study in peace. As with Ravenholm: No-one goes to Yantar.

Lake Yantar

The truth is, the experiment that occurred in the laboratories next to Lake Yantar created something that projected an immense amount of psychic energy, to the extent that every Stalker that wanders in here gets their brains turned to mush by the intermittent psychic waves emanating from the central building. The scientists were placed just outside the radius of this phenomenon, but the region's entrance and most of the map are well within the blast zone. The chief enemies to contend with here, then, are the victims of this psychic wave who wander around as half-conscious zombies with the barest modicum of remaining intelligence; enough to stay upright and fire their weapons, but otherwise completely gone. It's another eerie twist on a classic, and one that the game takes sinister advantage of with its detection systems.

Y'see, the game gives you three pieces of information whenever they're applicable: the amount of noise the player is making, how visible the player is at the present time and how many humans are in the vicinity shown by the radar/mini-map. The sound detector is always working: the player knows at all time how loud their pace is, and this can be mitigated by sneaking around, avoiding bumping into things or not walking over loud terrain (like metal). The visibility detector, however, only applies when a hostile is actually observing the player: once it maxes out, the hostile is fully aware of the player's position. This has all sorts of wonderful applications in environments where the player believes, fallaciously, that they're alone. Once they see that visibility bar start to grow, however, they instinctively stop and look around for the beholder. It's great fun if the enemy is behind a window, a sniper on top of a tower or is at that moment sneaking up behind the protagonist. The third detection system gives you the number of people nearby with an electronic Stalker tag: this generally extends to every human NPC in the game, but not to mutated creatures (even the snorks and bloodsuckers, the appearance of which suggests they must've been human once). Zombies have them though, because zombies were once Stalkers; even if you haven't picked up on what they are from notes and the like, this is a fairly overt way of insinuating their unfortunate fate.

The nearby scientists give the protagonist a piece of kit to alleviate the psychic damage the machine in the basement causes, and sends the player down to deactivate same. It's the first of the game's handful of timed sequences, as the psychic shield will only apply for so long, and you have to run through a vertical cylindrical structure hitting switches in the right order and avoiding the shuffling hiveminded zombie horde that are wandering in to protect what is essentially another giant brain in a jar. The game's body horror isn't really on the gory side so much as it simply feeds a distinct recurring sentiment of "what did those assholes do this time?" throughout the game.

Army Warehouses

If you found the Duty faction discomforting with their staunch policy on making sure nothing about the Zone ever emerges to the public consciousness, the Freedom faction offers a ideological opposite. The Freedom are essentially bandits, like the Mercs, but are friendly enough towards the player when they first come in contact. They believe information on the Zone, including discoveries of what it contains and the artifacts it creates, should be freely spread to the world. This is in opposition to not only Duty but the military, which means they live in a precarious position between the nearby Duty to the South and the center of the Zone to the North which hosts the kinda scary Monolith faction.

You meet the Monolith for the first time in the Army Warehouses section, but they're essentially the bandits and Mercs for the final few areas of the game. They're cultists that worship the immense artifact at the epicenter of the Zone, thought to be the source of its power and also rumored to grant the wishes of any Stalker that reaches it. To say anything more about the Monolith would perhaps be saying too much given its importance to the ending, but the fanatical Monolith faction are adamant that no Stalker shall ever pass through them and speak to their "God" in what they consider to be the most blasphemous of acts. They're also, naturally, the best armed NPCs in the game: even the military fears and avoids them, given the power they wield. A few of them even have gauss rifles, which are the first weapons in the game to really punctuate the fact that it takes place in a near-future setting.

Red Forest

After passing through the Army Warehouses, which contain a few more side-missions for the Freedom faction and is (I believe) the furthest point you have to go to to resolve a side-mission for one the previous vendors, the game kinda turns on its blinders and goes full sprint towards the finish line. The Red Forest and the two regions that follow - the ruined town of Pripyat and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself - all string together one after the other as the game heads towards its conclusion. At this point the game expects the player to have the best gear it is possible to buy, acquiring new ammunition and supplies from the bodies of NPCs they gun down. The game's best weapons and gear are only found by searching these late-game environments and collecting them off corpses, so there's never a reason to return to the vendors once this threshold has been passed.

With the Red Forest, the goal is to turn off the Brain Scorcher: a group of enormous electro-radioactive antennae that project a psychic force so powerful that it not only obliterates the minds of anyone who wanders too close (besides the Monolith members themselves, curiously enough, though there's plenty to suggest that they're "zombies" of a different sort) but destroys anything electronic in its vicinity, including military choppers and vehicles. The linear path to the antennae is littered with highly radioactive abandoned vehicles and many Monolith zealots lying in wait to ambush the player as they pass by. Once you get close to the antennae, you start getting attacked by phantasms of mutated creatures that appear out of nowhere and make a beeline for the player: it takes a while for the player to realize (or it did for me) that these phantasms conjured by the protagonist's mind are actually completely harmless. The requisite underground section doesn't even bother being overly suspenseful this time, instead creating a gauntlet of ambushes to get past once the antennae have been shut down.

After this, all Hell breaks loose as the path to Pripyat and beyond is open and every major Stalker and faction member makes a mad dash for Chernobyl. I won't say too much more here, but the following sections play out in a similarly linear manner: pass through a number of ambush points, repelling the Monolith forces at every turn, until the conclusion of the game is within grasp. It's a little hectic and, well, actually kind of disappointing. It tosses away the atmosphere it's been building up for its entire length for a crazy busy and difficult run-and-gun sequence past what feels like a thousand cultists with powerful shotguns, gauss rifles and rocket launchers and a few hostile military choppers thrown in for color. It's as if it remembered it was an FPS game right at the end and reverted completely to type. A little bit of a bummer, but it at least gets in one last eerie moment when the player finally confronts the monolithic "Wish Granter" and the ending plays out one of several ways depending on the player's actions.

Anyway, that's a far more exhaustive guide to the Zone and its regions than I intended, but STALKER was one of those games I kept thinking about long after it was over, and word vomiting onto a word processor is generally the best way to unknot and evaluate any giant morass of thoughts and impressions that a piece of media leaves behind. If that's not the mark of a quality game, I'm not sure what else to tell you. Look where you're walking if there's radioactive anomalies all around you? Don't be like Fido, everyone. That puppy got chomped by a cruel and unfeeling God.