Dang, don't wanna reveal too much too early, but this might actually be the first Commish game I'll continue playing after this piece is done. I feel like everyone and their babushka has already played this month's Commish target, the 2007 Ukrainian FPS S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (thanks to my frequent sponsor @omghisam for the gift), but on the off chance that they've yet to take on The Zone (formerly Chernobyl and its surrounding environs) and/or frequently mistake it for the other grim supernatural post-apocalyptic Eastern European FPS Metro 2033, I'm here to set the record straight on rads, anomalies, mutants and getting perforated from a hundred yards away.

This one's going to be more text and less images this time. The game does a lot with a little, visually speaking, and the core appeal of the game is in its many mechanics and systems and it wouldn't do to have a whole bunch of screenshots of destroyed buildings and menus with giant paragraphs of text for captions. (As always, feel free to avail yourself of previous Comic Commishes here: Harvester - Long Live the Queen -Luftrausers - Papers, Please - NiGHTS Into Dreams - Syberia - Freedom Planet.)

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

You might be wondering why I'm bothering to correctly place the periods behind every letter in the game's acronym title rather than half-assing it with just the caps. That's because I have been taught the importance of thoroughness by S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and its methodical gameplay. Actually, I suppose the game's more about efficency and frugality, which would mean less futzing around with punctuation and more getting on with it instead of dedicating an opening paragraph on a failed analogy. I guess the game's solitudinous peregrinations are also making me a little more introspective than usual (though still every bit as unnecessarily sesquipedalian, but hey, that's jus' how I roll).

STALKER, then, appears to be an open-world FPS that's all about impetus. Whereas most open-world games have you wandering around looking for extra challenges and loot to steal, STALKER would prefer that you stick your blinders on and chase whatever goals it presents to you. It does this by de-emphasizing certain aspects common to this sort of experience - there's no leveling, weapons and items are plentiful and you can only hold so much anyway, and everything degrades through wear and tear so either make sure every conflict is meaningful or stay out of a hostile being's way. It weened me off the packrat mentality pretty quickly: traders are placed far apart, at least those willing to buy ammo and weapons off you, and being encumbered really reduces the speed at which you get anywhere. Plus, being able to run for more than ten yards without running out of breath is a handy habit in an environment full of bandits and radioactive mutations of common European animals.

What's impressive about the game is how quickly it can get its hooks into you, and establish a burgeoning respect and curiosity within the player for how its world works as they continue to dig into its mysteries. You might spend the first hour or getting put off by its generic look and user interface that - true to the spirit of the game - puts pragmatism over ornamentation, or taking side-looks at the miserable-looking salvagers in the starting area as they hold conversations in Ukrainian (when addressing you, everyone speaks English with a Ukrainian accent: the localizers wisely decided to leave the ambient discussions in their native language and I think the game's better for it) around makeshift campfires or feeling the exasperation of taking the first peashooter you've given to a bandit base and dying a few times to their sub-machine guns. Once you get past that early barrier there's something almost appealing to the lived-in, ramshackle, knife-edge existence that is life in The Zone. It's like you're right in there in the shit with them, earning your place around the burning oil drum and dreaming of finding the motherlode nestled between areas with liquefyingly radation levels, and potentially even worse misfortunes. The game has the feeling of an MMO without any other human players around: it's all about the necessary camaraderie (or, conversely, screwing over neutral parties for your own profit) of the stalker life. STALKER sort of makes me wish I'd read more depressing Russian literature in highschool Eng. Lit. so I could properly convey the level of (nonetheless engrossing) bleakness, desperation and despair this setting luxuriously wallows in.

The game establishes its fiction fairly quickly too: the unnamed player character is found in the wreckage of a "corpse truck"; a vehicle used to cart away the many bodies that the military finds in the deeper areas of The Zone, presumably for further research. The Zone comprises the entire setting of the game: a region a few kilometers away from Chernobyl was suddenly hit by an atomic disaster that once again rendered the landscape uninhabitable, but with the added wrinkle of creating some sort of malevolent, possibly-sentient force at its epicenter that threatens to engulf the rest of Ukraine, Europe and the world if left unchecked. In spite of the danger, the military and various looters of all stripes have been drawn to the area due to artifacts: alien crystalline objects that give their holders supernatural powers and command extremely high prices on the black market depending on the strength of their enchantments. They exist around and are formed by anomalies: deadly areas of irrational space that look like heat shimmers and mirages that form where the radiation is highest and tend to turn living things into red mist if they happen to wander into them. The local mutated wildlife have all adapted to avoid anomalies, as have humans with their technology, though many of the more dangerous anomalies appear to have a life of their own. The military, usually the cavalry in situations like these, are determined to maintain an iron grip on the discoveries being found deeper into the Zone and will shoot stalkers (like the player) on sight. Stalkers, meanwhile, are fugitives, soldiers of fortune and poverty-stricken opportunists with nothing to lose who have snuck their way past the military cordons guarding the outside world from the Zone for the chance to strike it rich from selling the artifacts the Zone contains. Most end up dead: either shot by the military and the paramilitary groups assisting them, torn to pieces by mutants or turned into paste by the anomalies. It's a high-risk, high-reward sort of place.

I've never played ArmA myself, nor specifically its "open-world survival" derivatives like DayZ, but from what I've seen of those games on Giant Bomb they're all about roaming around, searching dilapidated buildings for supplies and having friendly and not-so-friendly encounters with fellow survivors. STALKER feels a lot like that: the majority of time spent in the game is walking from one location to the next, searching for ammo, health and food to keep you going and artifacts to sell to anyone you meet on the road with the cash to buy them. That money then goes right back into supplies or put towards a tougher set of armor or better weapons when a proper vendor is found. There are special missions to complete that earn the most money, lesser side-missions which seem to regenerate after a while and the central storyline in which you're pursuing a legendary stalker named Strelok: the only thing you're able to remember from before being found on the corpse truck is that your mission is to kill this guy, though you don't know the reason why nor who you're doing this assassination for. There's enough story to keep you moving from place to place further into the Zone, though the backtracking to the starting mission-critical vendor NPC is starting to wear me down (from what I can tell, there'll be another mission vendor a little later on to reduce the amount of walking back and forth).

The gun combat is like ArmA too: it's very easy to get yourself overwhelmed if you don't play it smart. Don't let enemies flank you, make sure you have somewhere to fall back to, let any neutral bystanders take the brunt of the attack, etc.. I've also found it's not worth starting fights with the mutated wildlife, since there's very little reward for gunning them down and most will leave you be if you keep your distance. Your armor wears down with every gunfight too, so it's best not to go around looking for trouble in general. There's also the anti-packrat mentality I mentioned earlier as well, as there's no way to increase the default 50kg weight limit and going over (to a maximum of 60kg, at which point you can no longer move) means your endurance will drop a lot faster and any running/jumping is practically out of the question. I've learned to let surplus weapons go, as their trading value is rarely worth the extra weight, and to pare down my ammo, food and medkit supplies whenever I can. It's nice to have twenty medkits on you for emergencies, but you'd probably be just as peachy with five or ten and selling the rest to keep your encumbrance down. Ammo and meds like bandages and anti-radiation pills seem to have the best value-to-weight ratio after artifacts, so I just tend to stock up on those if I'm looking to make some scratch.

All in all, I'm really enjoying this game. It does the immersion thing surprisingly well, for one, and the FPS combat is tactical and deliberate enough that it hasn't grown tedious yet. I'm finding more artifacts the deeper I go into the Zone, and despite the aforementioned harsh inventory limit there's a lot of treasure-hunting to do. Whenever you kill a guy, there's a chance that you'll pick up a PDA from their body that reveals the location of a stash on your map: you can then follow that icon for some nice items like a deadlier version of geocaching. I've been in pitch battles with a dozen participants and walked away with a huge number of supplies and artifacts and five or six new stash locations to check out later. It occurred to me after I had been playing a while that the game where everything is scarce and you pay for things with bullets is actually the other one of these: Metro 2033. In STALKER, everything is plentiful, though it will involve a lot of firefights and risky ventures into the more irradiated areas of the game's world to get anything good.

I'll keep you all posted going forward. Until then, here's a comic strip that (possibly) accurately depicts the perilous life of a curious stalker:

STALKER! One of my all time favourite games. Looking forward to seeing what you think of the later areas.

Great to see people are still discovering/enjoying this in 2015. It has it's share of problems but overall I have a lot of fond memories of playing this game back in the day, I really loved the bleak/opressive atmosphere the game managed to create.

Hope you stick with it and keep enjoying it

Absolutely love the STALKER series good to hear you are enjoying it. This series has always stood out as the best examples of atmosphere done right in video games.

Great writeup, these games deserve lots of love, great atmosphere and combat in an original setting. I find STALKER spooky which would normally turn me off, but I'm ok with how that creepiness is handled in these games. Rather than outright jump scares or anything traditionally scary, it just gives you that uneasy feeling of being in a messed up place. Also Being able to use an AK-47 on invisible mutants makes the creepiness much more bearable.

I hope you installed the Complete Mod, it really spruces everything up nicely! It also maintains the core gameplay so it's worth installing even on a first playthrough.

Also some of your pack rat mentaility can be restored with certain artifacts which boost strength (I think.... its been a bit, and maybe Call of Pripyat was the one that let you do it.)

Eventually you should try out Call of Pripyat, it's like SOC but more open and better looking! There is even a great QL on the site.

Yeah I was thinking the same. I love Stalker but it's kinda necessary to install the Complete Mod.

@mikemcn: Ah, thank you. I always forget about the modding communities these games tend to accrue. I tend to be a purist about playing the game as it was when it was originally released, but in some cases these types of mods really make a difference enhancing and modernizing their games (and, in cases such as games developed by Troika, fix a hell of a lot of technical issues besides).

Now that the blog's up and I've given a fairly accurate portrayal of life in the Zone as it was for early adopters playing the game for the first time in 2007, I'll keep my playthrough going with these new additions.

Also, you're totally right about the spooky ambiance. If it's not inhuman noises coming in from god-knows-where a few kilometers away, it's wondering what the heck the deal is with all these anomalies and catching a glimpse of some poor mutant dog getting exploded by one in the distance. I do want to get deeper into the game so I can see more of the weird shit it has to offer.

I still think STALKER is the creepiest game I've played, and easily the most atmospheric. The atmosphere is always oppressive, more so than almost any other game, even when the game isn't creepy. You spend a lot of time on the surface, having tense firefights with bandits, that when you do start exploring the darker corners of the Zone and find all the weird stuff that lies within, you don't really know what to expect. It makes fairly boring, mundane abandoned factories and villages seem like the most mystical, scariest places ever, and there's nothing out there that does this quite so well.

I'm surprised at how, when I think back on moments in games that have really creeped me out, most of them come from this game, and how it constantly surprised me with some new terrifying situation.

Anyway, I'd second getting the complete mod. More than anything, I used it for bug fixes and usability features (being able to repair weapons and armour). With the complete mod installed, I'd say SoC is easily the best of the series, but if you want more, I'd also recommend Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat. Clear Sky is the buggiest, and features many of the same map locations, but it delivers more of what the first game offered, and keeps things fresh enough to still be worth playing. Call of Pripyat is also excellent, but for some reason it didn't grab me the same way the previous two did. I still loved my time with it though.

Big fan of the AMK mod for this game

I've given STALKER a couple of tries with the complete mod but I've never managed to get into it. Something about the weapon handling, difficulty, relative lack of direction and ever-present jank have failed to endear to me a game that should be up my alley. One of these days I'll give it another honest shot, though maybe I'll just stick with weird European-developed RPGs instead of their take on shooters.

One time I played a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game (I think Pripyat) while I had a fever and was a little delirious and it was the most tense, creepy, and wonderful gaming experience ever. I love these games; I've had some great "emergent gameplay" type moments that trump anything else.