Welcome back to The Wheel of Ukraineous Video Games, a celebration of video games developed mostly in the sovereign nation of Ukraine and also an accidental vector for me to play through the entirety of some of them, apparently. Man, I watched a friend play some of Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter and that seems pretty fucking wild in a way I’d like to see firsthand. As always, I’ll be including a link to donate to the Ukraine Red Cross so that this feature actually is meant for good instead of my own dumb indulgence.

Magrunner: Dark Pulse

Developer:Frogwares

Release Date: June 20, 2013

Time Played: A little over 90 minutes

Troubleshooting: None

Would I play more? Yeah

If there’s an accidental outcome from this feature, it’s that I suddenly have a lot more respect for the handful of recurring game devs featured here. As a champion of Eurojank (and its cousin, Slavjank) I’m always going to root for a developer or a game that tries to punch above its weight, outcome be damned. Frogwares has quickly shot up my list of favorites in that category, joining such hallowed champions as Dubious favorite Spiders… except, you know, they make games that I genuinely like instead of the RPG equivalents of successively less-lethal car crashes.

Take Magrunner: Dark Pulse, an XBLA and PSN game from late in the 360 and PS3’s life cycle that is very much capitalizing on the “Post-Portal” trend of puzzle games. It’s clearly not a big budget title, definitely a side project between all the Sherlock Holmes-ing, but it knows where to put the money where it counts. Instead of thinking with portals, however, this game asks the always prescient question of “Magnets, How Do They Work?” and goes from there.

As Jax, the most 2013 Shaved-Head Video Game Protagonist, it’s up to you to understand that sometimes you want things to attract, and sometimes you want things to repel, and you also want to solve some puzzles along the way. Having multiple items charged with the same polarity will increase the effect, and sometimes you’ll want to quickly switch polarities to give stuff momentum. A lot of the puzzles, at least during the parts I was going through, build upon those ideas mostly elegantly, and I’m proud to say I only spent *some* on stream time missing something really obvious to solve something. I never felt like the rules presented were especially obtuse or fiddly, and that’s a great benefit for puzzle-y stuff like this. Is it as tight and elegant as Portal? No. No, it’s not. But also very few games are Portal. I mean, heck, Portal 2 is pretty fucking good, but even that probably isn’t Portal. Um, magnets? Where were we?

Oh, right also Cthulhu is there. Somehow, I cannot escape the specter of Lovecraftian-ass Lovecraft shit showing up in my video games, even when I’m not actively seeking it out. See, the thing that separates this from the Quantum Conundrums of the world is that, a few puzzle rooms in, you overhear some ominous chanting on your radio. A few more puzzle rooms and you come in on a guy getting ripped apart by a Deep One. There’s something about this all being training to go to space, but the profoundly goofy premise of cyberfuture not-Facebook being fueled by the power of Elder Gods is extremely, extremely funny. I ended my stream having delved into the bowels of the testing facility, where profane statues and even more fish men lurked, and I just wanna say I’m way more into this than I would be if they just tried to be funny.

Now, I cannot speak for how Magrunner holds up as a full game, but for something I’m pretty sure I got for free on GOG at one point, I think it’s a fun puzzle thing and worth a look if you also at some point got it for free on GOG. At this point I’m here pulling for my homies at Frogwares regardless, so please look forward to more Sherlockholmesin and probably that Lovecraft game. No, the other one. The less-bad one whose Steam release is unsanctioned by the developers. Guess I need to get it on PS5.

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl

Developer:GSC Game World

Release Date: March 20, 2007

Time Played: Um, probably somewhere around 15-20 hours?

Troubleshooting: I ran into an unavoidable crash literally during the ending sequence of the game, but other than that surprisingly fine

Would I play more? I played it to completion and I’ll be honest: probably gonna play more STALKER games

STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl is one of those oft-whispered cult classics; the kind of game people will ascribe GOAT status to before following it up with a massive laundry list of caveats. I certainly remember not making any headway whatsoever when I tried it in like… 2011 or something. Who else but an eastern bloc developer would make a punishing, survivalist semi-open semi-RPG based on a short story and a Tarkovsky film? This is absolutely the most unapologetically slavjank game I’ve played for this feature thus far, not cloaked in a license like Sherlock Holmes or smart budgetary limitations like the aforementioned Magrunner. If you like systems, subsystems, modeled systems and stuff that doesn't work quite right, do I have a video game for you. I dunno if anything will top Konung, but to be fair Konung also doesn’t have an absurdly active modding scene behind it to fix some of the cracks.

Now, I’m gonna save the conversation about mods for the *other* STALKER game on this wheel, but let it be known that I used a “Vanilla Plus” modpack called “Memories of the Zone” for my adventure through this video game. As far as I can tell, it’s built on mostly visual and bugfix updates without really touching the core gameplay all that much. I was initially tempted to play this game entirely vanilla, but the motion sickness brought on by the base 55 FOV and aggressive head-bob quickly banished that inclination. Just know that, as far as my experience went, it’s mostly comparable to whatever the final retail product which reflects “The Developer’s Original Intent” but the game sounds and looks better and is (somewhat) less broken. Cool? Cool.

While the audio-visual improvements absolutely helped, I certainly was not expecting to get as sucked into this game as I was. Part of this was initially borne out of the idea that I wanted to showcase some part of the game other than its infamously rough beginning. If you’re unaware, the opening hours of SoC pit your hilariously under-equipped protagonist against groups of similarly under-equipped bandits, semi-invisible anomalies that’ll kill you if you accidentally stumble into them, and lots and lots and lots of wild dogs. The makarov you start with is maybe one of the most peashooter-y handguns I’ve ever seen in a video game, and the sawed-off shotgun the bandits carry has the effective range of “point-blank, maybe.” It’s an astoundingly poor first impression, and while it emphasizes the uphill climb and gear curve you’re dealing with, it’s not until a few hours in that STALKER became something I actively started enjoying.

See, once you get past that point and start getting your hands on “actual body armor” and “assault rifles capable of hitting targets more than 10 feet in front of you” things start to swing in your favor drastically. It’s still a high-lethality game which more-or-less demands you quicksave obsessively, but what other shooter slash pseudo-open world RPG makes the acquisition of a scope for an AK the equivalent of being able to cast Fireball in D&D? At that point, the more sandboxy, systematic chaos, semi-open structure starts to come forth. In some ways, it’s closer to the video game people claim Far Cry 2 is than Far Cry 2, complete with almost psychic enemies capable of seeing you halfway across the map, but unlike Far Cry 2 I’m not constantly fiddling with a hidden malaria timer.

I’d hesitate to call SoC a true open world game in the traditional sense, though you can certainly embark on the sad Ukrainian scavenger equivalent of killing rats in a sewer if you so desire. It’s a series of interconnected maps with reasons to explore, but rarely obligations. The survival elements are present but rarely onerous, especially once you become over-encumbered from hoarding far, far more ammo than you reasonably need. There are mods for that, if you want it, but that’s something I’ll talk about when we get to Call of Pripyat.

Now, the middle part of this game is one of the best video games I’ve played this year. I cannot emphasize how good STALKER is as a tone piece. There’s an ethereal, alien quality to The Zone, both in its natural and urban environs, which I think is still fantastic even fifteen years later. It’s a good contrast to the small pockets of population you encounter, full of a bunch of sad grimy Slavic dudes playing guitar, sitting around fires, or listening to Russian pop music on the radio too loudly. The shooty-shoot is fine, and I probably should’ve put it onto Master difficulty after hearing how it apparently affects bullet damage for everyone, but it turns out most guys will go down in a headshot regardless. It’s just a shame the last few hours are where you can see time and budget running out, as the last few maps narrow to a series of linear literal, dimly-lit corridor crawls. It wouldn’t be Eurojank without it, and even with that caveat it’s something I highly recommend. Just… don’t ask me what mods to use. I have no fucking idea.

Folks he ain't lyin' about the beginning of Stalker. It's just no damn good. Hearing that it gets better (and that there's a one-off mod that maybe does a bit of updating but maintains the original vision) means that I might eventually move it out of the DNF pile. Apparently I own... 3 of these games? Way to go 2010-ish me with more money than time and an "at this price I can't lose!" attitude toward Steam sales.

I played Call of Pripyat quite a few years ago at this point, but never got around to Shadow of Chernobyl. It sits in the “I’ll play that eventually” pile. Definitely took me a couple tries’ worth of getting insta-headshotted by guys to figure out what was going on. That atmosphere is palpable though.

Of the three games, I think Call of Pripyat seems like the most accessible by a pretty serious margin, even in its vanilla form. For one, you start with an AK-74u, which you may recognize as "A compact assault rifle capable of killing things" and not "a limp, inaccurate nerf gun." That said, oh god when that comes up for this feature I hope you're ready for a dissertation on what it's like to peek one's head into a modding scene that has been incredibly active for more than a decade and often in a language I don't speak.

That also said, STALKER 2 is ostensibly still coming out this year despite... you know, the part where most of the developers are (were?) located in a country currently being invaded. If it does end up being a real product, I'm interested to see how they try to make it more approachable, if at all.

I did in fact get Magrunner free from GOG at some point! I might have unfairly dismissed it, perhaps I should give it a glance.

Shadow of Chernobyl is one of my favourite games, and I played it without mods and even enjoyed the opening because I am obviously a certified sicko and legitimately broken. The desperate and brutal combat clicked with me. Atmosphere is defintively top tier!

Yes, I'd say Call of Pripyat is the most accessible, and I'm pretty sure even non-sickos can just play it straight without mods. But I don't know if I should be trusted on this.