Pulled from my full retrospective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGd-vhg0AZE

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., as I’ve come to see - and more or less appreciate it, is an impressive waste of time. Everything it boasts, from the gunplay and the realism to the immersive systems and the atmospheric open world, is all just a space to exist in for however long you see fit, until you get bored with the loop and find something else to do. It presents a wild, open world full of infinite possibilities (of things to kill, or things that will kill you), and a list of mechanics and systems that you’re seemingly not supposed to understand without trial and error and frequent quick-saves. It requires a lot of time and patience and commitment, and I feel that I gave it the amount of time it deserved before giving my thoughts a three-year-deep conclusion.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (the game), is little more than an aesthetic, comparative to its genre peers. It implies a deeper message, but only through its proximity to these other works, considering its title and setting. What S.T.A.L.K.E.R. seems to aim for thematically is on par with Fallout’s frontier-fantasy; isn’t it mysterious and sexy to have full reign over this barren landscape that used to be a civilization? Isn’t it fun to think about returning to zero, carrying nothing but a backpack and a gun into the wide unknown? Here we’re shown less the effects of war on society, and more a wonderland for grizzled gun-toting men, survivors who are here for the same mechanical reason as the player - they like shooting things too. Inherently, as a piece of interactive media focused more on open, immersive mechanics than a linear story, it seems more interested in being a military simulation in a “cool setting” than a rumination on why that setting exists in the first place, much less what it symbolizes. It’s a reaction to the aesthetic trend of nuclear media, the allure of tragedy and the speculation around the effects of nuclear energy, and the inevitable horror genre tropes that fill in the gaps and begin to form the fear into something shiny and profitable.

“The zone” is often as beautiful as it is ugly and static, and I found myself getting enraptured by Anomaly’s weather effects and skyboxes as often as I was disappointed with the emptiness and ugliness of an area I thought I’d take the time and resources to explore. The world is also incredibly hostile to its inhabitants, in a way that pursues “realism,” but in the process loses track of why it exists at all. The openness is presented as a space of limitless opportunity, but for what? The answer, of course, is to “be a part of the world,” which is enacted through the game’s verbs by walking for a period of time, then shooting a gun, then walking somewhere else. This openness, also, provokes a classic form of open world burnout. You’re provided with so much to do (in the form of walking, shooting, and then picking things up) that you quickly lose yourself in the loop of trying to make your numbers go up (namely encumbrance, which translates to money). With a higher number (money), you can build up equipment that allows you to go further without having to reload a save after getting one-shot - or at the very least mortally wounded by anything you come across, or anything that (thanks to the immersive world design) comes after you. This is an expensive process, both for you as a player and “you” as a stalker, and will necessitate running back and forth across several maps doing fetch quests, finding filler items to sell (that might be useful, or might just have flavor text that alludes to being useful, we’ll never tell), and trying not to get encumbered.

I’ve done my time in the zone, I’ve lived in it for a period, explored its secrets, even if I haven’t “beaten” S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in whatever form it wants to be beaten. I will probably still think about it, maybe gratuitously return to it for a few hours, try and see if there’s anything else hidden in its world. In the end, maybe this version of the zone just isn’t for me, maybe I’ll never find what I want hiding somewhere deep inside it, and maybe it wasn’t ever meant to be any deeper than “just a game.” Given S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s upcoming release, the developers’ lack of reservations about NFTs, and the series’ target fanbase of hunter-killers, maybe no zone will ever live up to the ruminative fantasy I keep in my head and heart. Perhaps Chernobyl’s exclusion zone is fated, ironically, to be a constant mystical battleground, an aesthetic backdrop for yet another survival shooter game, an untouched, unruled place full of limitless violent possibilities. In the meantime, in the real world, maybe we can continue to cope with the doors that cannot be closed behind us, and hopefully learn from our mistakes and our history of violence, and prevent such a prospective future from befalling us before we inevitably get another triple-A post-nuclear frontier survival experience for the cost of $70, a thousand layoffs, a handful of crunch hospitalizations, and our dignity as artists.