Do you love Kalashnikov rifles, drinking vodka, smoking, Adidas tracksuits, gas masks, the color grey, cosmic horrors beyond your comprehension and other Slavic Staples? Then you, my friend, should check out STALKER, especially with the new one out right now! I’m a huge fan of the original STALKER games, and I’m super happy that STALKER 2 seems to have found an audience in the West, as the old games are pretty obscure, and not just because of how old they are. STALKER remains obscure and niche not just because its from a different country then who I imagine will be reading this, but also because its a bit of a broken, janky, unfinished and unfair mess-and that’s kind of why I love it
STALKER is beloved in Eastern Europe, given that it’s one of the biggest cultural outputs of Ukraine, but it never quite found footing in the West until recently, so I figure I should give a quick rundown on what STALKER actually is for those unfamiliar.
What is STALKER?
All of the STALKER games are semi-linear FPS games that take place in the real life Chernobyl exclusion zone where a mysterious second disaster around the infamous Chernobyl nuclear reactor has caused reality to break down, causing the emergence of deadly mutants and strange anomalies across what has become known as The Zone. You play as a Stalker, a catch all term for those willing to jump the fence and venture into the zone for any number of reasons, be that money, fame, an escape from the “real” world, etc.
The Zone isn’t all fun and games, however, as the Ukrainian military has orders to shoot anyone inside the zone on sight, and several factions have emerged within The Zone that are almost constantly at war with each other along with fighting back against The Zone itself, along with ruthless bandits that are more than willing to kill you. You have an equal chance of dying from a strange mutant blowing your brain up with psionic powers or getting shot with Ivan’s rusty double barrel over a carton of bootleg cigarettes, so really, if you’re from Eastern Europe, this is less of a game and more a simulation of everyday life.
Making The Hostile Appealing
STALKER has a unique aesthetic that’s unlike anything else I’ve seen in a video game before or since, and to see it simplified into “it’s just Russian Fallout” when it is neither Russian in origin nor Fallout in gameplay bums me out. STALKER has the aesthetic of wandering around a beautiful, yet terrifying grey apartment block and then getting glassed with a cheap vodka bottle by Cthulu wearing a tracksuit, who was gopnik squatting just behind you and jumped you while you checked your PDA.
And you feel that vibe from its gameplay, which is harsh, unforgiving, and sometimes unfair in how it punishes you. I’ll be honest, STALKER is not for everyone. In fact, I think its for very few people. STALKER is not only a game from 2007, its a game from 2007 made on a shoestring budget in brutal conditions on an engine that only high level Ukrainian wizards are capable of understanding, much less wrangling into something coherent. It goes past the normal babysitting gameplay of other survival games in punishing you with stat decreases for not eating or something. Take a wrong step on the road? You get an introduction to the whirligig anomaly, which will swing you up into the air and make you violently explode. Get into a gunfight without the necessary preparations? Well, even if you win the gunfight, there’s going to be a good chance you wont have enough blood to make the trip back without any bandages! Wander into a bad part of town accidentally? Say hello to the local Bloodsucker mutant… you get the idea. The difficulty is off putting and unfair at points, but that’s also what makes it so compelling.
You Aren’t Special, Stalker. You’re Just Like The Rest of Us
In STALKER, you don’t really feel like the protagonist. You aren’t some highly trained special ops killer, you’re a Slavic delinquent that decided it would be a good idea to jump the fence into what is essentially an alien world with nothing but the clothes on your back and your grandpa Boris’ old AK-47 in your hands. And everyone else in the zone is exactly like you, subject to the same rules. Things you take for granted in other games aren’t in STALKER; there’s no guarantee that someone who gives you a quest will be alive to pay you upon your return, or that the thing you were sent to pick up wasn’t picked up by some other random guy, who then wandered across the entire map and got mauled by dogs.
Despite this, or maybe because of it, it feels real. Reality can be frustrating, it can be unfair, and The Zone doesn’t care about you. You really do get the feeling that if your character bites it, life will go on. The next guy in the area will come and loot your corpse, Sidorovich will continue to eat his food in the nastiest way humanly possible, and The Zone will continue to be weird and mysterious. I love the feeling of being just another weirdo who thought this was a good idea, and the fact that you are makes extraordinary feats such as fending off a ton of Monolith soldiers, or managing to escape a terrifying mutant den, or securing an incredibly valuable artifact so you can buy a fancy new gun that much more invigorating to acheive.
Embracing the Roughness
STALKER is the king of what has been coined Eurojank, a term that came to be known as a game made in Europe characterized by unique ideas with rough edges that, from an objective standpoint, make the game worse, but those rough edges give it character. If nothing else, STALKER has character because of its rough edges, and is memorable for its jankiness. Something like the newer Far Cry games have smoother gunplay, better voice acting, prettier graphics and more tools to use, but I don’t remember a damn thing from any Far Cry game past Far Cry 4.
The smoothing of the friction makes it feel like any other video game, while Stalker’s intentional and non-intentional friction makes it memorable. If the movement was smoother, common complaints like weapon jamming being frustrating and poor accuracy fixed, would STALKER be a better game? Maybe in the eyes of mainstream critics, but you would also lose what STALKER is at its core. Its hostile to you. Not in a malicious way, but in a way where it doesn’t care if you live or die. Sometimes, you will do everything right, only for your gun to jam at the moment where you need it most, even if its fired perfectly fine a hundred times before. But those moments and the improvisation that follows, combined with its unique atmosphere and incredible setting, are what make STALKER memorable to me. I remember sitting in a bush drinking vodka to get rid of radiation poisoning more than I remember anything from most other AAA open world games.
Maybe I’m just a bit of a masochist–friends of mine will confirm I love playing games that seem to actively hate me–but despite all of the weirdness, the dated graphics, the miserable color palette and the unfairness of its gameplay at points, I still love STALKER. And I think if you give it a genuine shot, you will too.
