The developers could certainly have picked up a few tricks from Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl and its sequels about how to make the Zone feel more dynamic. Friendly trader stalkers, meanwhile, simply stand around waiting for you to come to them. The only things you find are resources and clues relating to your story, there is no wildlife (even though the Exclusion Zone is renowned for it) and enemy AI rigidly sticks to their patrol routes or stands in one place-never sitting at desks or fighting radioactive monsters or taking a wazz. As someone mildly obsessed with the crumbling vestiges of the Soviet empire, I find these environments mesmerising.īeautiful and haunting though these areas are, they are a little lacking in substance. #Chernobylite konstanty windows#It gives the areas an intense verisimilitude that I can't stop snapping-grass and shrubbery reclaiming blocky clusters of Soviet apartments, smashed stained glass windows depicting doomed communist utopias, smoggy sunlight oozing through sickly canopies. The Farm 51 actually went to the Exclusion Zone and used 3D scanning to recreate its terrain, textures and buildings. These maps aren't huge, but they look wonderful. At the same time, you can send out your companions to scout future missions or gather resources. When you're ready, you pick a mission set in one of six regions around the Zone-whether to progress the main story or search for clues. Your choices will affect enemy activity in the area, how many allies you have in the Zone, and at one point even the topography of the game-you can, for instance, destroy the infamous Duga radar at the behest of a man believing himself to be in a good-vs-evil conflict with a Rat King.īetween missions you hang out in your base, where you can cook, build improvements, explore other peoples' memories based on clues you find, or even just go straight to the Heist mission at the end of the game (where you'll almost certainly die if you've not assembled a crew and equipment, but it's there if you want it). It's pretty ballsy for a game to lay bare the workings of its choice system like this, but given the breadth of Chernobylite's web of choices and possible outcomes, the devs have every right to want to show it off. Each time you die, you wake up in this dreamscape where you can see how the key decisions you made are connected, and go back and change those decisions using Chernobylite shards as payment to whatever interdimensional god-force is running the show. It can teleport you from one place to another, or even let you revisit old memories via a dreamscape of floating rocks and non-Euclidean geometries. You see, Chernobylite is a substance that can open wormholes in time and space. Interestingly, you don't have to stick with your choices. Obviously, I went for the drama-baiting combo of lying and inviting them to my ragtag crew. Later on, I met a character who was very close to the sketchy stalker, forcing me to choose between lying or coming clean about my murderous whoopsie, and whether to invite them to join my group. I killed them in cold, mildly irradiated blood, looted their corpse, and made my way back to base. Previously, I took the humane option with someone, and wound up trapped in a room fast filling with poison gas, so this time I took no chances. It has some throwaway horror elements too, because apparently that's mandatory in any Chernobyl-based media.īut most successfully, Chernobylite is a game about choice, where you're constantly faced with decisions that may (or may not) meaningfully affect your story.Įarly in the game, for instance, I killed a sketchy stalker who refused to give up information. It's part base-building survival game, as you gather resources to improve your base with crafting stations, bedding, and even mushroom gardens (mushrooms, it turns out, are integral to crafting everything from wooden walls to handheld nuclear weapons). It's part first-person shooter, though it's quite possible to sneak through much of the game without firing a single bullet. As physicist and former Chernobyl Power Plant employee Igor, this is why you've returned to the haunted area. Its melancholy atmosphere permeates you like plutonium, confronts you with big decisions at every turn, and surrounds you with a well-written (though sometimes terribly voiced) core of grizzled stalkers who you'll need to befriend as you chase spectral visions of your long-lost wife around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. But where Get Even felt like a game that couldn't get its ideas in order, coming across as aloof in its attempt to tell a poignant story, Chernobylite does a much better job of welcoming us into its world. Chernobylite is a rare game that makes you feel the weight of your decisions.Ĭhernobylite is a curious mash-up of ideas orbiting a pretty stiff first-person shooter, not unlike The Farm 51's previous game Get Even.
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