IN THE ZONE: Navigating Through the Deep, Aimless World of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

[Music] stalker the video game is a title I've been obsessed with for most of my life ironically without having ever actually played it it's everything I love in a game it's obtuse and slow punishing and mysterious it's based on the work of one of my favorite filmmakers and it's a product of posts Soviet paranoia forming the historical basis for its setting and atmosphere in 2021 after years of being a fan of stalker the film at my height of obsession with post Soviet anti-war anti-nuclear art I finally sat down and took the time to play the first game shadow of Chernobyl I spent an estimated dozen hours going through the motions and felt incredibly deeply like I was missing something I dedicated a solid amount of time trying to explore naturalistically engage with the game's renowned immersive systems which consisted of a lot of trial and error reloading saves and trying to find answers online the reward I found was just more of the same I'd find a stash pick out some filler items I could carry then find somewhere to sell them I do a fetch Quest the whole time reloading saves to avoid a roaming mutant reloading saves to avoid abandoned Camp reloading saves to avoid an anomaly I didn't see and then getting the finish line and being given a few thousand rubles for my efforts I came to the conclusion that I wasn't super into the gameplay Loop the immersive simulations Wen working for me and I must just be missing something with my limited time and en energy I thought I'd instead skip to the slightly more recent call of prat which had higher reviews and seemed to be a more polished game overall in equal dozen hours in I found the experience threateningly similar to the first game and I started to remember the time I'd spent with bethesda's games simply wandering around picking things up and trying to make my own Fun by exploring only to be generally rewarded with boring mechanically unengaging death pits quick loads and lot that felt mostly like filler content to be sold at a merchant or to fill out the world worse yet the story the game was trying to get me to meander through was very much just go here do this the go here was walk for five to 20 minutes and the do this was usually do a fetch Quest or shoot something and do a fetch Quest confident that there was something I wasn't seeing I started looking for reviews and essays there had to be a reason this game was taking such heavy inspiration from tarkovsky's film as to use its name there had to be a reason it was set in chernobyl's exclusion Zone there had to be something it was trying to say and do that was just flying over my head surely the ratings had to be so high for more reasons than what I was seeing in open world gun game with a nice Skybox and an everpresent incumbrance system from what I could collect the mod stalker anomaly was the way to go fans took the step up and fixed as many problems as they could made a more immersive world with better graphics and performance more customized experience and a million little additions to make a more definitive version of stalker's world so I tried it out and I was impressed but come 12ish hours on my first run a 2-year break and another dozen on a new run this month I think I've finally come to terms with what stalker is and is not and where I am at as a fan of this kind of thing or at least what I thought this kind of thing was supposed to be stalker 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 system sys in the atmospheric open world is all just a space to exist in for however long you see fit or 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 it lists 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 which is something that I respect in the game and so I feel that I gave it the amount of time it deserved before finally giving thoughts a three-year deep conclusion the zone is as often vibrant and beautiful as it is visually Bland and mechanically static and I found myself getting en raptured by anomali weather effects and Sky boxes as often as I was disappointed with the emptiness and ugliness of an area that I thought I would 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 a space of Limitless possibility but for what the answer of course is to quote be a part of the world which is enacted through the game's verbs by walking for a period of time than shooting a gun and then walking somewhere else this Freedom 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 buy and repair 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 and managing encumbrance while finding filler items to sell that may or may not be useful depending on the flavor text and so after indeterminate hours spent building up a few thousand rubles you'll have to spend it on bandages and medkits because you had a chance encounter with some bores that charged you without warning and then also stumbled into an anomaly that spawned in a bush and you almost bled out also you spent all of your ammo so you'll have to buy more of that mod your gun because your gun is your best friend and it looks so good to see your hands holding it on screen it feels so good pulling the trigger and it feels so good pressing buttons to clean it and care for it and repair it and it makes me wish so badly that I could fire a gun in real life or at least that's what the game really wants me to be thinking about it wants me to think all of that while reflecting on the fact that anybody in this open immersive world not just the player is susceptible to the dangers of the zone and the guns there in all of these men you care about who say things to you like I don't have work for you right now and I'm not interested in buying things from you can all die at a moment's notice just like you can sometimes you'll even get a notice that you failed a quest because the quest Giver was shot by a gun just like yours at the same time as you were bringing him some supplies that he asked for time is money but sometimes that time and money can be pulled out at a moment's notice for the sake of upholding the game's ideals of realism this is the price we must pay for a game where we get to simulate the power fantasy of owning and shooting a gun sometimes and the guns they feel just okay within the game's vocabulary it is simply a tool for pointing and clicking the other big thing I noticed through my time with stalker is that for how much it touts its Inspirations from tarkovsky's film and the real life tragedy in Chernobyl it really doesn't seem to be saying anything about anything except that it wants you to be impressed with its mechanical efforts to be essentially a charmingly janky military walking simulator its sibling series Metro and its namesake stalker the film are both very special works of art to me are both deep ruminations on the irreversible horrors of nuclear warfare and the advance of nuclear technology they speak on the collapse of Soviet leadership had the Ecology of an entire 30 km radius Zone almost the entire world was tarnished near permanently by a series of cruel and violent accidents starting on American soil these pieces examine how the residents of a ruined World cope how nature is right to fight back against those who would seize power to enact brutality to the land and to its people and how nonetheless Humanity slips through the cracks to try and make the world beautiful again Metro uses its guns to show Humanity Holding On by their fingernails forced to cope with having opened a door that cannot be closed and being punished for it through some Divine ecological Justice we're shown that violence breeds more violence and fascism Reigns in a violent Society careless to the needs of the land and its people when power and profit are within reach we're given a stark parallel between those who started nuclear warfare and those militant groups now that prefer a win state to the world being even remotely livable the only way to face fear and Desperation is through adaptation and cooperation or else the toxic Loop continues and nobody else will be left to perpetuate it on the other hand stalker the film doesn't employ violence at all and in fact makes it a point that the Zone isn't a good place to be waving around weapons leading to the stalkers throwing their guns away completely before venturing deeper in the violence has already been rought we don't need more this zone is a place of reflection its protagonists are not the toughend adventurers that we expect but a philosopher a professor and a writer the zone is a place of mystery the notal luring is a place free of societal consequence rather is a series of unkn and Magics where we might find answers and Inspirations at this Zone's heart is a room that supposedly grants wishes to those who know how to find it perhaps a solution to the damage wrough upon the World by the Zone's existence in the first place or even just a reason to continue living through the pain we return to stalker the game as a little more than an aesthetic compared to its genre peers it applies a deeper meaning but only through its proximity to these other works considering its title and its setting what stalker 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 with government and rules isn't it fun to think about returning to zero carrying nothing but a backpack and a gun into the wide unknown here were shown less the effects of War on society and more a Wonderland for grizzled gun toing men surviv 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 then the inevitable horror genre tropes that fill in the gaps and begin to form the fear into something shiny and profitable this game a pinnacle of nuclear aestheticism takes its setting as a purely mechanical excuse to throw around zombies and mutant dogs and Renegade soldiers for you to shoot at in a place where there are no societal consequences for doing so you could very easily play these games and believe that the developers did not in fact watch tarkovsky's film before they took its name there are parallels sure but we have to keep nailing in that they are purely aesthetic not quite bastardization but not fully understanding the intricacies of what's being said and symbolized on a global scale stalker instead aims for a loose plot about greed leading to our own demise the titular stalkers are of course thieves pushing their encumbrance for more rubles and a chance at finding something valuable in the exclusion Zone than being punished for their huous in the end it's just tarkovsky's wish room but made to pre on our sense of greed rather than our philosophical need for answers there's a lot of room for an interesting narrative there but as we've established this game is mechanical and aesthetic at its core the story is just an excuse to place boundaries within those mechanics and Aesthetics rather than taking the opportunity to do something with any substance like critiquing the military-industrial complex that perpetuates the advance of nuclear technology out of greed all we get is a Twist that seems to shame the player for wanting a reward at the end of this [Music] journey after thinking on all this there was only one more thing I had to do before I could leave the game on good conscious one little task peing my my curiosity I had to travel to the top of the map and finally see Prat in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant itself the only way to do this of course would be to turn on God mode and place myself in the boots of a sightseer no stamina no health no radiation and no hunger to meticulously track in my peripherals no realism to get in my way I start from the rookie town and head up to the dead City a truly empty shell of a block housing District punctuated by a statue of Lenin in the center Square it's a mirror to the real City palinska where a handful of stragglers have held on to their homes a population of 20 people as of 2013 regardless of its place in the exclusion Zone I tried to explore the empty homes looking for any semblance of a previous life but every room was laid bare down to the furniture and shelving and a few vague graffiti tags here and there Bandits were dying my screen red wherever I went so I took the liberty of switching my route to the back alleys between the flats and the supermarket and admired the overgrown Gardens and Rising Sun motifs in the windows before mutated rats made it known that my presence was unwelcome here or too people lived here once from what I'm told though not shown the space is almost believable but does not allow itself to fit into either of the two categories it attempts to align with the first a melancholic reminder of a life that once was the second a battlefield for the sake of play one that hasn't even been cleverly reworked to function as a level design more than a semi- literal translation of a real life space moving on to lonk a more highend res residential Zone north of the Dead City an undeniably more interesting space filled with more architecture to show off the destruction but little reason to stay the town exists purely mechanically as a safe route for stalkers to avoid something called the brain scorcher a nearby radar array that wouldn't you know it turns people into zombies this device is based on the real life Dugo one a radar system that the West was convinced was some kind of mind control device the Soviets were using to brainwash people into becoming Communists in game the Lord seems to agree with this easily disproven but aesthetically interesting Theory I have since stacked the brain scorcher on my pile of questions about why the developers chose this setting these set pieces and what they were trying to say with these tools the answerers so far remain it's cool they're cool and nothing the game ironically seems to dislike when I kill a lot of things in a short span of time and I'm not exactly bother to take cheap measures to prevent hostility so I don't bother killing the bandits that disallow me from wandering around the area investigating the sights and sounds I bear the red screen just long enough to find the route to the deserted hospital I've seen enough postapocalyptic media to know that this is the kind of setting I like chipped White Tile Scapes overgrown with Ivy Lab equipment everywhere contrast between scientific advancement and regression shown in one isolated diarama the perfect little thumbnail for any ill- fated Humanity story actually don't stay to look I'm immediately charged by a group of Wanderers who are in turn charged by a mutant brute the distra action allows me to cross the outer walls of the hospital where I'm overrun by zombies and gas masks running on all fours I leave zaton undeniably my favorite location in the game hits me like a ton of bricks rolling marshin lead to a mored ship frogs sing in the REITs around me and birds fly in the Wide Open Sky I can almost feel a warm breeze and smell the swamp itself that sweet peppery smell of stagnant water I imagine looking down and seeing Tad poles maybe minnows swimming between clumps of moss and under the shadows of down trees like one of those macro videos people take under the surface of streams I look up the pasti of Ukraine's own preo bensy Bridge frames the distant Skyline and while admiring it I'm snapped back to reality as I remember passing through here during a particularly frustrating run a few years ago nothing sticks out worse in the memory of this game than the annoyance of trying to cross the space cautiously only to be repeatedly thrown and killed by a series of anomalies and mutants along the way I wanted so badly to interact with the architecture of this space and was punished for it just as I have been for assuming any other space here exists for more than an aesthetic bang my train of thought ends when I see a flash of right across my screen and look down to see a mutated rat attacking me on prompted and unannounced I don't have to worry about resources anymore thanks to an anomaly named Gore unlimited ammo one so I spray the ground with bullets and exit the wetlands the sad part is while I'm writing this I'm realizing I have even less to say about the cnpp and Pria than the game does I'm hard pressed to think of anything interesting to do here that I haven't already been doing for the last 30 hours it's cool to see the ferris wheel to look at how big the plant is to see the city streets recreated as a faithful encapsulation of a few blocks of the real life place but what else is there what's worse I can't even tell what the space wants me to feel I can't even meet it on its own level because I don't know what its level is am I supposed to just treat this place like a battlefield am I supposed to be excited to see zombies running at me it's uncanny to see this space drained of its cultural Global political significance and place into a 3D plane as a level to play through am I supposed to be sad thinking about all the real people who lived happy lives here before the explosion the game doesn't seem to want to acknowledge The Melancholy of the space given how often my solo Trek is interrupted by unprovoked violence so am I supposed to take it as a cool Battlefield a series of polygons made to shoot and loot through is a genuinely just artifice the thrill of seeing something real placed into a Digital Playground modified with mechanical symbols of violence what is this space saying what does it care for the real life actual Chernobyl for the fall of the Soviet Union for the people that lived here who were affected by careless leaders in the greedy weapons industry that led to nuclear science being used as a source of energy in the first place is it all just an aesthetic as I'm led to believe by everything else I've seen here I have to make it clear that these are Ukrainian Developers making art about a tragedy near to them both in proximity and a matter of two decades they were all alive when the cnpp exploded probably even cognizant enough to recognize a change in the National atmosphere cognizant enough to be afraid I know the statistics are lower here relative to other nuclear disasters the recorded deaths totaled sub 50 but is this really a shallow enough incident ecologically to degrade the space into a gunfire rank only two decades later why does it feel so inauthentic so American is this truly just a cash in on Western Trends or on nuclear imagery am I just not at a capacity of cultural knowledge to understand how ukrainians really felt about the incident after it happened I guess we were making tasteless art about 911 within a shorter span of time but then again we treated that as a nationalist fuel more than anything else so is this really comparable I don't have an answer to any of my confusion and honestly I want the game to speak for itself rather than seek out developer interviews to see if they explained any of their modus oper I verbally if they had anything to say on the matter it hasn't shown itself in the final product or at least I haven't found anything through an extensive search and I think if it truly mattered if this game had anything to say at all at least anything important it would be obvious by now the dead City lonk the red Forest the hospitals zon and Prat itself these places are the most interesting in the game but provide no incentive to exist in them hardly even to pass through them if you're keeping tight track of your resources and have a goal in mind other than sightseeing there's nothing here but shaky violence and empty space to Showcase a tech engine every time I look at these environments I think about how fun they look to inhabit even while playing it trudging through the swamps or down back alleys in the ruined towns my brain flickers for a brief moment and I imagine how much I'd love to play a game like this and then I remember that I am playing it and it's nothing 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 stalker 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 beneath the veneer 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 maybe it wasn't ever meant to be any deeper than just a game given stalker 2's upcoming release the developers lack of reservations about nfts even if Reed back and the series Target fan base 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 faded 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 AAA postnuclear Frontier survival experience for the cost of $70 a th000 layoffs a handful of crunch hospitalizations and our dignity as [Music] artists before you go I have pitch I have several other projects I'm working on right now from illustration to a newsletter where I recommend and talk in depth about art that's inspired me and that I love to another video essay an hour long on the importance of tokusatu in the literary Sublime if you like my work if you found me online somewhere if you want more things like this or more things like that consider supporting me for a dollar a month and help me to make more time and set aside more funding for things like this I love talking about art especially in a more optimistic setting than this and it would mean a lot to be able to put these projects into action someday so for your consideration thank [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Jellyghost

Views: 1,171

Keywords: Jelly, Jellyghost, Ghost, stalker, tarkovsky, review, stalker anomaly, chernobyl, fallout, stalker 2, shadow of chernobyl

Id: aGd-vhg0AZE

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 13 2024