Please let me get in my Zone.
There’s an area in Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl that’s simply called The Garbage. It’s basically a miles-wide bin for radioactive waste and heavy machinery, the latter presumably used in the wake of the 1986 disaster. Back then, crane drivers in lead-lined cabins carried out their work in total blindness—their every move governed by radio operators who watched from a safe distance as the leaky reactor building was encased in a great concrete sarcophagus.
Much of the discussion, which plays out across forums, subreddits, and YouTube, is rooted in one indisputable fact about Stalker: it’s hard to hit things. Often in Shadow of Chornobyl, you’ll spot an enemy in the mid-distance, and find that potshots from your starting pistol don’t tend to connect with their target at range. This, it seems to me, is by design: a way to push you to close the gap and take on some personal risk.
That tracks with my own experience of Master mode, which of course I tried to stick with for a while. A friend told me they’d finished the game this way, but admitted they were reading Roadside Picnic at the time, and so perhaps took a masochistic pleasure in being dropped into a realm of brutal survivalism. In fairness, there is an unvarnished cruelty to Stalker’s world that suits a gnarly difficulty setting.
Then there’s Stalker’s promise of a dynamic world, where NPCs can live and die according to your actions. Out in The Garbage, I helped a loner named Bis defend a scrapyard from encroaching bandits. In the aftermath, it emerged that Bis was a fugitive, wanted for GBH and two murders after taking revenge on a pair of vicious muggers. “I’ve done well in this place,” he said, “but the list of my crimes has got a little longer too. I try to fight the lawless just as I did on the outside.
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