S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
Intense overall intensityWhat's in it
The player fights human enemies and mutants with realistic firearms; hits produce blood and corpses remain in the world, but there is no dismemberment or gore as a focus.
The player drinks vodka and energy drinks as consumable items for a gameplay effect, with vodka used to reduce radiation.
The setting is a bleak post-disaster exclusion zone of radiation sickness, mutation and death, and named characters die over the course of the story.
Underground laboratory sections use darkness, unseen psychic enemies and creatures that hunt the player through confined spaces to frighten.
Stalkers exchange profanity in campfire chatter and combat barks, at a moderate level.
Bandit factions in the world rob and extort other scavengers, though the player does not carry out these crimes as a core mechanic.
Mutated dogs, boars and other creatures can be shot and killed as ordinary combat.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
This title blends first-person shooting with role-playing systems, unfolding in an alternate-timeline quarantine region surrounding the Chernobyl reactor. A follow-up catastrophe has twisted the terrain into a landscape studded with lethal anomalies and biologically altered beasts. Cast as a memory-wiped scavenger, the player moves through a series of linked maps, bartering goods and accepting jobs from fellow survivors while battling rival human groups and creatures using authentically modeled weapons. Firefights produce bleeding and bodies that can be searched for supplies, though limbs stay intact. As part of staying alive, the character can down vodka to cut radiation levels, and stretches spent in subterranean labs shift toward horror, featuring creatures that hunt the player and mind-affecting phenomena. Death, contamination, and biological corruption run through a consistently grim setting.
How it's framed
The region is presented as a harsh, uncaring expanse in which staying alive is the aim and force serves continually as an instrument of both self-defense and gain. Warring groups, biological mutation, and dying are portrayed as ordinary realities of a broken landscape, neither celebrated nor cast as wrong.
Details
- Developer
- GSC Game World
- Publisher
- GSC Game World
- Released
- Mar 20, 2007
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