The real estate value here must just be… sky-high. Shooting, looting, getting drunk and singing Ukrainian folk songs, things like that.

The word stalker is also an acronym for the various gameplay elements to be found in the game. The player character is one of many scavengers who’s arrived to this part of Ukraine in search of valuable salvage after the accident, a stalker, as they’re known by the locals. This one is waves and magnitudes worse than the 1986 blast, widening the unlivable radiation zone and mutating the local flora and fauna.

In the STALKER universe, the Chernobyl accident is successfully contained, but a second, much worse explosion occurs in 2006. To this day, the Chernobyl plant and much of the surrounding countryside remains uninhabitable, and not even the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011 tops Chernobyl in terms of life and resources lost. The game revolves around the infamous Chernobyl disaster of 1986, in which a catastrophic nuclear meltdown bathed a large chunk of Ukraine in lethal radiation. STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl takes place in “the Zone”, which, rather than being the anomalous area that pretentious athletes aspire to be in at all times, is actually a nuclear wasteland in and around Pripyat, Ukraine. There hasn’t been a true follow-up or spiritual successor to this series since its inception back in 2007, but how well does it hold up for a horror gamer looking for something a bit more open? With months still to go before the release of Outlast 2, now’s as good a time as any to find out. They deal with everything that is to be feared radiation, mutants, lack of food, and Russian swearwords. The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or ( STALKER) series is perhaps the best-known group of open-world horror games in the PC world. Rarer still are decent horror games that try to take the atmosphere and gameplay endemic to linear horror-fests, and scatter them across an insidious open world. Explore a radioactive wasteland in search of a dangerous quarry.Ī decent horror game is rarer than gold dust.

Stalker clear sky steam overlay