Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl review – transfixing Ukrainian dystopia built on underlying tragedy

When Ukrainian developer GSC Game World released the apocalyptic adventure Stalker in 2007, it was considered a bleakly improbable piece of speculative fiction. Heavily inspired by cult novel Roadside Picnic, it imagined an alternative timeline in which a scientific experiment in 2006 caused a second Chornobyl disaster and a vast irradiated zone filled with powerful space-time anomalies, in which the only inhabitants were mutants and the titular stalkers: men who wandered the wastelands looking for valuable artefacts.

The sequel, however, arrives in a very different world, its lengthy development period having been affected by both the Covid pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now the Stalker vision is a lot less improbable and its speculation has a much greater sense of urgency and authenticity.

As if to illustrate the point, Stalker 2 begins with an apartment building being torn apart in a huge explosion. As a consequence, the now homeless lead character Skef is drawn into the Zone, carrying a powerful piece of scanning kit that could aid him in his quest for retribution and escape – until he’s beaten unconscious by an unknown gang and wakes to find the scanner has been stolen and now he is alone in the irradiated wastelands.

What follows is a remorselessly challenging survival adventure in which you must navigate monster-infested landscapes and marauding gangs of feral warriors, looking for your tech and trying to stay alive. The odds are constantly stacked against you: your guns often jam and require constant repair, your food and ammo run dangerously low, each building you come across could be filled with vital recourses or rabid dogs or booby traps or all of the above. Scattered about the map are various safe houses where stalkers and ne’er-do-wells gather, offering trading opportunities, weapon upgrades, side quests and other resources. You gather what you can before heading back out into the unknown.

The world of Stalker 2 is starkly beautiful: a hazardous, ever-changing patchwork of grasslands, swamps and forests; the natural world overgrowing the leftovers of civilisation. One moment you’re wandering a rocky pathway in blinding sun, the next, a storm moves in and a howling wind sends leaves and garbage swirling into the darkening sky. Everywhere you go are anomalies – sometimes blobs of floating antimatter, sometimes explosive mini volcanoes in your path – all deadly if you don’t learn to spot and avoid them. Like Death Stranding, this is very much a game of lonely exploration; of wandering for many minutes with your backpack too full of loot and your energy dwindling, hoping for some shack to hide in for a few quiet moments. It’s so tense, so immersive, you can’t help but get sucked in.

The plot is its own sort of swampy landscape. There is so much lore – so many warring factions, religious cults and paramilitary organisations – that your head spins and all the characters, plotlines and allegiances become utterly incomprehensible. It’s not helped by some terribly wooden voice acting and thudding dialogue, nor by the fact that this is a world almost entirely populated by irritable bald men with identical goatee beards. It’s like being trapped in a post-apocalyptic real ale festival. When I finally encountered a woman after several hours of play, it felt like a stumbling upon a desert oasis.

I also encountered dozens of bugs during the pre-release period, from incomplete character models, to side quests that wouldn’t trigger their finish states, to cinematic sequences that slowed toward a near stop. Major patches have since fixed many of these faults, though I can’t imagine the game will run completely smoothly for a few more weeks.

But the thing is, I played through them, often deep into the night, transfixed by this flawed, idiosyncratic universe. There is, in this game – perhaps more than any other dystopian fiction the industry has produced in the past few years – a stark sense of desperation and of underlying tragedy. It is hard to wander the scrublands, past the skeletal remains of obliterated villages, past downed helicopters and the rusted remains of tanks, and not think of what the makers of this game have seen and lived through. For those in any doubt, GSC Game World commissioned a documentary, War Game, to explore the process.

Has Stalker 2 become an allegory for the Russian invasion? Well, one of the main military factions in the game, named the Ward, has invaded the Zone, claiming to be bringing stability but actually more interested in annexing the land into its own state. Interpret that how you like.

At the very least the game is an exploration of trauma that resonates with a similar fury to Elem Klimov’s Come and See and Michael Herr’s Dispatches. As you keep going, discovering new weapons, upgrading them, making new allies, opening new hubs and map areas, the narrative draws you ever closer to the heart of the Zone and whatever terrors await there. The sense of foreboding, the atmosphere of solitude and the image of humanity just hanging on by a thread are bleak and astonishing.

Stalker 2 is a strange, brave and sometimes broken paean to resistance in the face of overwhelming odds. It is utterly uncompromising in its vision, often to a fault, and envelopes you in its dark spell of science, violence and chaos. Certainly, if you loved Dragon’s Dogma 2, which similarly edged towards self-parody with its offbeat systems, eccentric characters and overall jankiness, you will cope fine with this game’s technical and narrative inconsistencies. Indeed, like the stalkers that inhabit its damaged world, you may shrug, improvise, and carry on. If you thought developers weren’t making vast, outlandish, utterly singular open-world games any more, you were wrong: they are. And some of them have been through hell to do it.