A rush of wind rattles the bushes by your feet. Your Giger counter’s going nuts, and something’s… wrong with the air in front of you. It’s gathering into a tight, shimmering point. Like it’s forming a fist. You’ve got a Kalashnikov and all the canned meat a Stalker could eat, but you’ve been here before and you know this isn’t a fight bullets can solve. It’s an anomaly. You leg it.
Anyone with a passing interest in the video games of 2007 has this moment seared into their mind’s eye. STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl did the shooter thing very differently to its peers at the time, dropping you into a massive open space that couldn’t be any dourer if it was rendered in monochrome, giving you a waypoint off into a terrifying horizon, and letting you figure out the rest.
