Barely 20 minutes into a Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl demo a gravity-distorting anomaly orb turned my insides into my outsides. It was my fault, I guess: Following a linear tutorial sequence, the game spat me out into the open world surrounded by the strange orbs, and instead of treating them like deadly hazards, I kept hurling bolts at them and inching as close as possible to their murky exterior to learn what their deal was. Their deal was, evidently, "Stay the hell away from me or you're dead," which turned out to be universal advice for playing Stalker 2.
The best thing going for Stalker 2 is how weird it is. It's far less structured and "triple-A videogamey" than games I expected it to resemble like Far Cry or Metro Exodus. There are parallels—open world maps with compounds you can approach from any direction—but where Far Cry leans into the player's role as an apex predator, I spent most of my Stalker 2 time running away from monsters that would literally eat me.
