Come to Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl fresh from a younger open-world series and it may appear deliberately unfinished – an early access build that never made it to version 1.0. Set in a radioactive psychic hinterland based on the 1989 Chornobyl nuclear disaster, it's a work of unvarnished post-Soviet miserabilism, a resolutely fun-averse shooter consisting of dreary geography full of loveless mercenaries, ethereal deathtraps and malfunctioning guns. While badged as a horror game, it's more depressing than horrifying. And how much more miserable it seems in the context of games such as Horizon: Forbidden West, with their bright, exotic landscapes of smooth-swallow quests and conveniences, their magnetic mission loops, crunchy ability combos and syrupy insistence that the post-apocalypse is a place of possibility.
Stalker shares fixtures with these later games: it's both their ancestor and their baleful adversary. It has trading outposts, enemy camps, and replenishing loot caches, the rudiments of a Ubisoft worldbuilding playbook. It has maps and mini-maps, even a magic compass that points to your next objective. Its story carries you through curated mission spaces as you hunt down the mysterious Strelok, who apparently lurks somewhere at the heart of the Chornobyl exclusion zone. You'll prowl the corridors of sunken silos, eyes peeled for the glimmer of a flashlight on a wall, and on the streets of Pripyat, the wretched city of Oz at the end of this radioactive-yellow brick road. But Stalker doesn't link these elements together as fluidly and gratifyingly as the Far Cry series would. And while its landscape teems with NPCs and mutant animals, all swirling about and raiding each other at the behest of the much-trumpeted A-Life system, it doesn't offer a "living, breathing world" as much as one that refuses to die.
