There aren't many games with a story like Stalker 2's, whose development at Ukrainian studio GSC Game World was interrupted by Russia's invasion of the country on February 24, 2022. Kyiv was bombed, devs and their families were evacuated while others enlisted in the Ukrainian military, and the studio as a whole had to be effectively rebuilt from the ground-up in Prague.
"Subconsciously, we were all ready to die," says a GSC dev named Alina in a new documentary, called War Game, put out to mark the game's tumultuous path to release on November 20 this year. In a section detailing devs' experiences of the day Russian troops rolled over Ukraine's border, we see shots of Ukrainians flooding into basements as missiles rained down from overhead. "I remember the alarm we heard in Kyiv," recalls another dev, "It was quite a scary feeling. The creepiest thing was knowing that your life would depend on this sound."
