S.T.A.L.K.E.R is a survival horror game that I finished. This makes is really stand out amongst most other horror games, because I’m too scared to play horror games. S.T.A.L.K.E.R was a different story however, as even in it’s most terrifying moments, the atmosphere made the game so compelling, and made it feel so real, that I just had to make it to the end. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R, you awake from unconsciousness in ‘The Zone’ with amnesia, unable to remember how or why you arrived in such a horrible place. An alternate reality, the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R takes place in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, after a second catastrophic nuclear reactor meltdown caused strange things to happen in the area. The game has a nonlinear storyline and has features such as trading and two-way interaction with NPCs. The world is typically very dark, dirty, abandoned and dilapidated in appearance. People sparsely populate the land, and the player spends long periods of time alone in the wilderness of irradiated northern Ukraine. There is hostile military presence, clans of bandits, hellish mutants and dangerously unpredictable radioactive anomalies that constantly threaten the player. There are warring factions that the player can join, a myriad of weapons and armours, and even strange artifacts that can improve the player's physical abilities. All of these things work in tandem to create a world that truly embodies a ‘dog eat dog’ world. The player is constantly searching for food, water, medical supplies and equipment to keep themselves alive, and this creates an atmosphere of survival, distrust and selfishness. Your terribly maintained weapons constantly jam and misfire. The way all of these systems communicate with one-another makes the gameworld really feel alive. Because of this, it’s really easy for you, as a player, to leave your real-world ethics and considerations behind, and put yourself in the body of this dispossessed stalker. As well as the other people, monsters and environmental hazards you’ll encounter in The Zone, there are unique environmental hazards as well. Emissions, or blowouts, occur when when sudden releases of excess noosphere energy is released from the center of the zone, and when this happens, the player has a time limit to reach safety. The sky darkens, the screen shakes, a loud rumbling is heard, and birds drop dead from the sky. I remember hiding from my first blowout, and seeing the crows dropping dead at the entrance of the train tunnel I was hiding in and thinking to myself, wow. They really didn’t need to do that, but they put that extra little bit of effort in, and boy does it make a difference. The game has received a lot of flack over the years for its glitchiness, it’s bad translation and it’s difficulty. But it’s the difficulty that makes it so effective, it’s the bad translation that adds an element of uncanniness and it’s the homemade game engine that allowed things like parallax occlusion back in 2009. I played through the game for the first time in 2015, and it blew my mind when I saw a brick texture with parallax occlusion. The X-ray graphics engine was used to develop the game, and alongside the parallax occlusion, things like HDR rendering, normal mapping, motion blur, multisample anti-aliasing and the fact that a million polygons could be rendered on-screen at any one time, meant that the world could really look and feel authentic. The game is really scary. It’s really hard, and it’s very vague. But for such a dead land, the world feels so full of life. The atmosphere of the game is very complex, one of constant survival, stress, strategy and prolonged feelings of fear and despair. But there are also subtle nuances, moments of fulfillment, fleeting moments of safety and warmth. NPC’s sitting around a campfire playing guitar, eating and drinking, in the middle of a rotten, mutant infested forest. Coming across this type of scene after an hour in a terrifying locale gives you such a feeling of relief. After talking to the NPCs, trading information, food and ammunition, after listening to the guitar, enjoying the glow of the campfire, it’s really hard to then tear yourself away from that, to trudge off back into the woods, alone, and immediately in survival mode again. The atmosphere of S.T.A.L.K.E.R is very complicated, as it’s a complicated game, and while it’s certainly not perfect, it’s a really powerful example of an atmosphere that feels authentic enough to pull me through a really scary game. |
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