"S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl" will be the second game, I guess, that I'll purchase at full-price and not at some discount. And it's not that I like these tedious tinker-and-resources-gathering/crafting/managing games. If I want chores, I'll clean my bathroom.

But like 20 years ago with "Half-Life 2", I'm a tourist who loves to wade through absurdly overdone landscapes, with weather effects and atmospheres so ridiculously overblown that you wouldn't even on drugs encounter them in real life. I just love strolling around looking, watching, gazing.. until I get shot by some AI generated villain.

("Half-Life Alyx" is another gorgeous visual experience with so many details and consistent "world building". It's just wonderful wandering around there and studying the debris, the fauna, the extraterrestrial impacts on the Odesa-styled City 17...)

Sadly, today's progress in computing powers (both for the CPU as the graphics cards) invites the industry to either remake old titels (to "freshen" them up visually) or publish new titles primarily with the emphasis on graphics and visual effects. Otherwise these titles have become pretty boring (with regard to story telling, game mechanics, loot system and such).

Not to mention the absurd length of such games. Remember when games like "Half Life, "Half Life 2" and others took about four hours for a decent playthrough? Now you can waste up to 60 hours to get only through tzhe main story line and various side quests. Ridiculous. Who has that kind of free time any more?

Anyway. I'm looking forward to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl". Although to be released today, I'll give it two more months until the main bugs are fixed. And spend my time until then with "Tomb Raider" (the first game of the relaunch trilogy) which is still an amazingly consistent self-contained game; with "Half-Life: Alyx" (the PC mod version); and some others like "Far Cry 5" (very nice landscape), "Callisto Protocol" or "Dead Space", or the original "F.E.A.R." series

As an afterthought: I tried "Black Mesa" and "Black Mesa Blue Shift". Awful games. Look like Playmobil in overdrive. Shiny plastic surfaces, and the XEN world is such a terrible visualisation of somebody's bad mushroom trip... They overblew it on all accounts. Both games show in their "extraterrestrial" environment the deep influence "Dear Esther" seems to have had on game developing. But while the latter Indie game is a gem that too my knowledge first successfully used a "walking simulator" to engange the player in a trance like state (stunning graphics), the kids of the "Black Mesa" Remake teams took the visual ideas of "Dear Esther" and streched them all for the sake of mere bombast. Shock and Awe. (Never thought that Donald Rumsfeld would win even one battle.)

As a second afterthought and thereby returning to "S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl": There is a whole genre of games built around the concept of a "zone" of some unknown influence through which "stalkers" move carefully in order to garner riches and avoid "anomalies". These idea rest on two templates.

One is the 1971 sci fi novel "Roadside Picnic" by the Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Andrei Tarkovsky in 1979 based his movie "Stalker" losely on that novel). Here the the topoi of the "zone" and the lone scout (called "stalker" after the Tarkovsky movie, I guess) were first introduced.

The other template has been the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 with its subsequent evacuation of the entire population due to radiation, the abandonment of the aerea, and the rewilding henceforth, with radiation givin the the rewilding its specific drift into the unexpected.

Both templates are ruminated again and again. And in their combination, the specifically otherworldly character of "Roadside Picnic", the strangeness of the aliens' visit and what it might mean what they left behind, is substituded with the survivalist theme of the nuclear power plant catastrophe of 1986. I'd love to see games in which the more miraculous aspect of "Roadside Picnic" plays a decisive role. Wonderment and fascination not because of sneaking skills and visual traumatisation of the player but because of the bafflement and wonder created by the story. A shock and awe not of Rumsfeldian liking.

#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten #games #scifi #Strugatsky Tarkovsky #stalker #Chernobyl