Chernobylite may look like it’s a cheeki breeki away from being a full-on S.T.A.L.K.E.R tribute act, but The Farm 51’s shooter isn’t quite a retread of irradiated ground. While aesthetically the two games are interchangeable, sharing core stylistic motifs like mutants, anomalies, oppressive weather, and a certain nuclear power plant that had a bit of a mishap in April 1986, structurally they’ve mutated in quite different ways.
Chernobylite review
- Publisher: All in Games
- Developer: Farm 51
- Platform: Played on PC
- Availability: Out now on PC
Where Stalker uses a now-familiar open-word shooter template, Chernobylite has more in common with Metal Gear Solid 5. Its semi-open world is split into several locations that you revisit frequently, environments and enemies evolve over time, and the whole experience is threaded together with an extensive base-building metagame. It’s an unusual structure, and it’s simultaneously Chernobylite’s most interesting feature and the source of all its flaws.
You play as Igor Khymynyuk, a physicist who was employed at the Chernobyl NPP at the time of the disaster on the 26th of April 1986. Also present was Igor’s wife, Tatyana, who vanished on the night of the catastrophe. Fast-forward 30 years, and Igor returns to the Exclusion Zone to search for Tatyana after he begins to see visions of her in and around the power plant.
Quite why Igor waited three decades to check whether his wife was dead or not isn’t entirely clear, but his timing in returning to the Zone is less than ideal. The area surrounding Chernobyl has been occupied by a private military company known as NAR. Its purpose is not entirely clear, but it’s related to the appearance of a new, mineral-like substance in the Zone, a substance known as Chernobylite.
After a brief, dreamlike introduction that sees Igor arrive in the Zone by train, Chernobylite kicks off proper with a slick, Call of Duty-like night-raid on the power plant itself. Aided by your solider-of-fortune pal Olivier, you learn how to sneak past NAR patrols while the vast bulk of the NPP looms above you like a sleeping leviathan. This opening mission presents an interesting amalgam of Chernobyl fact and fiction. As your stalkerish characters skulk through the meticulously recreated corridors and reactor halls of the power-plant, you trigger flashbacks to that fateful night which recall scenes from the 2019 HBO series, technicians arguing in confusion and denial in the control room, and turning valves by-hand in the flooded vaults beneath the open reactor.