I’m in the middle of like three movies, four books and 10 video games and still have about five short games I’d like to dip into for 2024 (ya’ll are gently crossing Nine Sols off that list), so of course I decided last night was the perfect moment for me to try S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (2007) for the first time
Here’s the rare English sentence that I can guarantee is also a first-timer: Stalker (the video game) is a lot like touhou for me. Or it least, it has occupied a very similar headspace in that I’ve long (17 years long) sort of had a vague idea of what it is. I’ve seen the 1979 film. I’m aware of the book, Roadside Picnic. I knew there was a vague connection to the Metro series, but it was all sort of nebulous. This week, I sought to clear all this up for myself. Unlike touhou – a thing for which I’ve read the associated wikipedia article about 16 times; each time my eyes glaze over midway through and I’m still left, well into my 30s, with very little idea of what’s going on here – it was easy to finally sort out that these were all just things inspired by the same book, which I finally ordered for myself and am excited to read at last, especially after seeing how all of these fringe pop cultural threads connect back to it
Anyways, since I had this wild hair, my extremely logical ass said, why not just try this S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 on Game Pass, the devs say it’s as good an entry point as any, it’ll only cost me 115 GB and I’d love to appreciate the feat Ukrainian developers have pulled off given the circumstances. I played on a Series S for a bit and didn’t experience any of the widely reported technical hangups; it’s a beautiful game with a stunning and genuinely oppressive atmosphere and a pretty bad console UI (specifically any sort of sparse tutorial heads-ups appearing in teeny tiny texts fluttering around like hallucinations).
It fascinated me quite a bit, but not enough to keep on pushing through a pretty lengthy, spectacle-filled guided section at the beginning (planting a sensor device numerous times) when death is so constant and pairs with – the one tech downer for me – really long load times to restart and retry. That alongside the synergy of the game’s innate, intentional obfuscation and its unintentional obfuscation of the information it wants you to have left me with a strong suspicion that I might be better off with the first game. It just felt like, despite what the devs and the internet said, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 might better serve people who have a little bit of an idea of how a Stalker (I’m done with the periods) game operates.
I think I was right about that. I’m having a much better time with Stalker (2007), even having made the equally dumb assed choice to play it on a console via the recent Legends of the Zone collection (my Black Friday pickup at $23, a choice as classically American as a 75" Walmart-exclusive LED TV that’ll never have the motion smoothing turned off for all its days).
For one, while I’m mostly interested in the atmosphere and media workings of Stalker, I was told that this was supposed to be an open-world survival FPS, and Stalker (2007) gets to that so much more quickly (read: immediately) compared to Stalker 2, the opening of which plays like Way More Interesting Call of Duty But You Die Over and Over Before You Get Through What I Can Only Assume is the Tutorial. In this one, I’m tooting about doing open-world survival stuff and learning about the world around me from the fucking jump, at my own pace. It being an older game, the constant saving/loading rhythm also works better here, as in instantaneously. And the comparatively pared-back systems are much easier to grok for a first timer – easy to play around with, too. I’m also enjoying the way this one handles voice acting for English speakers, with understated English VO using a consistent local dialect mixed with in-world/atmospheric native speech and lots of text, vs. the choice of either strange and inconsistent English dialects or natural-sounding native speech with tiny fleeting subtitles. Kind of a vibe, like you’re playing Karous but you don’t speak Japanese or something, but maybe not the best for stepping into the series. The more sparse, 2007 visuals in a nice crisp resolution also help make this feel like a more focused starting point for me – the skybox is still beautiful, as is the muted, desaturated autumnal apocalypse.
And I’m still getting the fun stuff, too. Just witnessed about 12 mutant dogs pour from the sky like they dropped on top of some bandits from an invisible funnel, and I have no idea why I’m throwing bolts at anomalies other than because they did that in the movie. I don’t know. In my case, checking out a spartan and really complex world has been better served starting with a more spartan game – feels right to follow my impulse with the creators’ original impulse. Pretty good time to throw them a little money, too.
