Lost in the Bleakhouse

There's this guy I've been eyeing for a while now. He's at the campfire in the villa's center every night. Sits with a few other guys and jaws a bit, sometimes standing to stretch or go for brief walks. Mostly he'll pick up a six-string and strum something slow and sad. The wind swirls piles of dead leaves, and sometimes it rains, but he keeps playing anyway. The others--some with rifles, others bottles--stop talking and listen, studying the fire until he's finished. He's just some guy in a hoodie. And I'm supposed to kill him.

While it's not quite Cormac McCarthy's The Road, that's more or less what playing GSC Gameworld's post-apocalyptic shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R. feels like. Who's that guy up the road? Do you give him a chance to be sociable, or just start shooting? It's that sort of go anywhere, do-anything disposition that helps muddy S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s otherwise plot-driven linearity by giving you enormous swathes of scrubby hills, irradiated forests, and desiccated structures with underground tunnels to explore, occasionally teasing F.E.A.R.-style (hey, acronym parity!) druggy vision sequences about where you came from and why you're called the "Marked One."

Doom hits the lights and bids you shoot anything that moves. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. flicks them back on--intermittently--and encourages you to consider carefully what you're pointing that gun at. Sure, you're just another "Who am I?" protagonist trying to make ends meet in the ruinous "Zone" surrounding Ukraine's calamitous Chernobyl reactor (it went boom in 1986, but in S.T.A.L.K.E.R., it went boom again more recently). And yeah, you're still mostly running errands and capping mutants, mercs, or military types who'd love to pick your corpse clean. But the atmosphere is decidedly...European. And you have the sense as you prowl around skeletal bases, barns, and houses for overlooked loot or scare bandit crews out of gutted complexes, that you're moving across a blighted, ancient, alien landscape.

I had the somewhat unique privilege of standing directly above one of Lithuania's still-running Chernobyl-style nuclear cores at Ignalina back in summer 2001. We were only allowed in that room for a dozen minutes because of the radiation. More than the otherworldly rumble-hum you felt walking in smocks and special shoes across a disquietingly warm metal floor, I'll always remember the way the reactors looked from outside: row upon row of rain-scoured vertical and horizontal concrete pylons pressed together like side-stacked tile, supporting crooked red and white striped chimneys that sprouted from the roof like straws. When you've only read about the desolateness of Soviet-era architecture, experiencing it firsthand can be surreal.

You can certainly catch more than a glimpse of it in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as you scavenge artifacts--paranormal ability-granting elements that appeared in the Zone after the second explosion--and assemble plot cues into something like a coherent narrative. It's too bad the game had to surface before it was entirely finished, and I've had my share so far of garbled quests, stuck NPCs, malfunctioning interface tools (you have a PDA that aggregates info about people, quests, and map coordinates), vanishing bodies, and hitching, lurching sound effects.

Still, I'm plowing on--closing in on Pripyat in fact, the town that was nearest reactor no. 4 when it blew. I'm close to the end of the tale, long past the point where I had to choose whether to save or exempt mister guitar-man. Chernobyl beckons. I can't stop wondering what I'm going to find when I get there.

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