Very quickly, you will find yourself inside this same balancing act.

That acceptance is everywhere in the zone of Chernobylite: each side character is animated by some contradiction of viciousness and grace that allows them to survive in the zone, carefully balancing the rationality of survival against the madness of survival inside of the zone. Initially, I was incredibly off-put by the dead wife trope, but in the end, I’m grateful that I stuck it out long enough to accept that I’m allowed to hate Igor, as long as I understand his journey well enough to survive it from the driver’s seat. Like the protagonists of Pathologic or Apocalypse Now, it is easier to accept Igor as a character when you also accept that you don’t have to like him to hear his story. The fact that he will take this paranoid instinct to the point of staging an armed inquest into the zone is, if nothing else, interesting. Presented with information about treason and coverups that could rewrite history, Igor remains squarely focused on questions of jealousy and marital fidelity. It is a cynical kind of non-violence, where one avoids killing simply because one grows tired of the process and consequences of it.ĭuring the course of his investigation, Igor indulges his pettiest, most banal impulses. Each firefight is mentally taxing, where the simple act of lining up a shot against these poorly animated targets can be exhausting, and for that reason, it is often better to avoid violence wherever possible. Murder, like most of the pursuits one can take up in a video game, is often just another form of labor. It’s a tragedy that plays out in all of the game’s systems, often at the cost of fun. That’s Chernobylite’s loop: from a single desire, return to the zone and find the truth, there are many consequences. When a science such as warfare or power generation is practiced, there are emissions that are toxic to human life, and we, in turn, must deal with them, which manifests in Chernobylite as a highly involved (if not intricate) web of resources. This is a space where war is a generalized fact of survival, and the practice of warfare is amoral: it is simply a science of survival, akin to hunting or electrical engineering. Whether that system is capitalism or communism or fascism or a nuclear reaction is irrelevant: systems break down, and when they do, we confront the fallout.Įven the most calculating and vengeful mercenaries in the zone are rarely cruel, and they generally view mercy and cooperation as the path of least resistance. Stalker is the obvious comparison: both games are first-person shooters set in the exclusion zone surrounding Chernobyl and Pripyat, and both follow an outsider navigating the world of “stalkers.” They directly reference Andrei Tarkovsky’s films and represent the bitter surreality of life in the half-life of a doomed system.

Many of my favorite experiences with video games are with abrasive, difficult games, particularly buggy Russian ones like Pathologic and Stalker. Lenin nuclear reactor at the center of the game’s setting, Chernobylite is a leaky, perhaps doomed mess, but the world is so much better for it.Īs a game, this one is oftentimes downright not fun to play. Like the “sarcophagus” around the failed V.I. It is a marvel of engineering that cannot possibly contain the vast energy within it, but one can still marvel at the attempt. Chernobylite, the new “science-fiction survival horror experience” from The Farm 51 Games, is jank.

Chernobylite review