Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl review – transfixing Ukrainian dystopia built on underlying tragedy
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/nov/21/stalker-2-heart-of-chornobyl-review-ukrainian-survival-adventure
GSC Game World; PC, XboxExplore the starkly beautiful landscapes of the irradiated Zone in this foreboding and remorselessly challenging survival adventure
When Ukrainian developer GSC Game World released the apocalyptic adventure Stalker in 2007, it was considered a bleakly improbable piece of speculative fiction. Heavily inspired by cult novel Roadside Picnic, it imagined an alternative timeline in which a scientific experiment in 2006 caused a second Chornobyl disaster and a vast irradiated zone filled with powerful space-time anomalies, in which the only inhabitants were mutants and the titular stalkers: men who wandered the wastelands looking for valuable artefacts.