by Nate Andrews
The necessity for survival is communicated in no uncertain terms in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, the first-person shooter/RPG inspired by the sparse aesthetic of both the 1979 film of the same name and the real-life remnants of the 1986 Ukrainian nuclear meltdown. This is the story of how I learned to look beyond the game, beyond survival, and see something lasting and beautiful in its landscape.
The game’s alternate reality interpretation of the irradiated area surrounding that disaster takes the form of a bleak stretch of almost completely inhospitable land. In this fiction, the abandoned vacuum of the Zone—as the new locals call it—soon fills with all manner of hard men, aggressively hunting fortune and dominance in a newly unclaimed territory. Few know compassion or restraint, and their collective misanthropy creates an environment of constant hostility and danger for the player. This is the unnatural “state of nature” into which the player emerges, taking the role of an amnesiac character simply known as the Marked One, who is apparently on a quest for revenge.
Though S.T.A.L.K.E.R. offers an open world, and the grounds of the Zone are free to wander as the player chooses, doing so casually is dangerous. Grotesque, mutated dangers and heavily armed bandits occupy much of what would otherwise be empty structures or untouched fields. These forces wait for the head of the ill-equipped or underprepared to poke where it shouldn’t and then shoot. To play S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you have to give as good as you get: it is kill or be killed, and proper play involves constant awareness and raw nerves.
I fell naturally into this lawless game world. I coveted and collected guns, using them to stave off, and deliver, death from all sides. I observed threats from a distance, planning opportune routes and methods of attack. I killed. I looted. I maintained a balanced suite of tools for carving a way through whatever abominations lurked in the dilapidated offices, compounds, and holes too dark and too deep for hope. To trudge into a desolate, unforgiving place like the Zone armed with any more pliable mentality and expect to come out the other side shining would be sheer ignorance — and also essentially suicidal.
As I played, though, I realized that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. conceals something lasting and intangible under this constant demand to survive. While the player is constantly conserved with preserving his/her own neck, the world he inhabits isn’t just a killing field. The game itself encourages one to think of the landscape tactically at all times, transforming hills into high grounds and huts into hiding places; however, it becomes evident that the Zone is a place—a tarnished shell of something that used to have a function and a shape, still dotted with spaces of something you could call a sparse and measured beauty.
In fact, if you take away the ugly and ever-present human threats of the Zone, it is populated by dozens upon dozens of quiet, contemplative moments. Time has stopped in this irradiated landscape, and what objects that remain standing do so as monuments to scuttled lives.
It was with this oddly calm, aesthetic experience in mind that I downloaded and installed a game trainer, a “cheating” utility that ultimately allowed me to tweak the game, eliminating the possibility of failure from the scenario entirely. This freed me from the the kill-or-be-killed mentality driving the game, the need for survival.
Free from obligations to combat, food, and survival as a whole, I wandered the irradiated landscape and started to focus on the wonder and horror of the spaces around me. I was no longer a gun for hire, embroiled in the world; rather, I was pacifist, a curious observer looking directly at the beautiful, static hell that had been hiding in the game all along.
In shrugging off the constant need to tend to my wellbeing, I discovered that while the Zone primarily fulfills the role of containing all the game’s terrible things, it also provides a fitting physical structure and face for the beaten down, forsaken reality. The pieces of infrastructure peppering the Zone are simple and utilitarian, designed with the intent to create atmosphere and foster interesting and effective gameplay experiences. Separated from all human occupiers, however, they ache with the architectural and symbolic beauty of a time since passed—something I was able to take in fully once I removed myself from the standard course of gameplay.
In a game mostly characterized by dark, violent outbursts and the grim reality of survival, it pays to take a moment to ignore those stark intrusions and observe the quiet efficient life of destruction after the fact. The ability to revel in the simplicity and unique moments it brought about—made for a poetic, transformative experience.
