It's part base-building survival game, as you gather resources to improve your base with crafting stations, bedding, and even mushroom gardens (mushrooms, it turns out, are integral to crafting everything from wooden walls to handheld nuclear weapons).
It has some throwaway horror elements too, because apparently that's mandatory in any Chernobyl-based media.īut most successfully, Chernobylite is a game about choice, where you're constantly faced with decisions that may (or may not) meaningfully affect your story.Įarly in the game, for instance, I killed a sketchy stalker who refused to give up information. Previously, I took the humane option with someone, and wound up trapped in a room fast filling with poison gas, so this time I took no chances. I killed them in cold, mildly irradiated blood, looted their corpse, and made my way back to base. Later on, I met a character who was very close to the sketchy stalker, forcing me to choose between lying or coming clean about my murderous whoopsie, and whether to invite them to join my group. Obviously, I went for the drama-baiting combo of lying and inviting them to my ragtag crew. Interestingly, you don't have to stick with your choices. You see, Chernobylite is a substance that can open wormholes in time and space. It can teleport you from one place to another, or even let you revisit old memories via a dreamscape of floating rocks and non-Euclidean geometries. Each time you die, you wake up in this dreamscape where you can see how the key decisions you made are connected, and go back and change those decisions using Chernobylite shards as payment to whatever interdimensional god-force is running the show. It's pretty ballsy for a game to lay bare the workings of its choice system like this, but given the breadth of Chernobylite's web of choices and possible outcomes, the devs have every right to want to show it off. Your choices will affect enemy activity in the area, how many allies you have in the Zone, and at one point even the topography of the game-you can, for instance, destroy the infamous Duga radar at the behest of a man believing himself to be in a good-vs-evil conflict with a Rat King.īetween missions you hang out in your base, where you can cook, build improvements, explore other peoples' memories based on clues you find, or even just go straight to the Heist mission at the end of the game (where you'll almost certainly die if you've not assembled a crew and equipment, but it's there if you want it). When you're ready, you pick a mission set in one of six regions around the Zone-whether to progress the main story or search for clues.
At the same time, you can send out your companions to scout future missions or gather resources. These maps aren't huge, but they look wonderful. The Farm 51 actually went to the Exclusion Zone and used 3D scanning to recreate its terrain, textures and buildings.
KONSTANTY CHERNOBYLITE WINDOWS
It gives the areas an intense verisimilitude that I can't stop snapping-grass and shrubbery reclaiming blocky clusters of Soviet apartments, smashed stained glass windows depicting doomed communist utopias, smoggy sunlight oozing through sickly canopies. As someone mildly obsessed with the crumbling vestiges of the Soviet empire, I find these environments mesmerising.īeautiful and haunting though these areas are, they are a little lacking in substance. The only things you find are resources and clues relating to your story, there is no wildlife (even though the Exclusion Zone is renowned for it) and enemy AI rigidly sticks to their patrol routes or stands in one place-never sitting at desks or fighting radioactive monsters or taking a wazz.
Friendly trader stalkers, meanwhile, simply stand around waiting for you to come to them.
KONSTANTY CHERNOBYLITE HOW TO
The developers could certainly have picked up a few tricks from Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl and its sequels about how to make the Zone feel more dynamic.
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