God lives in the Zone.

You can feel his presence in the movement of wind through spidery tree branches or the unexpected flash of lightning just before it crashes into the ground. You can feel her in the arrival of strange, beautifully deadly ‘emissions,’ which turn the sky a pre-tornado orange and bathe the landscape in radiation. And you can feel them most of all in the incredible fragility of life in the Zone, evidenced by the corpses slumped in the corners of nearly every rusting factory, or laying stiff and forgotten in scrub fields.

In Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, people come to this devastated region searching for many different things. Per the game’s alternate history, the Chornobyl nuclear exclusion zone—dubbed “The Zone of Alienation” or just “The Zone”—regularly sprouts supernatural ‘anomalies’ that defy natural reason: pockets of gravity-warping air, floating shards of razor-sharp glass, red flickers along the ground that burst into geysers of fire when approached. Alongside these anomalies are artifacts that distill the strange magic of the Zone into physical objects. One of them may provide protection from radiation while another lessens the weight of carried objects. (It’s a necessary coincidence that all of the artifacts augment important videogame attributes.)

Heart of Chornobyl follows the people who flock to the Zone to support themselves from these anomalies. “Stalkers,” like the protagonist Skif, search for artifacts that can be sold for high prices. Others come to work as part of factions that want to exploit or preserve the Zone for their own purposes. Among them are people seeking miracles, looking for the expression of god in the inexplicable phenomena of the region, and hoping to find something beyond our current understanding of reality before the magic of the anomalies can be rendered down or commodified into understandable technologies.

Heart of Chornobyl’s plot is meandering and poorly told. Major revelations come in abrupt lines of dialogue that introduce scrambled names and sci-fi concepts without much explanation. But, blurred into a collage of its recurring themes and pinpointed through its most clear scenes, the game is concerned with a clash of ideologies in the face of a revealed god. A sort of gladiatorial arena for philosophical confrontation, the people of the Zone have come to an unregulated and vicious space that reveals the realities of life in stark detail. Death comes quickly, from the claws and fangs of a mutant boar, the bullets of another stalker, or the unpredictable natural environment. Faced with kindness and brutality in equal measure—the Zone’s inhabitants are just as likely to invite a stranger to rest at a campfire as to shoot them in the head for a can of jellied beef —the whole of human endeavour is boiled down to its essence, freed of the distractions of broader social and cultural baggage. This post-apocalyptic blank slate combines with the wonders of the anomalies and artifacts to make the Zone a proving ground for various ideologies.

One character, the order-loving Colonel Kurshunov, calls this space an “amusement park for scumbags,” and he wants to exploit it, declaring the Zone’s turbulent nature a “valuable resource.” Dr. Dalin, meanwhile, explains that there are no miracles in the Zone, that its wonders don’t emanate from “a myth, nor … a deity” but from the (only slightly) more rational source of a “psi-installation created by scientists from Project X.” On the other hand, Richter, the one consistently friendly face Skif encounters on his journey, says the Zone is a land of potential that “knows what’s best for us all”—a place where Skif might be able to find “anything you wanted,” whether that be “a friend, an enemy, money, death, miracles, even yourself.” The mystically inclined Faust, who has a backstory convoluted+ enough to rival any of the characters from Metal Gear Solid, tells Skif that “some come to the Zone to make money. Others come looking for miracles. Many just want to find happiness …. A way to feel real and alive again.”

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Stalker 2’s creator, GSC Gameworld, is Ukrainian, its former Kyiv headquarters now having moved to Prague as a result of the Russian invasion. Heart of Chornobyl’s makers have first hand, recent experience with violence and devastation—in late 2022, a member of their team was killed in action. And Skif can be viewed as a refraction of similarly harrowing experiences. We eventually learn that he’s a 25-year-old called Yevhen Martynenko, whose time in the army was followed by dangerous part-time jobs and an empty life with “no real friends, no family—just lonely evenings in front of the TV.” He’s jolted out of this stupor by the destruction of his apartment during a Zone-based explosion. Rather than follow his neighbours' lead in seeking recompense and information about the explosion from government officials, he decides to venture out into the Zone, and toward the source of the calamities that shook him free of his regular life.

Learning Skif’s backstory recasts him from player avatar to a more defined character, with his own motivations and personality. It changes him from would-be adventurer to something like a pilgrim, journeying to the wellspring of metaphysical power in search of, if not a miracle, then “a way to feel real and alive again.” There are layers of implication to this, a suggestion that a direct confrontation with death offers an antidote for apathy. But, given the wondrous, divine nature of the destination that Skif heads towards, it seems more appropriate to say that the game advocates for engaging with life and death on the level of intensive thought, not necessarily just through violent action.

Heart of Chornobyl is very much a game about keeping on, despite miserable circumstances. Skif is unable to remain contended (or in a state of numbness) once the stark life-and-death realities of the Zone literally blow apart his old life. God, expressed as a vast and alien power capable of both creating miracles and obliterating life, has visited him. If he wants to come alive again, Skif needs to reckon with god's existence directly. He has to remove himself from the mundane and plunge himself into a place where the best and worst of existence are offered in confrontational moments—mortal and supernatural drama, sometimes in parallel bursts of cruelty and loveliness. God might exist everywhere, after all, but they’re most evident in the Zone++.

Toward the end of the game, a scientist named Dr. Kaymanov reveals that the Zone’s miracles are the manifestation of humanity’s psychic energy, the result of some clunkily explained collective consciousness phenomenon called the “noosphere” that makes tangible our mindsets and viewpoints. The Zone, he says, exists “in our image, after our own likeness.” Accordingly, it’s a place of “suffering and sorrow,” created from the martial psyches of the opportunists and soldiers who live within it. The world, in Heart of Chornobyl and outside of it, is plagued by senseless destruction and casual death, but it’s also a place where, if our violence is tamed, something creative might bloom instead.

If god can be said to exist, from a certain viewpoint at least, they must be conjured from the raw matter of our experience. The stories we tell—the organization of the enormity of our universe and all we know of it—come from our collective imagining, a night’s dreams formed from the fodder of the day. God, or the noosphere, or a psi-installation from Project X, is borne of what we, as a people, do and think. The heart of Chornobyl is murder and radiation. The Zone is the war fought within it and the peace that has come before and may return again after the last drop of blood has been spilled.

Dr. Kaymanov ends his speech with what sounds like an appropriate enough question. He wants to know what this god we’ve made, in all their forms, could represent. What can they be, in light of the beauty and terrors of life, or the alternating senseless and sublime experience of simply existing? Rotting corpses in collapsed warehouses and the movement of a sweet breeze through the trees, set next to one another as clues to the nature of the governing spirit of our existence. “A tragedy most horrible, or a joy most profound,” Dr. Kaymanov says. “No one knows what the Zone truly desires.”

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+ With prior knowledge of only one or two of the following proper nouns, the player is introduced to a major plot point with the following sentence: “There is no Monolith, Faust. You acquired Controller abilities in one of the X-Labs so you could guide the Monolithians and serve C-Consciousness.”

++ Radiant Array’s visual novel Interstate 35, written and designed by Bullet Points contributor Julie Muncy, explores similar concepts through the lens of a nuclear explosion that’s rendered a stretch of North Texas into an irradiated wasteland.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.