header is screenshot from Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl
The Abandoned Men
Yussef Cole

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl is a game full of abandoned men+. Men with nowhere to go but the Zone, the residual hellhole left after Chornobyl’s reactor meltdown. The Zone is a place of plentiful dangers and vanishingly rare opportunities. It’s clouded with toxic gases that’ll chew through the leather and plastic of your suit. It’s peopled by other men who will prey upon you for a handful of pocket change. When you decide to selflessly help out another stalker, early on in the game, he’ll thank you, but wonder aloud whether you’ll survive the misery and exploitation to come.

Why must it be like this? The natural beauty of the Zone is all around you, impossible to avoid. Ultraviolet storms light up the sky. Fields of tall grass catch fire and burn in bright neon. The wind whispers through forests of floating trees. Mutant hounds and livestock gallop through the bramble; they graze in familiar packs, and are happy to be left alone, but for our incursions. We are the unhappy colonizers.

This was once a human place, a place where we could run and play and laugh and gather and eat. Housing blocks full of people, factories full of workers, schools attended by children. Now they all stand empty, and full of ghosts. Humanity isn’t welcome here any more. 

Stalker is a preview of our future. We squandered what we once had, and soon we won’t get to live here any more, not in the same way; we won’t get to keep on living simple, uncomplicated lives. Our only remaining place is as scavengers. The stalker is the man dying to find that lost simplicity again, who builds a life for looking for it, around ferreting out shiny trinkets from the toxic muck, and selling them to another fool for a quick buck. He is a scab on the surface of a festering wound, a radiation sink to sop up gamma waves and rusted junk. Searching aimlessly for home.

And where is home? Home can be anywhere, especially when it is nowhere. To the dirt poor settlers sent to the uncolonized Americas to relieve Europe of its rebellious masses, this new, unfamiliar world could be forced into the shape of a new home, against nature, against god (depending on who you asked). Stalker 2’s protagonist, Skif, seeks out a new home in the Zone, having lost his own to something mysterious and existential. He’s come here, looking to put down new roots, or to lash out, angry and lost.

If you’re tough enough, you can make it another day. If you can wrestle your way to the top of the slag heap, you can reap a measly reward, for a while. But not forever, not as a trespasser on land that doesn’t want you, that your forefathers already laid waste to.

There is a shallow pride to be found in the kind of survival stalkers do, how they learn to survive better than the others. In Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, the literary inspiration for the Stalker games, an old stalker known as the Vulture childishly boasts about his treasure to the protagonist, Red: “It might be the most precious thing in the Zone! And who’s going to get it, huh? Will it really be those sissies with their robots? Because I found it! How many of our men have fallen along the way? But I found it! I’ve been saving it for myself.”

If the world is doomed, and you are trapped within that doom, you might as well fill your arms with loot before the lights turn off forever. You might as well take a lease out on that oversized pickup truck and fill its tank with $200 of the planet’s precious lifeblood; go big game hunting for endangered animals, flush down wads of disposable (man) wipes, clean your ass with what’s left of the earth, kick the corpse of the world into a grisly pulp.

There are a few other men in Stalker 2’s Zone who manage to befriend the stalwart loner, Skif. The goof, Richter, lends comfort through incessant levity. The Gaffer, in Valissiya, broods over his fragile flock and is deeply grateful if you help him protect his people. There are odd bands of stalkers who glom on to one another for safety, and march under ideologically indistinct banners. You can side with them, if you don’t find their beliefs too distasteful. It’s a temporary reprieve from the overwhelming danger of the Zone, a group of fellows to break bread with, to sit around a barrel fire and listen as one of them strums out an ancient tune on a broken guitar.

Far more frequently, the men you come across in the Zone are dead. They’re in piles of splayed-armed corpses, lying in various states of decomposition. The Zone is rich in extinguished life. You can dig through their pockets, rifle through their stashes, strip them clean, down to nothing. A lifetime of dreams, of foolhardy hopes, of grit and temerity, reduced, abjected, down to a tin of canned meat, some bandages and a few loose bullets for the wrong gun. How can these trinkets amount to a man, to the full extent of his life and his desperate efforts? 

These lost boys of the Zone collect what they can, surround their hollow lives with barricades of junk and detritus. They weigh down their pockets until they’re dragging their boots across the scarred pavement. It’s not enough, just a threadbare film, the remnants of some tattered humanity to keep away the horrors of nature—which tears away at us anyway. The winds batter down the windows and the geiger counter clicks frantically. The walls come down and we are exposed to its fury until we are ruined, turned to dust.

There isn’t anything left to do but to trudge forward anyway. Animated flesh of a zombie-like desire to keep going, keep accumulating, keep searching for the impossible treasure that will make everything that came before worth it. Destroying everything, ourselves, in order to obtain it.

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+ The few women you’ll meet in the Zone are the rare exceptions that incontrovertibly prove the rule.

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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.