
It has long been cliché to talk of ghosts and hauntings in the Chornobyl exclusion zone, but there is no shaking them in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Every half-kilometer or so, you come across another sad, dilapidated ruin: a gas station siphoned of its fuel; a warehouse emptied of its goods. Out in the wilderness, birch trees rise out of the ground like spindly fingers; creepy and more than a little wraith-like, cast in blackened silhouette by another of the Zone’s pallid vistas.
Making a distinction between the 64-kilometer-squared open-world playspace of Heart of Chornobyl and the real-world Chornobyl exclusion zone is difficult. Aside from mutants, replicating dogs, and physics-shredding anomalies, the game contains many of the same sights as its source material: the Ferris wheel of the abandoned Pripyat amusement park; the towering metal array of the Duga Radar Electrical Substation; blocks upon blocks of Soviet-made flats which lie abandoned and overgrown. What primarily separates the actual and fictional exclusion zone is GSC Game World’s undeniably hokey lore, which inscribes that research into supernatural phenomena occurred alongside the generation of nuclear power. Following the 1986 nuclear meltdown, a second disaster unleashed weirder, more Lovecraftian terrors on the land.
The actual plot of Heart of Chornobyl is poorly told and confusing, doled out by a mostly indistinct mush of depressed, middle-aged men who relay bouts of nearly inscrutable exposition about C-consciousness, psi-radiation, and, most baffling of all, the ‘noosphere.’ Thankfully, these nouns do not get in the way of the real game: playing as Skif, a stalker who is eking out an existence in the wreckage of that awful moment from 1986. You gaze upon, make camp in, and scavenge for gear and artifacts amid the infrastructure that served Chornobyl and the nearby area: miles of reddish-brown pipelines; bus stops decorated with resplendent Soviet-era pop art mosaics; rusty cranes perched at the edge of dried-up riverbeds, which now sit still like gigantic metal skeletons.
This eerie, empty architecture is one type of ghost. Radiation, which sparkles and shimmers in your vision, is another. Both are remnants of a terrible, spooky past manifesting in the present. Such is the symbolically super-charged nature of Chornobyl and its place at the pop culture center of the Cold War, it feels as if the 20th century itself haunts the game.
There is little more emblematic of the tumultuous politics or the great technological strides of the previous century than the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. It exists, to a large degree, because of the splitting of the atom in 1945 and the subsequent inhumane bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This military development made civilian nuclear power possible, although early reactors were expensive to build and risky to operate. At the time of these reactors’ construction in the latter half of the 20th century, oil flowed cheaply and voluminously from huge reserves in the Middle East. As such, writes the historian Kate Brown, nuclear power was not so much a practical necessity as a symbolic one during the Cold War: “The big bomb producers needed a peaceful atom for an antidote to the skin-melting horrors nuclear war presented.”
Such history weighs heavily on both the real and historical Zone, and this is really what haunts it. The Chornobyl exclusion zone is a “vast wastescape,” continues Brown, “generated by global economies hungry for energy and global political powers craving ideological preeminence.” It is also beset by a ghoulish irony: what Chornobyl was intended to provide versus what it has become. The dream of nuclear power was to create such an abundance of energy that it could serve the essential human needs of food, heat, and medicine. But in the game, you and other stalkers live in abject poverty, huddled around a fire burning in a barrel while swigging vodka as a shield against lingering radiation.
In light of the stalkers’ destitution, it’s hard to see the Zone as anything other than a metaphor for material decline. But Mariia Grygorovych, the game’s creative director, thinks otherwise. Speaking about it in the context of both Soviet imperialism and latter-day Russian aggression, Grygorovych characterizes the Zone as a space of renewal where nature reasserts itself in spite of the violence wrought against it. For her, both the physical Zone and its existence as an idea is something to be reclaimed and cultivated by Ukrainians, perhaps like a garden. Reid describes The Zone as a place of spiritual discovery.
For sure, striking ecological beauty exists in Heart of Chornobyl, at sites like a vast, swaying field of red poppy flowers. But such images are few and far between (and the poppies can make humans fatally drowsy). Mostly, the Zone is desolate morass, evoking in its unnerving flatness the stark, post-Soviet landscapes of Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. Little so grand or poetic as renewal or rebirth occurs here: Skif, like the other stalkers, spends his days barely surviving.
Just when you think you might have a handle on the Zone, GSC Game World throws smarter, more viciously armed enemies at you and takes away cherished places of refuge. A lot has been made about the game’s brutality, which is undeniably true. But it is brutal beyond the ease with which an enemy can headshot you from 300 meters away or your gun might jam at a crucial moment in a firefight. In the Zone, there is no safety net—no welfare or benefit system. There are no pensions or vacations. Rather, you and your fellow stalkers (who are all self-employed) are destined to slug it out in the ruins of crumbling 20th-century infrastructure until your bodies finally give up. At its core, Heart of Chornobyl is about broken people navigating a broken world haunted by a better past. In this way, the game feels almost too on the nose.
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Lewis Gordon is a critic and journalist who lives in Glasgow, a regular contributor to The Ringer, Vulture, New York Times, and many other publications. You can find him on Twitter and Bluesky.