It’s been ten years since the last STALKER game – 2009’s Call of Pripyat – yet the Zone remains one of the most evocative, mysterious, and fascinating settings on PC. This expanse of radioactive wasteland, located between the borders of Ukraine and Belarus, was devastated by the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in 1986 – and, according to the game’s fiction, another incident in 2006.
It’s a bleak, nightmarish, but strangely beautiful landscape, teeming with mutants, weird anomalies, freak storms, radiation, and warring factions. The ruined cities, swamps, tunnels, bunkers – and the Chernobyl plant itself – have become home to stalkers, the Ukrainian government’s name for anyone trespassing in the Zone illegally. Some stalkers are there purely for the adventure, but others are there to profit from finding, smuggling,…
