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1 month ago
Feature: There's something behind you
The eeriest places in games are the ones where the environment is the monster
Whilst raw forms of horror work through shock and disgust, the eerie is felt more as a threat. Perhaps something seems to hover over or follow you -- there’s a rustling just behind you, or a shimmering in your peripheral vision. Usually eeriness pertains to places rather than people. Places that seem to move, shift or even act when they really should lie still. This…
7 months ago
Good news for fans of uncompromisingly bleak and incomparably atmospheric Eastern European sandbox shooters: an official S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel is on the way, original devs GSC Game World have confirmed. The less-good news is that we’re all going to have to continue playing mods for the original games for a while yet. According to the announcement, the game isn’t due until 2021. And for those itching to pass the…
10 months ago
Take one hundred players fighting to the death in that Playerunknown's Battlegrounds way, throw them into the S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-esque irradiated and anomaly-ridden ruins of Chernobyl, and you might have a game like the newly-announced Fear The Wolves. This latest game to hop on the hot Battle Royale trend is coming from Vostok Games, the studio founded by some former members of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developers GSC Game World.…
1 year ago
Feature: Is #1 A Jump Scare?
To compile a list of the 25 best horror games on PC is to look into the void for so long that the void not only starts to look back, but shakes you by the hand and takes you out for coffee. It is to fight with monsters until you become a monster and then go on a European railtrip with the other monsters, and…
The most exciting part of Survarium [official site] has always been the dream that it might one day become essentially an unofficial S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel. Survarium studio Vostok Games was founded by folks who formerly worked on the celebrated open-world FPS-RPG series, Survarium is set in a very similar irradiated world of artifact hunters, and Vostok have gabbed about wanting a peristent world to stalk. Survarium…
2 years ago
If I was a betting man, I'd have put money on Enderal, the vast Skyrim total conversion, winning the public vote for ModDB's mod of the year. That I'd have lost all that money is why I'm not a betting man. Enderal came second behind Stalker: Call of Chernobyl, a similarly vast total conversion for the enduring Stalker: Call of Pripyat.
3 years ago
Feature: Clockwork people
Just before the Christmas break I was trying to catch up on all of the interesting games that I hadn't found time to play earlier in the year. Else Heart.Break() was right near the top of the list, even though I have zero interest in games that expect me to learn how to program in order to have fun. If I learn how to program…
4 years ago
The one certainty with news items about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. [official site] is there's at least a 70 percent chance they've been planted by Jim. Thanks Jim! GOG.com continues to blow the horn in support of DRM-free everything with a new game reclaiming service, which you can check it out for yourself in this generously placed link. The idea is that if you bought a game legitimately but the game no longer…
Discounts on the STALKER trilogy (which seems like the wrong way to categorise the series somehow, but never mind) tend to wheel around pretty often, but this is particularly good deal for the whole set. There a certain games which are buried deep in RPS' DNA, and the semi-open world, post apocalyptic survival/horror/action STALKER is one of them. If you haven't played them, you are…
Gosh-o! After several years of nodding politely and say "Yes that's nice but..." to news about the deathmatch-y side of Survarium [official site], developers Vostok Games are starting to share firm plans for the post-apocalyptic FPS's open-world Freeplay mode. As we've hoped from the studio founded by former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developers, it's sounding pretty S.T.A.L.K.Y. as players roam across wasteland, scavenging for weapons and supplies, completing…
Y'know GSC Game World? Oh, you do! The Ukrainian studio behind spookyhard FPS series S.T.A.L.K.E.R.? Oh, you must! You remember - they seemed to close in 2011 but held on a bit longer, still working on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 for a few months then cancelling it, and since only resurfaced to weigh in on confusing brand rights issues. See, I knew you knew them. Well, they're…
Feature: Get to da choppagh
There are lots of survival games, but there are also lots of games which could be survival games with the right mods installed. Over the course of Survival Week we'll highlight a few of those games and i) write a diary of our experience playing with it ii) explain how to do it yourself. Honour is for better folk than I. Honour is for the…
Feature: You Will Survive
There are lots of survival games, but there are also lots of games which could be survival games with the right mods installed. Over the course of Survival Week we'll highlight a few of those games and i) write a diary of our experience playing with it ii) explain how to do it yourself. Evil is nothing if not thorough. Usually I prefer to hone…
I don't want to get into any speculation of my own about what's genuine and who has the right to do what in terms of STALKER's heritage right now. Let's just look at the brief in-game footage devs West-Games have finally pumped out to support their slow-moving Kickstarter, and see how we feel then.
If you took a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. design document and replaced the words "Chernobyl disaster" with "weird meteorite," you wouldn't be far off from Areal. Think post-apocalyptic open world survival FPS with non-linear missions, populated by simulated life and mutants, and fizzing with dangerous anomalies. That sounds pretty enticing in itself, but developers West Games also have a few former S.T.A.L.K.E.R. folks working on the game, including…
5 years ago
GameSpy has officially exploded, and games are still fleeing from ground zero while green smoke and shrapnel billows every which way. It's been a messy process, to say the least, with some games finding happy new homes while others collapsed on the street side, never to rise again. STALKER, thankfully, has made it out at the last second, with whatever remains of GSC releasing a…
Feature: Scanning For Anomalies
I am standing in the middle of Pripyat in what was intended to be the site of the 1986 May Day festivities. Now an expanse of cracked concrete, the iconic rusting ferris wheel stands behind me. No one else is in sight, as I've been left here alone to get on with some measurements. Looking down at the Geiger counter in my hand I slowly…
Feature: Stalk this way
Stalker: Lost Alpha is out, but it's not finished. Typical Stalker, really. The game, a fan-fronted effort to reconnect all the elements that were cut from Shadow of Chernobyl, was leaked during development. The developers have chosen to release it earlier than planned, and I decided to try it out. It's still Stalker, still based on the first game, but at the same time it's…
Feature:
Rob Sherman, author of interactive fiction project Black Crown, asked if he could write about videogame inventories. We were powerless against the result, which pairs a personal journey through the English countryside with the a treatise on the power of possessions and the reasons videogames must do better in representing them. There was once, and still is, a boy and a man called me, and…
My conflict-o-tron is clicking like that time I discovered a 'free kitten, smoosh child' lever. I could have had a free kitten, but then there's that child. Not even imagining the cutest kittens and the worst children could get me to pull it. Believe me, I tried. Survarium has me in that same sort of headspace: a game from a lot of the Stalker devs…
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