[News] Chernobylite

[Wassim MH]

 

Despite one of the more prolific and culturally enduring catastrophes, the Chernobyl accident that occurred near Pripyat, Ukraine in April of 1986 has been weird underrepresented in mainstream media. The area around the derelict Chernobyl plant has seen its own small subculture or morbid tourism, attaining something of a mythical status among horror enthusiasts. HBO’s Chernobyl and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series are a few examples of Chernobyl-centric fiction that saw a wider audience (and to some extent Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker).

 

 

The primary appeal of developer The Farm 51’s Chernobylite, for me, was the fact that they built the game using photogrammetric scans of the real-life of the plant and its surrounding area. I cannot speak how accurately the end result portrays the locations the dev team spent days meticulously scanning, but I can tell you it is one of the most hauntingly breathtaking settings I’ve explored in a videogame. I only wish they were able to craft a story deserving of such a place.

 

 

Chernobylite puts you in the shoes of a scientist named Igor who, years after the accident, has returned to the zone to solve the mysterious disappearance of his fiancée Tatyana. After a brief intro, you camp in a warehouse and what follows is a relatively predictable gameplay loop where you run missions during the day, and build out your base at night. Along the way, you gain new allies who join you at the base, prompting you to build more and more specific things to maximise their comfort and mental well-being.

 

 

To put it somewhat reductively, imagine if Fallout Shelter went for a tumble in the hay with Silent Hill 2. The missions themselves can range from simple resource gathering to looking for specific items, resolving conflicts, assassinations, etc. Everything you do is in service to your ultimate goal of finding out what happened to Tatyana all those years ago, or so the game says. Personally I thought the vastly more central mystery got somewhat lost in the relatively tropey story of warring factions and political unrest.

Despite making a very intimate and psychologically-charged first impression, Chernobylite’s story is much more interested in its themes and ideas than it is with its characters’ interiority. That isn’t an inherently bad thing, but I do feel like a few more rewrites could’ve crafted a story that brings all of this together in a satisfying manner. As it stands, the game does just find coasting on its vibes and mood. To be fair, it’s a hell of a mood.

I was expecting a rich story full of twists and turns, but I quickly found my experience with Chernobylite settling into a routine. The base-building and management elements seem more than a little inspired by Fallout 4 right down to the UI, but I guess Todd Howard was right: it just works. You can build furniture, different crafting benches for various purposes, as well as facilities specifically geared towards comfort like light sources, air purifiers, TVs, etc.

Unlike Fallout however, Chernobylite gives you a somewhat small warehouse to build instead of a massive open world. It’s almost hygge in its execution because your task is to make this limited space as comfortable as possible, instead of morphing a massive map to your heart’s content. It fits rather perfectly with the game’s bleak tone and very soon return trips to the base became something I looked forward to after missions, especially in the late game when the challenge starts to ramp up.

The missions too take place within gated off levels rather than a massive open world. There’s about five or six main locations you will become intimately familiar with over the course of the 10-15 hour long story. The areas are littered with points of interest that can lead you to resources, encounters with higher level enemies, NPCs to trade with, or tiny self-contained horror vignettes.

You have to manage Igor’s health and sanity while undertaking these missions, which makes enemy encounters more tense than they tend to be in games like this. Killing another human being will always have an adverse effect on Igor’s sanity, which you have to bring back up either by resting during missions or by crafting and consuming calming tea. On anything but the easiest difficulty, resources are scarce enough that taking another person’s life carries a lot of mechanical weight. You can level up towards making it so stealth kills are less taxing on the sanity bar, but most of the time you’ll want to steer clear of fights if it can be helped.

There are several points within Chernobylite’s story where you’re asked to make critical decisions. These are great because they’re never a binary good/bad thing, but always more about balancing helping the characters you like against helping your own agenda. Interestingly, there is a diegetic way to undo decisions if the consequences aren’t to your liking. A late game story turn allows you to travel back in time and enter alternate realities formed by paths you didn’t take. While I think it robs your decisions of any emotional weight they could have had, it’s just an incredibly cool mechanic for a scifi game that I had a lot of fun with.

Visually Chernobylite is something of a mixed bag. I played the PS4 version on a PS5 in addition to playing the PC version, and the experience across the platforms is somewhat uneven. The game is hardly a visual powerhouse, yet weirdly demanding on PC hardware. The PS4 version targets 30fps but doesn’t hit it most of the time. The Farm 51 have promised a next-gen console version coming in the near future so more on that when it arrives.

 

 

 

Where Chernobylite really shines, I think, is in its art direction. The locations you visit are positively brimming with atmosphere. Every collapsed residential complex and derelict playground is awash with the dying breaths of the lives that were, and the crushed potential of the lives that could’ve been. What Chernobylite lacks within its scripted narrative, it more than makes up for with the verisimilitude of its setting. Every inch of this game world contains a multitude of stories if you’re willing to stop and listen.

 

 

Overall I think Chernobylite is something of a mess, stretched a bit thin between trying to be a base-building RPG, a first-person shooter, and a walk and talk horror game. The best thing I can say about it is that it’s one of the more unconventional games to come out this year, and the novelty of that will be enough to carry you through its mid-sized campaign if your tastes are anything like mine. It’s a weird, creepy, somewhat forgettable ghost story set within one of the most memorable and fully-realised locations ever built for a videogame. Sometimes, a little jank is just the price you pay to experience something out of the ordinary.

Review codes provided by The Farm 51 and Plan of Attack. Chernobylite is out now on Steam, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, with next-gen console versions coming later.

 

LINK:https://me.pcmag.com/en/gaming/13467/chernobylite