Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl has almost single handedly saved 2024 from being an absolutely rubbish year for gaming

When PC Gamer goes into hibernation over the holidays, we’ll be leaving you with the traditional treat of our GOTY awards. Through our exhaustive deliberations we’ve picked out a cracking set of games, but I’ve gotta admit: it was incredibly hard this time. Thanks to the knock-on effect of Covid-19 and the tragic axing and savage pruning of so many studios, 2024 has been a pretty bleak year. Delays and disappointments have become the norm.

Due to this, I confess that a couple of my personal GOTY nominations were largely perfunctory. Games that were undeniably fun, which I would absolutely recommend to people regardless of the year, but which I can’t pretend I’m actually passionate about. This is not to say there haven’t been some corkers. Metaphor: ReFantazio, for instance, is probably my all-time favourite JRPG, even better than Persona 5. But even with that still fresh in my mind, it wasn’t quite enough to wash away the sense that, when I look back on 2024, I’m not going to recall it with any fondness.

Then Stalker 2 arrived.

I have not played nearly as much of GSC’s triumphant sequel as I would have liked, largely thanks to the derelict husk that is my treacherous body. I was struck with some kind of evil super flu last weekend, and even something as simple as sitting at my desk hunting for anomalies leaves me exhausted. Yet I’ve still spent as much time as I’m physically capable of hanging out in the Zone, and when I’m laid up in bed, it’s all I can think about.

Stalker 2 is not remotely our best reviewed game of 2024—and to be clear, I haven’t read another review that aligns with my own feelings towards the game more than ours. Josh is the perfect Stalker reviewer. He has a love of the strange and a high tolerance for jank, but he still recognises that its abrasiveness and rough-around-the-edges quality can sometimes be detrimental. Anyway, it’s a faux pas to review a reviewer, especially when said reviewer is a colleague—my point is, 83% is an extremely fair score for Stalker 2, but it’s still the best thing to happen to 2024.

Stalker 2 is not a product. I don’t like it when critics call games “experiences”, but I’ll make an exception here. The Zone is a place you inhabit rather than visit, where you toil and struggle and die and never quite find your footing. It is an endurance challenge, full of quiet nightmares and loud gunfights. But it’s also playful, silly and surprising, full of secrets and surprising beauty; a place that defies categorisation, instead revelling in its juxtapositions. It does not feel like a simple game setting.

It might also sound like I’m describing Erdtree’s Land of Shadow, but they are very different destinations. FromSoftware’s realms are highly curated and precisely designed. From Dark Souls to Sekiro to Elden Ring, the word I find myself grasping at is “elegant”. The Zone, meanwhile, is fucking raw. It’s dirty and bleak and rough. When you play Stalker 2, you have to approach it on its own terms. Sure, you have plenty of agency and a bunch of ways to tackle any given situation, but it won’t make any concessions to allow you to have a good time. You have to do the work.

I’ve heard so many Elden Ring fans talk about how the game finally clicked for them when they found the right build and started to git gud, but in Stalker 2 you kinda just have to accept it for what it is. A game that will make you walk for miles for some shitty rewards from some dirty backpack; where you’ll be caught in a radioactive storm, frantically looking for somewhere to hide, only for some invisible bastard to murder you without warning. You can’t shape the game around your own desires—it shapes you. Or breaks you.

It is rare to find a game, especially one with such a high profile, that boasts such an uncompromising vision. And that’s understandable. In this age of instant feedback and review bombing campaigns, dealing with fans and customers both prospective and actual must be kind of harrowing—even for studios not maintaining a live service. An element of pandering is natural. And on the other side of the equation, you’ve got publishers exerting a huge amount of influence, to the point that executives and data and trends can render a game dead from a thousand cuts.

But Stalker 2 is GSC’s game. Yes, like every developer it still has to say it’s “for the fans”, as if anyone would spend years of blood, sweat and tears to make something simply to entertain some faceless, mercurial customers. But you don’t get something like Stalker 2 unless a whole bunch of folk desperately want to make it because they think it’s brilliant and have confidence in their vision, regardless of what strangers like you or I think. That it’s exactly the kind of game that a lot of people actually love is a bonus. Stalker 2’s long, winding road to launch would never have reached this triumphant conclusion if the folks at GSC weren’t almost recklessly passionate about it. If they didn’t need to make it. For themselves.

And bloody hell does it show. In the absurd scope of this beast. The brutality of the combat. The subtlety and impact of the storytelling. And the countless ways it says, “Fuck you”. The storms. The ambushes. The juggling of so many systems—systems, I should add, that feel organic rather than overtly mechanical, like the way it treats morality as a more personal thing rather than some big karmic scoreboard. And of course there’s the absolutely infuriating carry limit, which stops you from hauling an entire armoury around with you. GSC will never let you feel truly powerful, or escape the sense that even with all the ways you can progress and all the artifacts you can collect, you’re still ultimately a vulnerable sack of meat.

I don’t think I quite realised how exhausted I was by the modern obsession with polish and approachability and balance until I played Stalker 2, though there was a flicker of it when I started to get hooked on The Forever Winter, which has many of the same qualities. The Forever Winter is similarly rough, a product of a confident vision, with a fascination for interlocking systems and warring AI factions. When it launched in early access and I saw all the complaints about performance issues, bugs and punishing systems, I needed to lie down. Now we even expect our experimental early access games to be safe and smooth.

Stalker 2 really solidified the revelation that what I want is boldness; big swings from janky weirdos that would rather try something new or risky instead of just feeding us more of the same junk food we’ve been fattened up on. It’s even clearer now because of Stalker 2’s proximity to another game I’ve spent a stupid number of hours playing—despite not really enjoying it.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has little in common with Stalker 2, but it still makes for an interesting comparison. It is exceptionally polished, tightly designed, and on the surface ticks a lot of the boxes that BioWare fans have come to expect, while also correcting some stuff that they said they didn’t like. It’s flashy, action-packed, big but not open world, and does absolutely nothing to offend anyone (apart from transphobes). It is also relentlessly boring. I have gone from considering it a perfectly fine RPG but not a very good Dragon Age game to straight up hating it. It represents everything I’m sick of—a vapid, crowd-pleasing safe bet. My biggest disappointment of 2024.

Playing Stalker 2 after The Veilguard, well, it feels like I’ve been rescued. I’m constantly being surprised, scared, stressed and incredibly annoyed. I’m a messy, turbulent ball of emotions. And I’m so goddamn happy about it.

The other night, when I made it out of a particularly tricky encounter, sneaking through the darkness, stopping to get mauled or shot at or just to whimper every few minutes, I walked out into the daylight—no more bandages, running low on food, my guns broken, my armour worn—and I felt true, pure joy. I took a literal victory lap, punching the air and swearing like a docker, until I had to lie down for an hour because, as I’ve already established, I am dying from super flu.

I also find myself thinking about the environment in which Stalker 2 has been made and the resilience of its Ukrainian developers. In 2022, the Russo-Ukrainian war, which began a decade ago, reached a horrifying new phase. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has become the most brutal conflict that Europe has experienced since World War 2, costing hundreds and thousands of lives. After a brief pause in 2022, GSC relocated to Prague and continued work on Stalker 2. This is a game that’s been designed by people facing an existential threat. It is a genuine marvel that it—and other Ukrainian games, like Frogwares’ Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened—even exists, let alone that it’s phenomenal.

As we hurtle towards the final month of this miserable year, I find myself once again discovering a reason to celebrate PC gaming, and to be so impressed by the people working in this often unforgiving industry. Stalker 2 represents the very best of this weird hobby of ours and has rejuvenated my waning enthusiasm.

But! As a dour middle-aged Scot I can’t allow myself to be too optimistic. While 2025 has an exciting line-up, I remain deeply concerned about so much of what’s happening in gaming. I worry about the escalating toxicity of obsessive communities, the continuing threat of AI, and the monopoly of Microsoft—a publisher whose absurd expectations have already killed off some incredibly talented and successful development teams, even as it continues to invest in the same old tired stuff from the likes of Bethesda and Blizzard.

Oof. What a gloomy note to end things on. Hang on, lemme rustle up something lighter. A fun wee anecdote to sweeten the taste of my vitriol.

I spend a lot of time taking screenshots. A lot of time. I just enjoy snapping, but given the vast number of stories we write at PC Gamer, it’s always handy to have a robust selection of images for every game. So when I was walking out of Stalker 2’s first hub and noticed a particularly cool anomaly, I had to get closer to grab a pic.

The anomaly in question appeared as a huge bubble floating above a marsh, underneath which were a couple of derelict vehicles. The bubble exerted an unnatural force upon the area around it, crushing the vehicles, and then undoing the damage seconds later. It looked incredible. “I’ll get some snaps and a quick video,” I thought to myself, as I moved closer to get a better shot. And then I kept moving closer. And closer. And closer. Even as I took my fingers off my keyboard.

I panicked—not for the first time that afternoon. I cursed my hunger for good images and fought against the pull of the anomaly, retreating during the moments when the bubble’s gravitational power briefly ceased. I really didn’t want to die this close to town. What would the other stalkers think? I genuinely felt afraid. But I was lucky. I escaped. I looked back at the anomaly and flipped it the bird. And I’m pretty sure that’s what sealed my fate. Cockiness is a killer, friends. I skipped off, so pleased that I’d survived another brush with death, and mere seconds later, a mutant that looked like a dog spliced with a giant arse jumped me. My AK jammed. My shotgun jammed. My pistol had no more ammo. And yes, I died.

Anyway, Stalker 2 is rad as hell.