More punishment? Here are the best survival games on PCĭespite retelling the story of the original game, albeit with a few more cutscenes and quests to improve coherence, Lost Alpha introduces a slew of new features. This is the game STALKER could have been. It is the result of poring over details from leaked test builds of the game, design documents, and early magazine previews, from which the fan team then assembled their own version of the game. Lost Alpha is a community passion project that picks up the pieces. The result of years of protracted development hell, it was buggy at launch, and had swathes of planned content left on the cutting room floor. The original STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl was a bit of a mess. It would be foolish to try to summarise even half of the mods produced, so instead, let’s take a look at the three titanic projects that define the STALKER mod scene as it stands today, each one built on a foundation of dozens of smaller projects and two standalone releases. STALKER has developed a strong modding scene with an appropriately devil-may-care attitude regarding the reuse of each other’s work, and even the legal status of the games themselves. The series puts you in the shoes of freelancing mercenaries – the titular STALKERs – wandering this horrific environment in search of fame, glory, or perhaps just a big payout. It is memorable for being set in a fictionalised and incredibly haunted vision of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which is not only irradiated but overrun with reality-warping anomalies and mutant monsters. It’s been nearly a decade since the launch of STALKER: Call of Pripyat, the last of Ukrainian studio GSC Game World’s trilogy of bleak and atmospheric open-world survival shooters.

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