It’s become a game industry in-joke, but Bethesda games, from the Elder Scrolls series to Starfield, have always heavily leveraged what’s come to be known as environmental storytelling. The classic example is the hordes of skeletons you find in the wasteland in the Fallout games – propped in various poses suggesting the manner of their tragic passing, delivering tiny nuggets of story content to the player simply by how they’re placed and what objects are placed with them.
Here is a skeleton surrounded by canned food, but lacking a can opener. Here are two skeletons entwined in a hug, lying on a mattress in a charred room. Here is a skeleton slumped in a lawn chair high on a cliff, with a sniper rifle and several boxes of ammo sitting nearby. And so on, and so on.
Games that lean heavily on environmental storytelling are often cluttered with useless objects. Every bandit or space pirate is a terrible hoarder, with food, trinkets, and baubles strewn everywhere in their lairs.
To give credit to the designers, clutter is part of the special sauce that makes environmental storytelling work. The more props, the more varied the visual vignettes can be.
The concept is an industry in-joke because of how pervasive and effective the technique is. Bethesda has long been the master of the idea, but other studios have followed in their footsteps.
But in the best titles, like GSC’s brilliant, buggy, and immersive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, the concept of the environment telling a story is more than vignettes of cleverly placed props. In S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, the environment is a character itself – ever-present in every aspect of the experience.
of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 on a rare
sunny day in the Zone.
Books, Movies, and History
Let’s go back a bit.
In 1972, the Russian science-fiction novel Roadside Picnic was released to critical acclaim and commercial success. In 1979, the authors of the book wrote the screenplay for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, loosely based on the novel’s core concept – a mysterious Zone, forbidden to most of humanity and cut off by the military, where strange things happened.
Stalker is a challenging watch, but a monumental achievement. Slow-moving and philosophical, the movie focuses on three characters referred to by their occupation (Stalker, Writer, Professor). It’s a simple story but open to multiple, sometimes competing interpretations – a meditation on faith, human interaction, and how well we understand ourselves, all wrapped up in a tension-inducing visual package.
In the movie, the setting is as much a character as any of the three travelers. The Zone is a lush but post-apocalyptic landscape, all rusting vehicles and ruined buildings half-reclaimed by vegetation – familiar tropes to a generation that grew up on Fallout and Last of Us, but visionary in 1979.
Though not once in the movie do the men see anything genuinely dangerous, tension hangs over the entire journey to the mysterious room at the center of the Zone. At one point, the three men walk carefully through a field of tall grasses where several rusting tanks sit, still in battle formation. The scene is classic Fallout-style environmental storytelling, years before Bethesda was a game studio. The director shows us, without dialogue, that the Zone is deadly in ways we can’t begin to understand.
The Disaster, and the Game
It’s no secret that one of the inspirations for the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, released in 2007, is the 1979 film.
The concept of the Stalkers as paid guides escorting people into the Zone for reasons they don’t understand; the environment of the Zone itself, a sealed-off place with its post-apocalyptic landscape; the idea of place or a point at the center of the Zone that grants wishes and desires; even evocative details like throwing metal bolts to detect invisible dangers – so much of what makes the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. setting unique was inspired by the movie.
The other and better-known inspiration is the 1986 disaster at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine. All credit goes to GSC’s designers for making the connection between the original Zone concept from Roadside Picnic and the exclusion zone that still remains in place around the power plant.
screenshots of the game that aren’t
gray, but that’s kind of the point.
Thematically, and visually, pictures from the Chornobyl area today look a lot like the movie. Everywhere you look, you see overgrown buildings, rusted metal, and the remains of daily lives interrupted in a furious, frantic evacuation – books, glasses, toys, dishes on tables. I imagine Bethesda’s Fallout designers, too, must have used both Tarkovsky’s movie and pictures from the nuclear disaster as references, alongside other groundbreaking post-apocalyptic fiction and images from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Stalkers in 2024
The bleak realities of their creators informed both Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky’s film. Only a generation of artists who grew up in the post-WW2 industrial dystopia of the mid-20th century Soviet empire could fully imagine the Zone.
Tragically, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s developers are also informed by sad realities – not only the Chornobyl disaster but the illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and the horrifying impact of the invasion on Kyiv, where the studio was based.
The excellent documentary released by GSC goes into depth on the challenges in making the game during a war. I won’t go into the details here; the documentary is worth a watch. But I was struck by how the ongoing destruction in their country must have influenced the developers.
The environmental storytelling in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is some of the best I’ve seen. Locations in the game feel substantially more real than the carefully posed skeleton tableaus of Fallout, though the same design concepts are being used – cluttered rooms, half-broken buildings, rusted-out vehicles, and nature’s gradual reclamation of the world from humanity. It’s just better executed – grounded and directly informed by the lives and experiences of the creators.
Unlike many games, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 forces the player to slow down and breathe after bursts of gunplay. For long stretches, traveling between points of interest, you’ll have no encounters and see nothing new. The closest game comparison is the feel of multiplayer-focused games like DayZ or Escape from Tarkov – extreme peaks of excitement broken up by quiet sojourns through the landscape.
During your travels, you’re still tense and alert; it’s easy to lose focus and stumble into a deadly anomaly. But these periods of simply existing, strongly encouraged by the costs of a limited fast travel option, evoke the languid pace of Tarkovsky’s movie and increase the feeling that the Zone is a real place.
hill? Maybe just ruins and wrecks.
Maybe the next valuable artifact!
A Complete Package
There’s a lot more to say about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. It’s got bugs, and it’s a less complete and systemic experience than modern, fully-modded versions of the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. The economy and balance need a lot of work, a long-term project for a future generation of inspired modders.
The team is aggressively patching the game. They know they’ve got a hit on their hands, and are dedicated to getting it right for players.
But even in its current state, the game rises above the minor flaws. The setting of the Zone is a character itself – just as beautiful, terrifying, and compelling as it was in Tarkovsky’s 1979 movie.
There’s a reason hardcore fans of the series are so passionate. The Zone calls to something basic in us, inspiring us more than the usual game design illusions. It feels lived-in, a bleak dreamscape both familiar and alien. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. is a masterpiece that any game designer interested in environmental storytelling should play.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is available on Steam. The Scree Games blog will be on hiatus for the next two weeks. Happy Holidays!