When PCG’s editors asked me to write about a game people should play right now, they made it all very clear to me. ‘Josh,’ they said, ‘please turn your prodigious wit, abundant taste, and inescapable sagacity to recommend the best possible game our readers could play here, now, in September of the year of our Lord 2025. Also, you are very handsome and have the slim, fine-boned hands of a pianist.’
Well, how could I refuse? So, after spending a lot of time thinking about it, I’m here to tell you that the game you need to play right now is Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl.
Because, look, you ever have a game that reminds you what it’s all about, man? Something that comes along after you’ve spent weeks and months bouncing off stuff, grabs you by the collar, and won’t let go? I have. It’s Stalker.
Specifically, it’s the remaster of Stalker that GSC put out a few months ago, and which you got for free if you already owned the originals. They add mod-cons like gamepad support, slightly (slightly) improved graphics, and support for higher resolutions.
We live in an era of dollar-sucking live-service thingummies and games that sing your praises as the chosen one as soon as you start a new save. A singleplayer, hard-scrabble, and free (if you own the OGs) Stalker has never been a more necessary antidote.
With the remaster of Shadow of Chornobyl (plus its two successor games: Clear Sky and Call of Prypiat), there’s never been a better time to play it. I mean, you could play Stalker 2. I like that game plenty. But let’s be honest, GSC still isn’t quite finished making it. Best to stick with the classics for now.
Stalker was rare and odd when it first released in 2007 and it is, if anything, rarer and odder on the occasion of its remaster. The fantasy it provides is one of struggle—against nature, against man, against your own desire to pick up every bit of loot you see despite having an encumbrance limit of 50kg—rather than the exponential power fantasies we’re used to outside of everything but survival games today. Also, unlike survival games, Stalker never asks you to punch a tree, so point there for GSC.
But really, the reason you need to play Shadow of Chornobyl is because the remaster also added Steam achievements. Uh oh.
It’s that bit that has, maybe, perhaps, wormed its way into my brain and set me on the ravenous path of 100%ing the whole thing. Reader, I don’t know what came over me. I just love being in the Zone so much that I was eager for any and every excuse to remain there, and if that meant reloading old saves to painstakingly die to every individual type of anomaly or to summarily execute that one guy you find bleeding out next to a train carriage at the start of the game, then so be it.
There’s something narcotic about the achievement pop, even when the cheevos are relatively value-less Steam ones. It’s a kind of ersatz productivity, a feeling that you’re checking tasks off a list when actually you’re eating 25 breads (yes, breads). I was locked in on catching ’em all like I haven’t been on anything else in years (except, uh, work, to which I am 110% dedicated, PCG editors).
There’s just something about polishing off the cheevo list on an all-timer game—effectively encasing it in perspex for permanent display as a “Perfect game” on your Steam profile—that appeals to me. That appeal becomes all the more overwhelming when it’s relatively fresh territory, and when you can finally get the recognition you deserve for finding Fang’s exoskeleton armour (it’s in a Prypiat stash).
It’s a call (of Prypiat) too seductive to resist and, hey, the remaster is pretty great on its own merits too, so far as I’m concerned. There’s not been a better time to enter the Zone since all the way back in ’07. Get in here, Stalker.
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