There’s a case to be made that Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl has endured the most turbulent development of any video game yet created. In the last four years alone, developer GSC Game World has weathered a pandemic, a war that still rages in the studio’s native Ukraine, countless cyberattacks and leaked builds, and even a fire that gutted the server room of the studio’s Prague office.

But Stalker 2 also faced its fair share of troubles before the dividing line of Covid-19. Originally announced way back in 2010, Stalker 2 was supposed to launch two years later, but that project slowly collapsed under circumstances that remain controversial, ultimately resulting in the dissolution of GSC Game World. GSC was revived in 2014, its first project a reignition of the Cossacks series. Stalker 2 was reannounced four years later, designed by a mostly new team, with the studio’s founder, Sergiy Grygorovych, having largely retired from game development.

All of which is vital context for understanding Stalker 2’s development. But it also begs the question – what is the game that has emerged from all of this? How much does this Stalker 2 relate to that initial project from fourteen years ago? Does it achieve the series’ long-frustrated ambition of delivering a truly open world survival shooter? And what, if anything, can Stalker 2 bring to the open world experience at a time when the genre has arguably seen its heyday?

I pose the first of these questions to Ievgen Grygorovych, who is CEO of GSC, game director on Stalker 2, and also Sergiy’s brother. “We didn’t take anything from the first attempt,” he says, while also clarifying that part of “the reason why development of Stalker 2 was stopped” was in fact down to Sergiy’s departure, the original studio head having found the process of game making “exhausting”, in his brother’s words, and so ultimately choosing to move on to other interests. “The standard changed, and we couldn’t take that content we had previously.” This doesn’t just mean mechanical or technological features, even the narrative elements of the original Stalker 2 were thrown out according to Grygorovych. “We were doing it from scratch based on the Stalker 1 lore.”

The second question I’ll answer myself. I spent three hours with Stalker 2 last week, experiencing its first two chapters at GSC’s Prague office. Based on what I’ve played, Stalker 2 seems to be precisely what GSC promised, a survivalist shooter that takes place in a seamless open world, which is every bit as weird and uncompromising as the Zone featured in the original trio of games.

As for that final question, well, that requires a longer answer.

Stalker 2’s introduction directly calls back to 2007’s Shadow of Chernobyl, with your character being driven through the Exclusion Zone on the back of a flatbed lorry. Unlike the original, you’re not a nameless, amnesiac stalker; you’re Skif, a young stalker who has teamed up with a scientist named Hermann to conduct a clandestine experiment in the Zone using a particularly unusual artefact. While the background of both characters is only thinly sketched out, one thing is clear enough, Skif is desperate for whatever reward he expects for this work, and he’ll either come back with results, or not come back at all.

This opening chapter (which doubles as the tutorial) is a linear, whistle-stop tour of the Zone’s hazards and horrors. To retrieve the equipment he needs, Skif descends into an irradiated bunker filled with dead scientists. This is followed by a scrape with a group of bandits, a gauntlet of anomalies to navigate, and a wrecked boat prowled by a creature called a Poltergeist that I bravely ran away from.

Two things I took away from Stalker 2’s first chapter. First, it’s a much slicker and more polished experience than any of the earlier Stalker games. From the stunningly moody environment design to the more grounded, tangible combat, it’s a massive step up over anything GSC has produced before. Second, while the introduction is more gradual and comprehensive than previous Stalker games, the Zone itself has lost little of its hostility. I died twice during this tutorial sequence, once to a bandit that flanked me during a firefight, and once to a toxic anomaly in a cave while failing to root out a valuable artefact hidden somewhere inside.

Naturally, things don’t go according to plan for Skif, and the tutorial ends with him having all his gear nicked by another Stalker before being almost eaten alive by mutant dogs. It’s at this point where the Zone opens up properly, and you’re free to explore at your leisure.

And it really does seem like you’re free to go wherever you want. Climb up a water tower or some other vantage point, and you’ll see the russet countryside of the Zone undulating out in one vast, unbroken stretch, the red and white chimney of the Chornobyl NPP visible far off in the distance. Stalker 2 takes place in the same area as the original game, partly why it’s titled as a direct sequel. “We took a lot of locations from the first game [but] we had to adapt them to for an open world experience,” Grygorovych says. This, apparently, was one of the bigger challenges of the sequel’s development. “It required a lot of iterations on the level design, game design, we didn’t expect that it will require so much iterations,” he explains. “It’s fun to solve something that you’ve never faced before.”

Back in the Zone, I head toward a cluster of houses on a sloping hillside, where I discover a group of bandits had barricaded a Stalker inside one of the structures. I could walk on by, but decide to intervene, sneaking up on the three bandits and quickly dispatching them with a pistol. The stalker, whose name is Zhorik, rewards me with the location of a nearby stash of equipment. But he also asks me if I’ll help him rescue another Stalker the bandits abducted, named Gloomy.

I agree, and head to the redbrick building complex where Gloomy is allegedly being held, where I have my first proper firefight. While combat is more refined than the earlier games, it’s still distinctly Stalker. Some of the similarities are very specific. Aim down the sights of your weapon, for example, and you can trace your bullets as they arc through the air, helping you adjust trajectory for longer shots. Human enemies are also surprisingly durable unless you shoot them in the head, which is nearly always an instant kill.

Broadly, though, it’s the combination of thoughtful positioning, tense corner-peeking, and frantic bursts of movement that mark the combat out as Stalker. I assault the complex using a low quality submachinegun, which jams after just two shots. I dash into cover to try and unjam it, but the bandits immediately flush me out with a grenade. I manage to find fresh cover behind a tree, but not before taking multiple shots to the body, which require patching up with bandages. It’s tough, nasty, exhilarating stuff, and although the AI can be spotty, sometimes rushing you in a way that leaves them exposed, it’s generally adept at outfoxing you.

After rescuing Gloomy (which he isn’t particularly grateful for) I pursue the main objective, leading me to a settlement that’s divided in its loyalties. On the one hand are the veteran stalkers, who are unofficially represented by a fellow called the Gaffer, the other is a paramilitary group led by one General Zotov. Both want me to find a stalker named Squint, who is accused of murdering one of Zotov’s men. Naturally, they have their own reasons for wanting him found, and their own leads on how to do it.

In exploring the village and preparing to search for Squint, it becomes clear Stalker 2 goes unexpectedly hard on narrative delivery. All of this info is divulged through involved conversations with branching dialogues and full voice acting. According to Grygorovych, this has been a major focus of the sequel’s development. “We wanted to make a very story driven game with a lot of a narrative content,” he says. “It’s definitely not a Baldur’s Gate, but it still has lot of different lines, different branches, and even inside one dialogue you often have lot of options.” The reason for this, Grygorovych explains, is to heighten the role-playing elements of being a Stalker in the Zone. “I wanted the player to believe he is in the Zone and he can role play himself,” he says. “You can, in [the] same situation, work different dialogues and get very different emotions.”

Grygorovych is right when he says Stalker 2 is no Baldur’s Gate – tonally the writing is nowhere near as nuanced – at least not in the English language version (Stalker 2 is a game you may well be tempted to play in Ukrainian for the truly authentic experience). That said, the English voiceover is a vast improvement over the original trilogy, and in my view is superior to the localisation work 4A Games did for Metro: Exodus.

Yet while Stalker’s 2 extra narrative heft is surprising, this is a series that has always thrived on its systems; how the Zone and its inhabitants interrelate with the player and each other. In my short time in the Zone, I saw these systems at play frequently. In one example, I was sneaking around the wall of a compound when a mutant rushed me from the side, only to trigger a fire anomaly just before it attacked me, causing it to run squealing off into the Zone. I also saw bandits fighting mutants, NPC Stalkers fighting bandits, and one stalker, who I’d just finished talking to for a quest, intervened in a bandit skirmish I was having as he wandered back to the village.

While I can’t speak to Stalker 2 as a whole, the chunk I saw seemed highly dynamic and laced with emergent potential. Such flexibility isn’t exclusive to the open world either. It’s also weaved into quests and the campaign. To find Squint, for example, you can complete a couple of sub-objectives the game points you toward, or you can do what I did, which is just… find him. A landmark caught my eye and I decided to explore it (I won’t say which landmark for risk of spoiling the experience) and it just so happened to be where Squint was holed up. The narrative smoothly adapted to this, moving on to the next phase of the mission, where you can choose to kill Squint on General Zotov’s behalf, or help him escape the Zone by retrieving an artefact from a nearby anomaly.

This kind of reactivity is what GSC hopes will mark Stalker 2 out from other open world games. “A lot of games provide you a lot of freedom of movement, where you move, but not so much branching in how your story would develop next,” Grygorovych says. “When we are developing the experience we want to provide for the player, we never look to how they did it in this game or [that] open world game, because we know that we are very different game from the beginning.”

The surprises didn’t end here either. I agreed to help Squint by retrieving the artefact, and descended into a cave system for a fraught encounter with a bloodsucker – a tentacle-faced mutant that can turn invisible. But after defeating the creature and retrieving the artefact, I received a “mission failed” notification. Excuse me, Stalker 2, but don’t you mean “mission succeeded”? I soon found out the game was in the right, as upon returning to Squint’s hidey-hole, I discovered that he was dead.

I’m still not entirely clear what happened, whether a mutant or bandit had rocked up and killed him, whether Squint had accidentally triggered one of the many traps he’d set up to defend himself from such an ambush, or whether this was a good old fashioned bug. I asked the developer supervising the session if this was supposed to happen, to which he shrugged, explaining that Squint was not a particularly important character. This much certainly proved true. Despite “failing” to help Squint, the story continued unhindered, and I got to sell the artefact I found for a nice cash bonus.

While Grygorovych’s narrative comparison to Baldur’s Gate 3 may be a stretch, the two games are similar in another way. As Larian’s game harks back to the systemic roleplaying of Ultima and recontextualises it for a modern audience, Stalker 2 excavates a bunch of semi-forgotten ideas about open-world gaming. In an age of clockwork soulslikes and heavily curated experiences like God of War: Ragnarök, the flexibility and adaptability of Stalker’s 2 irradiated sandbox is refreshing and intriguing. If it continues to expand and elaborate upon that across the whole of its exclusion Zone, then GSC Game World might just have something special on their hands.