Visually Chernobylite is something of a mixed bag. While I think it robs your decisions of any emotional weight they could have had, it’s just an incredibly cool mechanic for a scifi game that I had a lot of fun with. A late game story turn allows you to travel back in time and enter alternate realities formed by paths you didn’t take. Interestingly, there is a diegetic way to undo decisions if the consequences aren’t to your liking. These are great because they’re never a binary good/bad thing, but always more about balancing helping the characters you like against helping your own agenda. There are several points within Chernobylite’s story where you’re asked to make critical decisions. You can level up towards making it so stealth kills are less taxing on the sanity bar, but most of the time you’ll want to steer clear of fights if it can be helped. On anything but the easiest difficulty, resources are scarce enough that taking another person’s life carries a lot of mechanical weight. Killing another human being will always have an adverse effect on Igor’s sanity, which you have to bring back up either by resting during missions or by crafting and consuming calming tea. You have to manage Igor’s health and sanity while undertaking these missions, which makes enemy encounters more tense than they tend to be in games like this. The areas are littered with points of interest that can lead you to resources, encounters with higher level enemies, NPCs to trade with, or tiny self-contained horror vignettes. There’s about five or six main locations you will become intimately familiar with over the course of the 10-15 hour long story. The missions too take place within gated off levels rather than a massive open world. It fits rather perfectly with the game’s bleak tone and very soon return trips to the base became something I looked forward to after missions, especially in the late game when the challenge starts to ramp up. It’s almost hygge in its execution because your task is to make this limited space as comfortable as possible, instead of morphing a massive map to your heart’s content. Unlike Fallout however, Chernobylite gives you a somewhat small warehouse to build instead of a massive open world. You can build furniture, different crafting benches for various purposes, as well as facilities specifically geared towards comfort like light sources, air purifiers, TVs, etc. The base-building and management elements seem more than a little inspired by Fallout 4 right down to the UI, but I guess Todd Howard was right: it just works. I was expecting a rich story full of twists and turns, but I quickly found my experience with Chernobylite settling into a routine. As it stands, the game does just find coasting on its vibes and mood. That isn’t an inherently bad thing, but I do feel like a few more rewrites could’ve crafted a story that brings all of this together in a satisfying manner. Personally I thought the vastly more central mystery got somewhat lost in the relatively tropey story of warring factions and political unrest.ĭespite making a very intimate and psychologically-charged first impression, Chernobylite’s story is much more interested in its themes and ideas than it is with its characters’ interiority. Everything you do is in service to your ultimate goal of finding out what happened to Tatyana all those years ago, or so the game says. The missions themselves can range from simple resource gathering to looking for specific items, resolving conflicts, assassinations, etc. To put it somewhat reductively, imagine if Fallout Shelter went for a tumble in the hay with Silent Hill 2. Along the way, you gain new allies who join you at the base, prompting you to build more and more specific things to maximise their comfort and mental well-being. After a brief intro, you camp in a warehouse and what follows is a relatively predictable gameplay loop where you run missions during the day, and build out your base at night. I only wish they were able to craft a story deserving of such a place.Ĭhernobylite puts you in the shoes of a scientist named Igor who, years after the accident, has returned to the zone to solve the mysterious disappearance of his fiancée Tatyana. I cannot speak how accurately the end result portrays the locations the dev team spent days meticulously scanning, but I can tell you it is one of the most hauntingly breathtaking settings I’ve explored in a videogame. The primary appeal of developer The Farm 51’s Chernobylite, for me, was the fact that they built the game using photogrammetric scans of the real-life of the plant and its surrounding area.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |