Games With Grey

Shadow of Chernobyl is riddled with flaws; the title’s sole saving grace is relegated to gameplay, a profound if muted construction, a construction mired in inconsistency, the game’s defining attribute. For the entire experience is a constant sequence of highs and lows, resulting in a strange – if almost magical – unpredictability. But imbalances exist alongside inconsistency, too; the highs are monumental, towering, while the lows which accompany them are abysmal and painfully felt. In terms of genre, broadly the game is a dull, conventional FPS. On a deeper level, the gunplay is tactical in nature rather than excessively arcadey. The freneticism of a game like, say, Doom 2016 is absent here, displaced in favor of a plodding gameplay pacing. Traversal systems are pared back; the entire experience is grounded, frustratingly so. This groundedness does suggest realism and believability, of course – the player is not some superhuman individual, wildly and lithely leaping about a combat arena, evading enemy bullets, moving, ever moving, sometimes in a ballet of sorts. Here, any aggressive displays are punished severely – rushing is typically a poor idea, meaning the player will hug tight towards cover, sustainer and comforter.

While this knowledge is imparted almost from the first – watch corners, proceed slowly, engage in quiet observation always – Shadow of Chernobyl’s gameplay shows a very steep learning curve. This steepness is potentially alienating, of course, and it is easy to understand how any given player might quit the game after two or three hours, for those two or three hours are passed in a war of attrition; frustrations are constancies; enjoyment is fleeting. But once those painful and sluggish hours are behind the player, gameplay – gunplay – finally hits its stride; enjoyment abounds. By this point, the player likely has a fair grasp of the core gameplay mechanics and systems (though some minutia evade full understanding even by the end game, owing to a willed developer vagueness). Now, the essentialness of cover is understood. Alongside this knowledge comes diminished frustration, and the experience generally is like a constant, rapid march of progress. And gameplay generally is characterized by progression, though of an unconventional sort. As time passes, ever passes, gameplay ideologies and expectations are internalized, meaning the player of the late game is quite detached from the player at the narrative’s opening. For that former figure possesses an enlightenment evading that latter player, though that enlightenment’s existence never trivializes the overall gameplay experience.  Consider also the firearms proper, diverse indeed, diverse in function and in lethality, each contributing to the progression systems. Starting weapons are painfully ineffective in cutting down even the paltriest opposition. But in time, the arsenal expands; potential enjoyment expands. 

The core gameplay loop which arises here is engrossing and rewarding indeed. For much of the narrative proper, the experience is generally like so – exploration / combat / exploration / combat, and so on in a consistent and predictable sequence. This constant vacillation preserves overall freshness by instilling valuable diversification. And so the player will explore this sprawling environment and then that, all the while engaging in periodic gunfights, as some hostile enemy NPC waits for the player character, ready to pounce upon him and drop him to the cold dirt forever. Even bestial mutants have their own menacing, distressing presence.  Whether fighting human grunt or lethal mutant, the core loop impressively weds together these two key pillars of exploration and combat. For success in combat of course requires resources, ample resources – see most prominently ammunition, at a premium. Some ammunition types exist in relative abundance. Pistol ammo is especially commonplace, for instance, in that almost all enemy types carry a sidearm. Other ammunition types, conversely, can scarcely be discovered through exploration nor can they be looted off opposition; in these instances, ammunition is acquirable only through merchants. Here the core gameplay loop flourishes, and the title adopts an approach not dissimilar to, say, Oblivion. For in that game, the player might navigate vast Cyrodiil, dungeon diving – or simply delighting in the exploration act, stumbling upon this occurrence, then that. If one does engage in dungeon diving, a trip back to a larger town, where larger, more affluent merchants are installed, is inevitable. For here, the player can hawk accumulated armor sets or weapons, while they can also have their own equipment repaired. Depending on character build, meanwhile, these city visits are especially vital, as the player may have very limited carrying capacity, while archers must voyage back to civilization for additional arrows. 

Parallels between Shadow of Chernobyl and Oblivion, then, are rather immense, even as that latter title possesses a depth totally lacking in that former title. For the RPG mechanics seen there are crudely and lazily implemented here. True, the absence of conventional EXP systems prompts a compelling streamlining and uniqueness, though it simultaneously fosters simplicity; the game is far more FPS than RPG, absolutely. If a player enters the game with this knowledge in mind, then they will derive greater, more instantaneous and protracted enjoyment. As matters stand, the player need only engage in inventory management (which is actually a strange if sometimes frustrating delight), lavishing especial attention upon the collected artifacts, objects discovered in the natural process of exploration. Each of these objects possesses multiple positive buffs – quite frequently accompanied by debuffs. Some increase endurance, for instance, enabling the player to sprint for a longer duration. Others increase health values, making them powerful and sustaining indeed. Some unexpected, anomalous complexity does exist here, as a fair amount of statistics are presented (though only poorly explained). See values like bleeding, rupture, electric resistance, and so on. Still: while many of these items only have situational usefulness, actually stumbling upon them prompts considerable delights. The player ought to have a fair variety of these artifacts on hand, for with diversity comes empowerment; the prepared player can swap between these objects to counter the situation at hand. Inventory management is never tedious, and the inventory screen is easily navigated, even on console. 

These objects become increasingly essential as the narrative progresses ever onwards. For by the late game, a sea change, terrible and dramatic, has indeed transpired. Now, the engrossing and diverse exploration / combat / exploration / combat design approach is completely displaced, in favor of this new approach: combat / combat / combat / combat. In this regard, the game loses its way and its identity, as the tacticallness evinced elsewhere is slightly neglected, mostly for frustrating and arbitrary reasons. The player can turn away from the core narrative thread at any moment, true (the game is open and incentivizes exploration, though it is far from a full fledged open world experience), meaning they can defray combat for a fair span of time in direct favor of exploration, but by this point all I sought was the ending. For frustration was truly mounting, just as cheapness mounted. In one moment, early on, the player trades bullets with bandits, menacing if unarmored and accordingly vulnerable. But in one moment in the late midgame, a new enemy faction spawns – the Monolith soldiers. One such class of this faction is clad in heavy armor, which expectantly expands health values – and the threat posed. In a flash, the player must grapple with an opposition which possesses three times as much health as the litany of foes earlier encountered. Immensely challenging to fight, melees are like wars of attrition. I truly believe that success in these engagements – and even in earlier engagements, before the gunplay’s complexities were relatively understood – would have eluded me forever if the generous manual save system was absent. But it is here, and is heavily relied upon. While the saving process is essentially instantaneous, engaging with these menus disrupts overall gameplay pacing. And so it does. Here is a beautiful illustration of the game’s low / high / low / high structure: the opening is torturous, the midgame is richly satisfying, while the late game expands upon the tortuousness thriving beforehand. Periodically, the game boldly shows innovation and enjoyment, though both are drowned as the narrative concludes. Gunplay, complex if intuitive gunplay, maintains its enjoyability, but riveting gameplay alone cannot stave off disaster.     

It is easy and instinctual to wax poetic on Shadow of Chernobyl’s gameplay, but to do so is to minimize the rampant failings present elsewhere – see most obviously the narrative, steeped in an alienating vagueness (which must not be confused with minimalism). By the narrative’s conclusion, I had essentially forgotten the occurrences of the narrative’s opening moments. Much of this unmemorability stems from narrative delivery, rather than narrative content. Formal cutscenes have a limited presence, numbering six or seven in total. Fair enough. But these cutscenes, when they play, appear very cheap and uncreative aesthetically, while they are brief and brisk indeed. And cinematicness is rejected, too. Were the narrative conveyed in a more typical fashion, with longer and more numerous, dynamic cutscenes, the story would only surge. This does not happen; the narrative clings to laziness – and unintrusiveness. And so the player is only provided the name of the player character, a figure known as the Marked One. Alongside his introduction comes a motivation – hunt down the elusive and fabled Strelok, a figure of fair notoriety in the Zone, where the narrative proper transpires. Much of the succeeding narrative involves this pursuit, though in time the narrative undergoes a sort of splintering, as the Marked One inevitably grows embroiled in factional warfare, a fair few factions trading blows and bullets in the sprawling Zone. This constant warfare does animate the gameworld, creates the illusion of life, though it is difficult to truly care about this warfare or the beings that are waging it, just as it is difficult to care about the twist ending advanced towards the game’s conclusion. Empathy and engagement both are lacking here, all owing to the pervasive laziness. 

Some instances of laziness are potentially attributable to budgetary constraints, to be sure; the Ukrainian developers here are far from a conventional AAA studio, lacking the funds correlative to their largeness. Reflecting this, voice acting had to be somewhat minimized. Alongside this minimization comes a redoubled emphasis upon traditional, unspoken dialogue. While the writing quality isn’t superb, this writing shows a strange sense of charm and heart. But troubles arise even here, in that so much narrative development is literally buried beneath these NPCs and their words. The player must deliberately remove themselves from the directed path to gain a greater sense of the narrative’s depth. So much narrative heft, then, is forgotten. Or, perhaps, that heft goes unacknowledged and completely glossed over. Again, one yearns for a more conventional approach to narrative development. For some promise does exist here. See only the fabled Wish Granter, a creature resting within the Zone’s very center, a creature capable of (expectantly) satisfying any given discoverer’s wildest fantasies. The creature is rightly revered and sought, and actually discovering the beast at the narrative’s conclusion was rather satisfying – if anticlimactic. Still: the drama is concluded, even as the events of Act I go forgotten.  

The core environment – the Zone – is brimming with moodiness and oppressiveness; it acts upon the player in a manner the narrative does not. It would be inaccurate to state that creativity is absent. It is more accurate to state that it is of an unconventional cast. Rather than embracing vibrancy, vibrant reds, ochres, violets, and so on, the developers instead chose to embrace characteristic bleakness. Grays abound, as do browns; general muddiness and murkiness overtake all. Decidedly Ukrainian or Russian in nature, the developers captured a true sense of place, literally grounding the narrative. For this was a fallen world, one subject to a cataclysmic devastation, a devastation repelling many – most – inviting others, principally the Stalkers and those like them, those who venture into the Zone for insight (or more frequently booty and an expansion of fortune). So many games fixate on the vibrancy rejected here, rightly realizing that a gay and tranquil atmosphere disarms the player, and subsequently engrosses and relaxes them. 

See for instance Far Cry New Dawn, a game only tangentially related to this one. This tangent, however, is valuable indeed, for it speaks much of Shadow of Chernobyl’s overall identity. In that former game, released a fair few years after the latter, a cataclysmic event has also occurred. At the narrative’s opening some fifteen years have passed, and those passed years have fundamentally altered the landscape – though here in a wildly and beautifully unexpected way. For here, violets and ochres do dominate; environmentally, that game could not be further removed from this game’s environments. With its grayness and brownness, the game is more neatly aligned with the Fallout games, particularly New Vegas, with its dull, sprawling desertscapes, only occasionally punctuated by glitz and glamor. All of these valid comparisons do suggest a dearth of originality, to be sure, though still originality ever has its place. The pervasive sense of loneliness is a major achievement, for alongside this loneliness comes dreariness and oppression. Cleverly, too, with its environments the game experiments with genres, embracing largeness though scaling back that embrace, and in so doing avoid (mostly) the pitfalls plaguing the open-world genre, like tediousness and repetition. Conversely, with their largeness, the environments are occasionally unenjoyable and boring to explore, partially because of their barrenness, partially because of their saminess. For essentially, the first environment is nearly identical to the last. This does foster unity and cohesiveness, fosters believability, but greater environmental diversity would have dramatically positive effects.

Considered in its totality, Shadow of Chernobyl’s flaws outclass its assets, successes. Ample, unquestioned praise could be lavished upon the gunplay, which controls in a distinctly unique fashion, wedding together tacticallness with a fair bit of energy. Highly difficult, that difficulty is a personal source of frustration and delight (though more often frustration wins this melee). For this high difficulty fosters a heavy try / fail / try / fail gameplay approach, whereas so many other, more conventional FPS games invite player successes almost from the first, even if playing on an elevated difficulty setting. While the brutalness here does preserve tension, ultimately that brutalness deals the experience a mortal blow. Pacing is especially swiped at. And pacing generally is plagued by inconsistencies, the late game especially defined by constant stops and starts. Reflecting this, I began to truly and zealously desire the narrative’s conclusion. With this mind, I essentially raced to the end game, ignoring all side quests, ignoring protracted exploration and scavenging – in short, I ignored everything the game and its developers’ incentivized, not because I didn’t appreciate their labors – for I certainly do – but because I felt they were boring and unneeded, completing pointless outside of their world-building functions. When the narrative’s conclusion did indeed come, then, adulation overflowed, as I was armed with the knowledge that some different, potentially greater game could be tackled in earnest. 

In many ways, then, Shadow of Chernobyl is overwrought, even as relatively speaking the playtime is lacking – here is no sprawling epic RPG. But here is a game which fails even as it rejects sprawlingness and epicness. The gameplay alone stands in unquestioned greatness, evoking considerable satisfaction (though a satisfaction ever and always tempered by frustration). Exploring the world, with its commanding strangeness, fosters some delights, just as it fosters some the unnerving and distressing. The environments, the gray skies with billowy gray clouds, act upon the player, oppress them. Moody, sometimes intense rainfall contributes to this pervasive dreariness. But much of Shadow of Chernobyl is foundationally forgettable – see most obviously the core narrative. While the motivations for player action are forgettable and easily forgotten, the general act of traversal prompts ample if unusual delights. I may remember nothing of the Marked One or the Wish Granter. I will likely remember, though, my first forays into the Zone, where docile NPCs strum their guitars in safety, where docile NPCs speak in a decidedly Slavic language, furthering world-building, grounding the world in space and time. But ultimately the failings override and eclipse the successes. Torturously, too, the game feels like a fifty hour investment, when in actuality the narrative spans but ten or fifteen hours. Here is no engrossing experience, but here is a tedious one, where each passing moment is painfully spent.