Developer: The Farm 51
Publisher: The Farm 51
Steam Deck Compatibility?: Playable
Rrp: £23.79 (Gog and Steam), £23.99 (Humble and Epic)
Released: 28th July 2021
Available on: Gog, Steam, Humble and Epic
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
Approximate game length: 20 Hours
I’ve had a deep fascination with Chernobyl and Pripyat for a long time. I intend to visit one day, once the conflict is over and Russia has been pushed out. Until the day that happens I just have to content myself with the various virtual versions I get through video games.
You play as Igor Khymynuk, a nuclear physicist who is on a mission to find his missing fiancee. However, there are several issues with that plan, firstly she went missing during the events of Chernobyl which was in 1986 and the game is set thirty years later, which makes it quite the cold case. Secondly, the Exclusion Zone (which is real in case you’re wondering) is under the control of a company called the NAR (who, for clarification, aren’t real in the real world) which hire mercenaries to capture or kill any unauthorised people inside the zone. Lastly, the NAR mercenaries aren’t the only hostile entities in the zone.
Chernobylite is a mission based FPS with base building and survival elements in which you are trying to gather a team to perform a heist. However, instead of trying to rob a vault you’re trying to break into the power plant to find information about your fiancee.
When you start a new game you get the option to change the difficulty settings. Unlike many FPS games though it’s not a single setting. In this game you can change the difficulty of combat, survival and management separately. I left them on the default medium for my playthrough but can confirm you can change them within the settings menu.
The game progresses in in-game days. Within each of these days you will start in your base where you can assign missions (we’ll get to that in a moment), make some improvements to your base (also covered later) and perhaps re-equip if you need to. Until you click the ‘start mission’ button you can keep messing around in the base without fear of time progressing.
You can assign a mission for each of your companions to accomplish and one for yourself. The chances of your companion to complete the mission is shown as a percentage on their portrait and when they return to the base from completing the mission they will bring some crafting materials they’ve gathered. You can send companions to story missions but they won’t complete them, instead they’ll return with materials (just like with normal missions) but will also have lessened the number of guards for when you attempt it. Of course, there’s always a chance that your companion may get captured by the NAR, in which case, you’ll have to find a way to rescue them.
The missions vary in type such as; collecting food, raiding ammo drops, gathering medical supplies, hunting monsters, exploring, story missions, companion quests and vision missions (I’m not sure what to call these as they mostly involve telepathically speaking to your fiancee about life etc).
Once you complete (or fail) a mission you return to your base where you portion out food to your companions, which will affect their health and morale depending on how much you’ve given.
Anytime you’re in the base you get to make improvements to it, assuming you have the crafting materials. This is a very important part of the game as it is here that you can make new equipment such as weapons and armour as well as apply modifications to them to improve their effectiveness.
There is a certain amount of balancing you will need to do as each crafting station you create will cause a drain on the power, which means you’ll need more power generators. But the early game power generators are noisy and use oil which lowers the air quality of your base. To improve the air quality you’ll need to craft air purification units that also drain power and to deal with the noise you’ll need to increase the comfort in the base. I won’t labour the point, but I’m sure you can see where this is going. Now, you may wonder “why do I need to worry about comfort or air quality?” to which the answer is “to improve your companions morale.” You need to keep the morale of your companions up in order for them to be effective.
Ok, we’ve covered the base and your companions (mostly, there’s still a bit more to go), so now it’s time to cover our own role in the game, besides managing the base.
The first thing to cover is an aspect that makes this game a bit different than most FPS’s is that you have three health bars, one represents your physical health, one is your armour and last but not least is your psyche.
Chernobylite isn’t the first game to include what is effectively a sanity meter, but most of the games that have them tend to be specifically horror games such as Dead Space 3, Amnesia or Call of Cthulhu. What makes this one interesting to me is what causes the meter to lower, some of it I expect, like encountering strange events, but in this game killing enemies will also lower it… well, usually it does. I say usually because I sometimes found that my psyche didn’t decrease after killing an enemy and I’m not sure if that’s a bug or a feature. Now I never allowed my psyche to get very low in my playthrough, mostly because I played like I always do when a game gives me the option to be stealthy, which is immediately try to complete missions by never being seen. However, I have done my due diligence and purposely gotten it low enough to see what low psyche does, which is cause auditory and visual hallucinations. Managing your psyche is fairly simple, especially in the later game, as all you need to do is either drink vodka or to eat a specific type of soup.
As you explore the various areas of the Exclusion Zone you’ll find crafting items that you can collect. These materials are used for creating a wide range of things like your equipment but also to make improvements to the base.
To make searching for crafting materials a bit easier you have an item called the ‘Environmental Analyzer’ that not only acts as a dosimeter but also can scan for crafting items within a small radius of you, with each scan having a cool down.
The inventory system works in a manner similar to Resident Evil’s, however, most items you collect only take up a single space and will stack. The only exceptions for an item taking a single space are weapons that take up two and armour that takes up four, neither of these will stack.
Throughout the course of the game you’ll be returning to the various areas of the Exclusion Zone to perform missions. While the terrain of these areas doesn’t change (except for during the course of the story), certain aspects of the environment will, such as where the patches of strong radiation are, how much material there is to collect and where it is, the weather conditions etc.
As you play through the game you’ll gain levels with each level giving you a skill point, there’s no increase to your health or damage, and you can’t even spend that skill point when on a mission. No, that skill point is to be used when you speak to your companions in the base. Each companion has several perks you purchase using the skill points, for example your starting companion, Olivier can improve how much damage the revolver deals, or make your melee stealth takedowns non-lethal (meaning no damage to your psyche) or he can make it so your move faster when crouched. I want to stress that this doesn’t mean you can only have one of those perks, you can purchase all three if you have enough skill points.
There is a trust mechanic that affects the way the companions that you gather feel about you. If it gets too low they will leave your team or in some cases it might cause some form of negative consequence when performing the heist. This trust is affected by the choices you have to make in the story missions. Perhaps in one mission one companion wants you to hack a database while another wants you to destroy the computer. Depending on which one you side with one will increase in trust while the other decreases.
To avoid spoilers I won’t say when this occurs but after a while the game introduces to you the death mechanic. For me this happened in the course of the story but I assume if I had died to an enemy that it would also have occurred then. If you die you are transported to a realm where you can alter the choices that you have made so far, changing the choice costs a very specific and relatively rare resource called chernobylite. If you come to this realm by dying you lose a random item that’s in your inventory.
I won’t lie, this game is a little bit janky, but for the most part it all works. Occasionally an enemy soldier will clip into the floor for a while, or the trees won’t meet the floor. But none of it is game breaking.
This game reminds me of Metro 2033 (and no, not because both games are set in a Slavic country) in the way that it feels like the start of something larger. That the developers will expand on concepts put forth in this game and given that a sequel is in early access at the time of writing I hope that I’m proven right.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
Stalker Series
Metro Series
