CHERNOBYLITE REVIEW

 Chernobylite is a strange mashup of ideas that orbits a stiff first-person shooter. It's like getting Even by The Farm 51. While Get Even felt like a game that could not get its ideas in order and came across as detached in its attempts to tell a moving story, Chernobylite does an excellent job welcoming us into its world.

The melancholy atmosphere surrounds you like plutonium. It forces you to make big decisions and surrounds you with a group of well-written stalkers. You'll have to get along with them as you pursue spectral visions around the Chernobyl Exclusion zone of your long-lost spouse. That is why Igor, a physicist, has returned to this haunted place.

You can play the entire game as a first-person shooter. Yet, it is possible to get through most of the game without firing one bullet. Part survival game and base-building, you will need to gather resources to upgrade your base. Crafting stations, bedding, crafting stations, and mushroom gardens are all part of the process. You can use mushrooms to make everything, from wooden walls to hand-held nuclear weapons. You'll find some horror elements in it, as that's a rule for any media based on Chernobyl.

Chernobylite, but, is a game about choices. You're constantly confronted with decisions that could (or may not!) affect your story.

For example, early in the game, I killed a shady stalker who refused information. I had before tried to be humane with someone and ended up being trapped in a room filled with poison gas. I killed them with cold, radioactive blood and then took their bodies back to the base.

Later, I met another character who was very similar to the sketchy stalker. I am forcing to choose between lying and coming out about my murderous whoopsie. And whether to invite them to my group. Naturally, I decided the drama-baiting combination of lying and asking them into my ragtag team.

You don't have an obligation to follow your choice. Chernobylite, a substance that can create wormholes in space and time, is an example of this. It can transport you from one location to another or allow you to revisit your past through a dreamscape of floating stones and non-Euclidean geometries.

Every time you die, you wake up in this dreamscape, where you can see how your critical decisions are connected. You can also go back to change them using Chernobylite Shards, which you pay to the interdimensional god-force.

It is a bold move for a game like this to expose the inner workings of its choice system. However, given the complexity of Chernobylite's choices and possible outcomes, developers have every right to do so.

Your choices will impact enemy activity in the Zone, your allies in the Zone, and even its topography. You can destroy the Duga radar at the request of a man who believes he is in a good-vs.-evil conflict.

It's a good sort of weird.