It’s one of those titles that I saw, promptly forgot, saw again and remembered I’d wanted to play it. For whatever reason, I always sort of associated this with F.E.A.R. Maybe it was just the whole acronym thing.

I agree that most Russian/former-Soviet games are pretty deep and quite hard to wrap your head around, and require a lot of effort to immerse yourself in. It’s a good game, I’m not knocking it, I just think that they wasted an opportunity to explore the one true post-nuclear environment by creating another one on top of it, I guess.

Being thrown in at the deep end is fun, most of the time, but usually because there are set-pieces or many characters with strong personalities from the off. Honestly? I think I turned away from the game because I actually became quite depressed by how isolated I felt inside the game, which is pretty powerful when I think about it. I may return to it at some point, but I guess my main argument was that I struggled with accepting the fiction, and that’s my biggest turn-off with a new game.

That’s kind of the point of STALKER: that not much of it makes sense to begin with. As you battle on through the game, it clunks slowly into place. The stuff you point to and criticise is all acknowledged, if not completely explained.

As for the setting and its incongruence with reality… well, yes, as the Zone here is a fictionalised one, its history altered so that, actually in STALKER’s reality Chernobyl suffered two disasters. The second one caused the anomalies and artefacts to appear, and people have been investigating them for a couple of decades since. Hence why people are there at all – the amount of research they’ve been doing into this stuff means there are full-on settlements in the Zone. But the astronomical value of these artefacts, and a race for scientific discovery, is what’s led to the conflicts between factions. This is all expanded upon throughout the game, and particularly in semi-sequel Clear Sky.

The reason it’s not there at the start is because, well, because you’re an amnesiac who knows nothing about this place. You could argue that’s a pretty hackneyed plot device, but – no spoilers – even that ties to a huge twist which actually uses the amnesia trick to create a surprisingly clever story point.

I dunno. I can’t help but feel you were expecting the game to be something it isn’t. It’s a snapshot of an alternate reality, and a story of discovery. It ain’t Fallout and it ain’t BioShock. It ain’t really an FPS or an RPG, despite having both first-person shooting and role-playing contained within. It’s its own beast. And I’d be curious to know how many Russian/former-Soviet games you’ve played in the past, actually, because I tend to think they’re pretty impenetrable (and hugely distinctive) until you’ve really got stuck into a few.