When your most important survival tool is a rusty bolt, you know you're living in some sort of Hell. When you're playing the prequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, you practically confirm it.
Not much has changed between Clear Sky and Shadow of Chernobyl. The world is still full of other-worldly artefacts and an awful lot of radiation, death can still come for you before you know it, but entire factions are vying for control over whatever is left, and you're in the middle of it all, a walking anomaly.
I didn't have the most successful of times in Shadow of Chernobyl, but I was intrigued by what it tried to do. Is the expandalone story of Clear Sky an easier entry point into this harsh universe, or just more of the same?
Get your bag of bolts ready and we'll find out.
Frustrations
Clear Sky is an old game, running on some funky X-Ray Engine. Windows 10, at one point especially, was notorious for not liking games in any form, but to me at least it seems to be much more likely that I'll have a good time getting something to run these days.
Not Clear Sky, though, oh no. After a suspiciously quick install from GOG, the splash screen loaded up and gave a rather common and easily fixable fsgame.ltx error. Some duplicated lines of text need removing, but after that, you're good to go.
Only I wasn't. We're now not making any progress passed this splash screen at all. Why not? Various Internet forums point out that, for some reason, you can get around this hanging by disabling audio devices. Obvious, when you think about it...
No progress with that, unless you count a new error message scattered amongst various "xrengine isn't responding" pop-ups. I was running out of ideas and patience. I downloaded a fan-made mode to fix a load of bugs, but before I even unzipped it, thought that I'd just start from scratch and see if that made a difference. Uninstall, redownload, reinstall.
Fun Times
Of course it would load first time, no problems...
Finally back into the wastelands, we get an incredibly brief introduction to the world in the form of a cutscene showing our mercenary protagonist Scar leading a bunch of scientists somewhere.
What are they investigating? Who are they working for? Crossing over some train tracks, the sky turns red, the floor turns red, shit gets real and we cut to the Clear Sky faction base, where we are lying on a bed as two bewildered doctors-of-sorts marvel at our inexplicable survival.
If you can see that. The subtitles are displayed in a chat log but don't persist long enough for you to read, and the only part of the plot I can make out is that some weird event happened and I'm the only survivor.
Waking up, we have a brief chat with Clear Sky leader Lebedev, who tells us to go to the bar, and it's the barman who serves as our first lengthy conversation partner, in the same fashion as Shadow of Chernobyl - seemingly endless dialogue windows plonked right over someone's face.
Further Frustrations
These lines of dialogue are voiced, but because there was so much of it dumped into my face from the start I tended to skim read the paragraph, click the one response option I had, and skimmed the next paragraph too.
The story involves some weird stuff that needs to be investigated, and we are perhaps the weirdest of the lot, having survived this violent emission of something or other that killed everyone else.
The conversation is cut short, so to speak, by news of some Clear Sky members in trouble. Having proven ourselves capable of going to a bar and chatting, we're given some equipment, blindfolded so that we don't know the location of this base, and sent out into the field to help.
I'm reliably informed that Clear Sky has a more streamlined HUD, removing some complicated features and replacing them with yet more complicated features. I don't know what has changed, and you might get the impression that I don't really care.
First-person survival games come in many forms, but I'm most familiar with those that are easy on the player, or light on the survival. Absorbing too much radiation in Fallout 3 is something I can deal with because of audio cues, HUD elements, and an even sicklier shade of green dominating my field of view. Most importantly, I can deal with it because it generally isn't too much of a problem to face.
In Clear Sky, you are dumped into a swamp full of radiation, which is neatly displayed by some visual graphic orb effect, but best seen by lobbing a bolt ahead of you and watching it either survive unharmed or get zapped into oblivion.
The idea is that you move carefully and keep an eye out, and audio cues will help you here as well, with a device on your person that keeps an electronic eye out for areas of this radiation where all-important anomalies are found.
They give you buffs to various stats and mechanics, and this tutorial swamp of sorts has you learn how to navigate with the aid of bolts, and then learn how to snag prizes from out of the middle of all this radiation. Or that was the plan.
The outpost looks deserted, but I can hear someone shouting. Bodies lay scattered on the floor, and being a survival shooter, you know the first thing to do is to go through the pockets.
Your inventory is quite sizable, containing clothing, weaponry, ammunition, medication, food, and whatever else might serve a use in this apocalypse, be it for consuming or trading. Sadly, I've no time to actually have a look at what there is available as we're attacked by beasts.
I don't know what they are, but they don't look too please by my presence. Luckily for me, they don't seem too clever, and go down without too much effort, though now I have an assault rifle with no rounds to assault anything with. Still, a shotgun and a pistol ought to keep me going for the time being.
What do we do now that this threat has passed?
This could have been an interesting story - and may still turn out to be one - but the way Clear Sky presents itself feels a little off. It all feels disconnected, both in terms of one scene flowing into another, and for these vast text dumps that you've no choice but to sit through if you want to have any chance of following what is going on.
I know from having played Shadow of Chernobyl that is this how the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games do things, but it's not the way to engage players, especially me. Text isn't necessarily the problem. I'll read logs if I have to, but a story can be told in many ways, and most of them are better than what's on display in Clear Sky.
I've heard that this game is considered by some to be more of an expandalone than a full sequel or prequel, and that doesn't mean it is a bad thing at all. Smaller stories can still pack a punch and can be finely crafted and focused.
But Clear Sky is an open-world first-person survival game where you can interact with multiple opposing factions in whatever way you want. It's not a focused, linear story, but it sure starts like a poor one.
While it may have been more interesting to hold this in a different location, at least this section shows Clear Sky's gameplay a little more clearly. I've got a PDA now, with a map of the action, and can see a few points of interest on it, including my objective.
Further Fun Times
It's a fight between people, and I've managed to flank these bandits who are attacking some Clear Sky members. Result!
My assault rifle is still in need of ammo, but my pistol is at the ready. It pays to not reload in such an exposed manner, but at least I had the drop on my targets. The shooting in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games is one of the first things to be modded by players, as the mechanics are those of pea-shooters versus railguns, and not in the player's favour.
I hadn't yet modded Clear Sky, but also hadn't yet encountered too much difficulty with the shooting, bar my tendency to not conserve ammo, I suppose.
There wasn't much time to hang around, though, as the Clear Sky troops scurried off into the bushes, presumably beckoning me to do so as well. I think I followed them because it felt right to do that. Imagine that. A video game getting you to do something because it felt natural, and wasn't glaringly pointed out to you with a HUD pointer.
As it happens, I probably should have hoovered up as much as I could before 'urgently' moving on, as I was about to assault a fishing hut with a shotgun, which doesn't sound all that terrible until you remember that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is a game where death is swift at every difficulty level.
Clearly, I was under the mistaken impression that a shotgun from 15 feet is effective. It's not. If anything, it just calls attention to you, and all it takes to kill you after that is a single shot from... well, I don't even know what got me in the end, but it was enough to send me falling through a hole in the pier into the swamp below.
A fitting end for someone capable of surviving unimaginable weirdness.
Final Word
Clear Sky is, from my brief spell with it, much like Shadow of Chernobyl in that it is unusual, it is really rather lovely looking in places, and it is an outright unplayable mess, be it for the engine it runs on, the bugs that need fixing, or the design decisions that lead to weapons being literally useless.
To be fair, though, I haven't really experienced enough of this first hand to know just how bad an unmodded Clear Sky is. It could be a refined entry that builds upon Shadow of Chernobyl for the better, providing even more tense survival for fans of this genre or setting, I just wouldn't know.
With the effort it took to get running, the vast amount of text dumps and the speed at which I died, it's unlikely I'll be dipping my toes into this swamp any time soon. After Shadow of Chernobyl, I was interested in watching someone far better than I play it instead. Maybe, when I do, I'll still be interested enough to see what happened before that story here in Clear Sky.
But maybe it's a game for the fans and only the fans... and those fans mod it an awful lot. It's a tough sell. On the one hand, you have an ambitious engine that looks great, and a setting that you do want to explore, even if you live in fear of it. But on the other, you have an overly ambitious engine that can lead to frustrating gameplay that you don't want to see too often.
I have seen tales of quick saves in the middle of a fight getting reloaded to see not only the enemy return to their default, perhaps even semi-friendly patrols, but of the time of day changing too. If saving a game can be as much of a gamble as merely deciding to shoot at a target at range or not clearly is for the shooting mechanics, how much nonsense is too much nonsense for the sake of a good time?
There could be a good time here, I wouldn't know. I'm not that eager to find out, as I don't see too much difference between the games right now, but at least the series is something I'm aware of now. If you can put up with its faults, it might be just the kind of game you want to explore for hours on end.
Come to think of it, there's another post-apocalyptic first-person open-world survival game full of bugs that I put up with for hours on end... is it just the gulf in difficulty that blocks me from playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. as much as I played Fallout 3?
That's a question for my future self to ponder some time.
Fun Facts
The X-Ray Engine is actually quite impressive when you can find the time to admire it, coming with all sorts of attention to detail, like water dripping down surfaces in the rain and rays of light piercing through the clouds to dry it all up again.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, developed by GSC Game World, first released in 2008.
Version played: PC, 2008.