After a long working day, video games can be a wonderful way to relax. You can run wonderful landscapes endlessly with some music on. You can fish in the most distant mountains. You can organize some furniture to create your dream home.
Or – hear me – you can endure the living and non -living horror in a supernatural mutated landscape, in the middle of Chornobyl. Perfect.
Stalker 2 can actually be a cozy game
I never played the original stalker, but I loved it especially like the subway: Exodus, so when I was looking for a game to get stuck in recently, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl caught my attention. An open world game about surviving the zone, which consists of several areas that have been exceeded with radiation, deviations and mutants, and is notoriously brutal and unforgettable when it comes to the threats you will face.
And so, of course, it has become my relaxing ritual after work right now. I upload it, went to explore some places or take on some assignments, listen to nature's sounds (ignore the temporary banshee-like screams that echo in the distance) and let the evening develop into all the stupid little shenanigans I get into.
There is something about the drawing of its game loop that makes it feel particularly chilly, even though the game is very not “chilly”. I love to be able to just wander around my own pace, handle my little backpack with the prey I collect and stop at campfires dotted around the map to sit for a while and play guitar. Sometimes I am interrupted by things that would not love anything more than kill me, yes, but a little danger does not mean that I cannot be cozy.
No plans, no expectations
I think that what makes Stalker 2 feel special cold is that I don't have to have a plan. I don't have to worry about what to do, I just have to choose one direction and explore, or track a mission and go and do what it is. Sure, there will be deviations, there will be caves and monsters, and there will be many more of the unexplained banshee screams, but I don't have to worry about anything else. There is a main story, but it is not predominantly demanding. I am not chased by a big bad or pressed in specific directions, and although many open world games are happy to let you explore freely, there is something so relaxed about Stalker 2.
Even with an unpredictable dangerous world, it is what makes it so relaxing. I don't know what to expect, so I don't worry about any information – I will just see what I come across, see what comes my way and have fun while I go. It is a terrible, beautiful map to explore, and I do not feel that I have any threatening world ending threats or larger goals than life; I just do what I want to do, fascinated by the strange deviations when I walk, and even before terror, I just feel calm compared to the attention that many other games require from me.
And then I came to the Vallmo fields, and I was immediately stressed by the persistent and unstoppable threat of the death of petals floating around. I have to go back there for a couple of stash, but I don't want to.
