This ensured I had to scavenge for firearms, ammunition, and upgrades to guarantee success, rather than extend the amount of time I spent with the functional but unspectacular gunplay. Personally, I dropped the combat difficulty and upped the survival and base management difficulties. This allows you to fine-tune the game and focus on the elements you enjoy most. Thankfully, Chernobylite offers independent difficulty settings for resource availability, combat difficulty, and base management (which covers both crafting costs and the sensitivity of your team to base conditions). Each element is mechanically competent and engaging, yet also streamlined to ensure narrative pacing is not affected. This is followed by an evening at your base, conversing with companions, crafting base improvements and new gear, before retiring for the night to start a new day (or engage in a VR-like investigation if you’ve collected enough evidence). It can take a while for all the impacts of your decisions to become apparent – making some betrayals and mistakes all the more infuriating – but you can always tweak the past to your preference and try again.Ĭhernobylite’s basic gameplay loop is easy to explain: you’ll tackle missions – from the first-person perspective – engaging in scavenging, stealth, and combat in a semi-open world, as you pursue short story quests with variable outcomes at the end. Depending on your decisions before and during the final heist, you may prefer to return to the timeline and alter events repeatedly. As you’ll want to complete all investigations, acquire key gear, and keep your companions loyal for the finale, this becomes an entire metagame of its own. With enough Chernobylite crystals, he can freely examine key decisions he has made and alter those events, changing the future, potentially revealing new missions, create new opportunities to find facts and clues for his investigations, and shift companion loyalty (as choices often split the team). Unlike so many games that would use this as an argument to replay the entire game, Chernobylite gives Igor has a portal gun that allows him to cross both space and time, so these choices and the consequences are not set in stone (from a certain perspective).ĭeath – either during gameplay, a scripted event, or (hilariously) “self-annihilation” – sends Igor into a fractal dimension between realities.

Almost every main mission ends with a choice, which may result in mutually exclusive outcomes, opening or closing off quest threads. The prologue sets the scene, introducing you to the basic gameplay mechanics and provides you a clear objective to work towards.Īlthough it takes a while to become apparent, Chernobylite’s narrative is non-linear and there is a degree of randomness when it comes to the order you recruit companions. His companions are also all connected to the exclusion zone, and provide a mix of entertaining banter and tragic backstories. In addition to preparing for a renewed heist at the power plant, Igor collects evidence for several key investigations that reveal past events. Why is Igor only returning 30-years later to find Tatyana? Why are the ghostly apparitions of Tatyana so closely associated with the presence of monsters? Why does he own a portal gun powered by the mysterious Chernobylite? Why is Igor fitter than several companions half his age? All these mysteries are revealed as you unravel the plot, and the constant flow of new questions is the greatest hook the game has.

She often acts as his moral compass and voice of reason, though sometimes provides ominous warnings, repeats the lines of other survivors in a raspy voice, or just rambles incoherently. What Igor fails to tell his mercenary companions is that he hears the voice of Tatyana in his mind.

In the years since the disaster, the multinational “NAR” company has purchased the land, officially to prevent intrusions and the spread of contamination, while unofficially conducting experiments using the titular “chernobylite”. He’s in the hunt for his fiancé that disappeared 30 years prior. Chernobylite’s convoluted, intriguing, and often bat-shit crazy narrative kicks off with the player taking control of physicist Igor (the murderous Half-life-style physicist), as he returns to Chernobyl.

Chernobylite psyche