Can games be more than just a game? – S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl

To put it bluntly, games are often just an entertainment product made to entertain. And a product made so that a company can make money. It starts to get interesting when games become more than just a game. For example, when games have a message and when games try to shed light on a real-life situation or problem. Then suddenly it makes more sense. The best example I can think of is Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, where the focus was on mental illness and it really convincingly portrayed a person with mental illness.

But games can be much more than that. Just look at S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl – this is a game that is much more than a game – or at least it has become one. Yes, there is a rich man behind it all who needs to recoup his investment, but for those who made it, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is ultimately much more than a game.

As most people know, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series was created by GSC Game World of Ukraine. The first game was released in 2007 and it was a huge success not only for the developers, but also for Ukraine – for several reasons. It was the product that really put Ukraine on the map in many parts of the West, which is important because many people at the time did not really distinguish between Ukraine and Russia. A bit like Hitman helped put Denmark on the map because the outside world thought Denmark and Sweden were kind of the same thing. Ukraine already had a strained relationship with Russia at that time, so the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game was an important product for them.

Therefore, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl was an important project for GSC Game World from the beginning, because they simply could not make a product that did not live up to the first game and the high expectations placed on it. Especially in Ukraine.

The game started badly. It was stopped and restarted several times, but in 2018 production began in earnest and they aimed for a release 4 years later, in 2022.

But as we all know, something happened in February 2022. As early as 2021, the threat from Russia began to affect the team in Kiev. At that time, GSC Game World had a crisis manager, a woman named Mariia. In the fall of 2021, she began making plans for what would happen to the many employees if the unthinkable happened. If Russia attacked their country.

With Mariia at the helm, they decided to draw up an evacuation plan that would move the team to far western Ukraine, to the city of Uzhhorod, right on the border with Slovakia, if the unthinkable happened. In January 2022, shortly before the Russian invasion, a large number of buses were rented and parked outside their offices, stocked with extra fuel and manned 24 hours a day with drivers, ready to immediately head west if Putin’s troops entered their country.

The buses turned out to be a great idea.

Management had planned an evacuation of 183 employees, their families and also former employees. 139 did not want to be evacuated. Four days before the invasion, Mariia decided that the team would be moved to western Ukraine for a short period of time, and if it proved unnecessary, it could be seen as a small excursion with the team. One early Sunday morning, however, computers, servers and much other equipment were packed and loaded onto the buses – and the long journey to western Ukraine began.

The temporary premises in Uzhhorod turned out not to be as temporary as they had hoped. Shortly after arriving, it happened – Russian troops poured across the border into the eastern part of the country. As proof of how important S.T.A.L.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl was to the team, one of the remaining developers in Ukraine, who incidentally joined the army shortly after the Russian invasion, said that “at least S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was safe” in the western part of the country.

Meanwhile, work on the game continued. Imagine the pressure of working under. You are working on the biggest and most ambitious project you have ever been a part of. At the same time it is a product that means something to many other Ukrainians and to your country, and at the same time your hometown is being bombed by an aggressive enemy. Someone has left family at home in Kiev. Several of your colleagues and friends have joined the army to fight against the occupying forces. And as time passes, many have been unable to contact their families, especially in the eastern part of the country, for example in cities like Mariupol, which has been virtually razed to the ground by Russian bombing.

The developers worked under inhuman conditions that we cannot imagine. For many of the workers, the game became a safe haven – the only constant they had in a very uncertain and uprooted life. They just wanted to work on the game, and they found peace in the terrible reality as they dove into the game and worked on it. It became their only constant for them, and in the documentary War Game: The Making of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Mariia aptly puts it, “Work is one of the most important tools to keep from going crazy. We all wanted to work on the game.’

This is a game that is much more than just a game, it is a “thing” that helps people who have escaped their lives and daily lives to focus on something else. A fixed point of reference. Some even sat making character designs on paper when the power went out due to the Russian bombing – as one of the designers says: “I switched to drawing on paper, so I didn’t stop developing. I was only interested in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. It was my goal in life to do this project.” These people really needed this project.

In the peaceful part of the world, here in the West, gamers and the press only see the game being delayed over and over again – finally releasing in November 2024. Two years late and six years after it went into production. Because now the team just can’t take it anymore. They are exhausted. But how do you receive such a game? How do you review such a game? Suddenly frame rate, gameplay and graphics are completely irrelevant. This game probably saved lives. Real human lives. But on the other hand, it’s still a product that we pay money for, so we can make demands of it – but can we make the same demands of it as we would of any other game? I don’t know, I don’t have the answer.

In mid-December of this year it was announced that the game had recouped its costs after the first month on the market and was now profitable. This is really great for the team, also because it indicates that they have created a product that can compete with the 2007 original, which was so important to them from the beginning. But at the end of the day, I think the majority of the team doesn’t really care about the financial side of the project. For them, this game is much more than a game. It is the project of their lives, which they completed and which probably got them through almost 3 years of war.

So what awaits them now?