I go inside, kill a ton of zombified stalkers, find a hole in the wall hidden behind some destructible crates, and find myself deep underground in some kind of sewer system connected by tunnels everywhere. Then, I'm wandering along and notice an odd side path on the road, with what appears to be an underground station access. And if you run out of one resource, like ammunition, then you may find yourself relying on crappy weapons left by the dead and scrounging for every last bullet. These items all have weight values to them, and you can only carry so much weight, so you have to maintain an ideal balance on everything. If you want to fare well out in the Zone, then you need to make sure you pack your supplies well, setting out with enough guns, ammunition, food, medkits, and drugs to tide you over until you can make it back to town. You have to be mindful of every step you take, and watch yourself everywhere you go, because you put yourself at risk every time you step out from town. You not only have to contend with living threats, such as mutated monsters, bandits, and gun-toting zombified stalkers, but the environment itself is even out to get you - take one wrong step and an electrical anomaly may char you to death. Survival is a major element in Call of Pripyat, as it is in the other STALKER games, with death around every corner and behind every tree. I only needed to consult a guide on two or three occasions, because I could usually count on my own logic and determination to solve any issues. This is what I mean by the quests feeling natural and organic when you're presented with a problem, you do what you'd do in real life - ask someone for help - and solve your problems entirely through the context of the game world. They don't always know the solutions to your problems, but they can usually point you in the right direction or give you some ideas. When you're given an objective like 'find this missing person,' or you come to a dead end in a quest with no idea what to do next, the amazing and utterly mind-blowing thing is that you can almost always talk to the random, ambient NPCs for suggestions or advice. The game includes a PDA system with GPS tracking for quests with obvious destinations (like when a stalker uploads specific coordinates to your PDA), but a lot of quests go completely unmarked, leaving it up to you to explore and figure things out for yourself.

Even having a lot of previous experience with the series, it still took me a little while to get the hang of things again. You either have to know all of this stuff already, either from playing previous STALKER games or by actually reading the manual, or else figure it out on your own. Call of Pripyat's introduction gives you next to nothing in the way of tutorials explaining how the game actually works - there's no message that pops up telling you 'these are anomalies, and they will f**k you up,' or NPCs telling you 'this is how you use a detector to find artifacts.' It doesn't tell you how important different resistances are, how 'handling' differs from recoil or accuracy stats on weapons, or that equipment can deteriorate to the point that their stats decrease and weapons start jamming. I'm a bit of a STALKER veteran, having played Shadow of Chernobyl twice and Clear Sky once, but it's been about five or six years since the last time I played either one, and I'd almost forgotten how vague and unforgiving these games can be.

Stalker call of pripyat endings