REVIEW : Chernobylite (PS5)
I’ve always been captivated by what happened in Chernobyl, even when I was a youngster in American middle school, trying to figure out why something so awful could happen. Imagine my astonishment when I learned that Chernobylite takes a horror-based approach to that iconic location. While most of the implemented ideas are shallow, the combination of FPS-meets-base-building-meets-time-travel works well enough to make it worthwhile.
Malleable Narrative
Igor Khymynuk and his fiancée Tatyana used to work at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant before the disaster. Tatyana went missing shortly before the explosion, and Igor never found out what happened to her or where she ended up. He receives a curious old photograph of Tatyana 30 years later, prompting him to travel to the Exclusion Zone in search of answers.
In this game, the story takes the cake among a slew of intriguing concepts. Chernobylite almost entices you to try a variety of narrative outcomes, and many of them are spectacular later in the game. Chunks of chernobylite, a hyper-reactive crystalline substance generated from nuclear fallout, are strewn across the game, allowing you to enter what I term a timeline portal.
After passing through the time portal, you go along a lengthy corridor lined with chernobylite blocks, each of which represents a significant decision point. You can then opt to revisit that moment and change your decision, changing the game’s outcome. The storyline alters if you skip from the game’s conclusion back to the first handful of missions where you demolished a building instead of upgrading your equipment. While not a novel concept, the implementation and choices you must make it feel unique.
CQC, or Close-Quarters Collecting
In the Exclusion Zone, you occasionally run into strangers. While some may join your team, they usually serve merely as a quest mover or a vendor. At the same time, enlisting the help of everyone can only be beneficial to you. The skill points you earn by eliminating foes and exploring use your progress, but you must engage with your recruits for them to teach you their skills.
This results in a nice levelling system. You interact with your allies instead of staring at menus and manipulating statistics. They teach you to be more stealthy, have higher precision, and be more efficient at stealth takedowns. These small details contribute to make levelling your character seem more at home in the environment.
Chernobylite is a simple FPS with simple controls and movement that works as it should. Exercise is a little stiff when travelling, but the game has a nice peeking feature with R1 and L1. While moving, you can peep around corners. Most fun I’ve played requires you to pause before peeping, so this is a great addition, even if it’s not essential.
Enter The Exclusion Zone
Chernobylite was created by dedicated individuals who paid close attention to environmental details. The developers went to Chernobyl’s actual Exclusion Zone and thoroughly sketched everything out so that the game could accurately reflect it. While the foliage generally does not move, the trees have a lovely flow to them that I haven’t seen in many games.
Your Geiger Counter is a general scanner as well as a radiation detector. You can further narrow down the search to identify certain supplies, such as food or fuel. I never utilized the specialized searches because all of the goods are usually quite far apart. So I made the most of my scavenging by grabbing everything instead.
All Your Base
This brings me to another point: contentless space. The decaying buildings are ideal for searching for survival items and enhancing the occasional narrative beat. Still, they don’t provide much in interactivity or difficulty, other than the rare lock pick. Although they don’t put up much of a fight, a single or two enemies patrol various spots.
Consider Fallout 4’s base building, but simplified. To manufacture everything in the game, you need explosive parts, mushrooms, electronic parts, chemicals, and herbs, rather than various other elements. Air filters, lamps, and ammo are among the craftables available, but the alternatives are limited.
This side of the game has very little depth, and anything can be created with very little work. At the same time, this fits with the game’s philosophy of providing you with activities that don’t get in the way of the tale they’re trying to convey. The story benefits from the lack of depth, but the gameplay suffers as a result.
Mission: Repetitious
While Chernobylite lets you explore the Exclusion Zone, the map isn’t particularly large. To gain access to the map, you must send yourself or your teammates on specified tasks. Each day delivers a new story-based quest, and the only way to finish them reliably is to complete them yourself.
These missions then take you out into the field, which is usually the same open zone you’ve seen in earlier missions. In the end, sending your buddies on random missions benefits your entire crew because they return with higher quantities of the resources and food required to keep your group alive. This helps decrease the need to constantly seek all resources on your missions; however, I found myself always looking for goods to upgrade my base in every nook and crevice.
These missions then take you out into the field, which is usually the same open zone you’ve seen in earlier missions. In the end, sending your buddies on random missions benefits your entire crew because they return with higher quantities of the resources and food required to keep your group alive. This helps decrease the need to constantly seek all resources on your missions; however, I found myself always looking for goods to upgrade my base in every nook and crevice.
Lost Progress and Miscues
Apart from the above-mentioned mixed bag, just a few aspects of the game are problematic. The first manifests itself in the form of bugs and slowdowns. The frame rate dips from a smooth 60 to 30 when going between fixed linear sequences and open-world zones. This contrast is striking, and it takes some time to get used to.
Last but not least, there’s the voice acting. The acting is adequate, if slightly low-rent, yet everyone, including Olivier, the Canadian companion, has a British accent. It feels fraudulent to ignore that level of authenticity in a Russian game with a Russian main character and a majority of the cast being Russian. This is especially apparent given how much care and attention the authors put into the story and time manipulation.
The only catch is that you can only play the game in Russian. This is how I played after I lost my saved data. The vocal work has a new vibe, and it feels more in line with the events and characters. I wish Chernobylite had had the time and money to produce Russian voice actors for the English dub for people who despise subtitles.
