‘Tis the season to be jolly, even if you happen to be ankle-deep in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Yup, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl 2 is getting into the seasonal spirit of giving with a completely free update promising “hours” of new quests and more – all arriving on Tuesday, 16th December.
It’s been a busy 2025 for Stalker 2, with developer GSC Game World having released numerous significant updates for the well-received open-world shooter – including major fixes for its troublesome A-Life system – alongside a version for PlayStation 5. And it’s now wrapping up the year, with a massive new storyline featuring “hours” of gameplay.
“Strange things start happening near the Malachite on the western part of the map,” GSC explains on the PlayStation Blog. “The research groups sent by scientists were reporting a signal interfering with their usual PDA communications. After listening to it, stalkers were suffering from headaches, nose bleeds, and hallucinations… You may hear their emergency transmission almost anywhere in the Zone. Pay close attention to the Red Forest Region on your map, and from here on, your intuition, rationality and choices will lead you down the rabbit hole to see how deep it is.”
And so begins a fresh mystery within the Zone spanning eight new quests and seven locations, including the Car Dump, Army Warehouses, City Boiler Room, Rail Depot, and Volkhov SAM. It also promises six new characters, each with their own backgrounds and stories, a unique weapon – specifically the GP37V2, a modified version of the GP37 rifle that only support single and burst fire modes – plus a new hub to create. The latter, assuming you make the right choices on your adventure, will appear in the Burnt Forest, giving you access to a technician, trader, medic, guide, and more.
Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s big free Stories Untold update arrives for all platforms on Tuesday, 16th December. And if you’d like to know more about its recent leap to PlayStation 5, GSC spoke to Eurogamer back in November, discussing, among other things, the difficulties of continuing development amid the ongoing Russian invasion of the Ukraine.