They say hope is the first step on the road to disappointment, and reader, I’ve made a pretty damn big step. Previously, on my mission to survive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl with only wild mutants as my weapons, I’d discovered clues that someone else was attempting to tame the Zone’s beastly inhabitants. With one of their electronic tracking collars in hand and absolutely no preexisting knowledge of their location, I set out to find this kindred spirit, only for the Zone to once again slam a door in my face.
A cold, steel, very literal door to boot. It turns out that the scientist’s laboratory is locked up tight, and will remain so until I delve about twenty hours deeper into the faction war that’s bubbled up while I’ve been running around throwing irradiated rats at people in tracksuits. Fine. Fine! But I’m keeping the collar.
Back on the quest grind, it soon becomes apparent that I didn’t need to send those rats to their deaths at all, as the info I needed from their bandit-gang slayers is also available on the PDA of a corpse in a nearby cave. It’s guarded by a Burer, a stocky, melted-looking humanoid mutant who almost kills me with a battery of physically levitated rifles; a power enticing enough that I stick around, trying to bait him outside so that I might weaponise him in turn. He’s smarter than his Bloodsucker cousins, though – not least because he knows to cover up his bum – and refuses to chase, leaving me to continue my investigation alone.
As it did with my earlier oddjobbing, the purely pacifist approach I’m forced into taking is weirdly effective on several successive missions. I wriggle out of an assassination job by bribing the man giving it to me. I escape his subsequent double-cross by bloodlessly hurling myself into a sewer drain. I befriend a group of former cultists and, when they send me to retrieve some vital machinery, I simply dash past the mind-wiped zombiemen guarding it. Panic almost sets in when I’m attacked by a Controller, another psychic mutie lad who sends my vision lurching around like my eyes are attached to cartoon springs, but he too is an optional fight that I sprint out of with an only minorly flayed brain.
Still, I’m unhappy. I’m supposed to be Bohdan Beastmaster, subjugator of the abominable, and yet I’m only progressing in the most passive, least mutant-reliant manner possible. Upon returning to the ex-cultist base, I’m rewarded with a fancy camouflaged sniper rifle, as if the universe itself were telling me “Come on, man, do this properly.” No – I must persist. I accept the gun with the same smile I gave my nan when she gifted me a Pixar’s Cars alarm clock at age 17, and continue on to my next goal: a military base in which I can install the recovered tech.
Yet again failing to pick up any monster pals along the way, I arrive at the base moments after its guards are gunned down, then bump into the assailants in the tunnels below. It’s some turncoat members of the cult, who are either combing the base for their own nefarious purposes or just really, really want their sniper rifle back. The corridors are tight and they’d outnumber me even with beast backup, but as ever, their fully automatic firearms are no match for my running-away-jutsu. I scramble up a ladder and back onto the surface, where a man I don’t recognise bellows from atop a control tower that he should have killed me when he had the chance.
That doesn’t narrow it down much – I’ve been bumbling around the Zone without a gun out for hours, buddy, there have been chances aplenty. Regardless, he’s blocking my route to the gizmo installer, so ascending the tower and neutralising him is going to be one battle I can’t just book it from.
Casing his perch reveals bad news. Plan A is a bust: he’s up a ladder, so even if I go off, find a mutant, and bring it back here, it won’t be able to follow me up and kill him for me. Plan B, ignoring him and just hoping I can install the machinery before he shoots me dead, won’t work either, as I physically can’t interact when the receptacle while in combat. Miraculously, it looks as if I can try an unexpected Plan C, as an Emission – a lethal, Zone-wide psychic storm blowout – starts to roll in. As the winds pick up and the sky turns red, I abandon the base of the ladder and take cover in the lab downstairs, knowing the far more exposed tower should leave my attacker open for a charring.
But no – as the sky clears and I climb back up, I’m met with more gunfire. In my eagerness for this man to die through non-bullet means, I’d forgotten that members of his sect are immune to Emissions, and all my cowering had achieved was grant him a mid-fight tea break.
It’s no good. I’m out of options. He, apparently, will never run out of bullets. I’ve travelled half the Zone, have wielded the power of its mutants to wipe out experienced soldiers, and even turned the tables on my own personal manhunter, but this dweeb up a ladder is going to render all of it pointless. And he’s still shooting me.
You know what? You can have the sniper rifle back. Here you go:
And with that, I’ve failed. My vow, my promise, never to kill with a weapon now lies shattered into as many pieces as this guy’s ribcage. Or is it? He’s still breathing. He’s still gasping out threats. And I have the dialogue option to simply walk away and leave him be. I think I can get away with this, as long as he doesn’t die.
Bollocks.
It’ve over. As I claim the hollow victory of being able to insert one MacGuffin into another, I picture the spirit of my father and mentor, Boris Beastmaster, shaking his head and muttering personal insults. “I’m sorry, father”,” I whisper. “Prick,” he responds. It’s worse than that – by abandoning my code, I’ve not just failed a quest, but have lost my entire reason for being. My reason to live. What good is a beastmaster who can’t master beasts?
I should have known, really, that I’d be doomed from the start, and for reasons that expand well beyond one dude up a ladder. The Zone, after all, is near enough a living thing itself. It’s mercurial enough to both kill and reward those who brave it. Yet while we can build sensors that let us scrabble around in the dirt for artifacts, or scanners that can replenish their anomalous energy, the Zone itself breaks so many laws of physics and mathematics that’s essentially unknowable – never mind understandable. And how can you tame something, even an extension of it, that you don’t understand?
Nevertheless, if my road is going to end, I can’t let it end with such a desperate abandoning of my principles. I’d say I’ve got one last good bit of monster-wrangling left in me, and vengeance on one of the tower shooter’s cultist co-conspirators sounds like the perfect way to exhaust it. I find him hiding out a few kilometers south, then immediately leave to go find something with big teeth to introduce him to.
In a supply shack down near the southern swamps, I find just the thing: a Bloodsucker, who (unlike that no-life Buren) is all too happy to chase me the hundreds of yards back where I came. Sure enough, the cultist is still there. Shocked and probably quite confused, he blasts me his with AK, but I’ve got ample medkits and nothing else left to lose. In his focus, he completely ignores the beclawed glimmer that followed me in, and within seconds, the Bloodsucker bursts from his cloak to slash the traitor down in two swings.
I may not have been able to bend these beasts to my will, but as that body hits the concrete, I’m satisfied that I could at least give them a nudge. Redemption, if not absolution. And so, with a sigh and a smile, I approach the Bloodsucker myself and accept the Zone’s judgement, falling quietly by the hand of my last chosen comrade.
