They are saying hope is step one on the street to disappointment, and reader, I’ve made a reasonably rattling massive step. Beforehand, on my mission to outlive S.T.A.L.Ok.E.R. 2: Coronary heart of Chornobyl with solely wild mutants as my weapons, I’d found clues that another person was making an attempt to tame the Zone’s beastly inhabitants. With one in every of their digital monitoring collars in hand and completely no preexisting information of their location, I got down to discover this kindred spirit, just for the Zone to as soon as once more slam a door in my face.
A chilly, metal, very literal door besides. It seems that the scientist’s laboratory is locked up tight, and can stay so till I delve about twenty hours deeper into the faction struggle that’s bubbled up whereas I’ve been operating round throwing irradiated rats at folks in tracksuits. Advantageous. Advantageous! However I’m conserving the collar.
Again on the search grind, it quickly turns into obvious that I didn’t have to ship these rats to their deaths in any respect, as the information I wanted from their bandit-gang slayers can also be out there on the PDA of a corpse in a close-by cave. It’s guarded by a Burer, a stocky, melted-looking humanoid mutant who nearly kills me with a battery of bodily levitated rifles; an influence attractive sufficient that I stick round, making an attempt to bait him exterior in order that I would weaponise him in flip. He’s smarter than his Bloodsucker cousins, although – not least as a result of he is aware of to cowl up his bum – and refuses to chase, leaving me to proceed my investigation alone.
Because it did with my earlier oddjobbing, the purely pacifist strategy I’m compelled into taking is weirdly efficient on a number of successive missions. I wriggle out of an assassination job by bribing the person giving it to me. I escape his subsequent double-cross by bloodlessly hurling myself right into a sewer drain. I befriend a bunch of former cultists and, after they ship me to retrieve some very important equipment, I merely sprint previous the mind-wiped zombiemen guarding it. Panic nearly units in once I’m attacked by a Controller, one other psychic mutie lad who sends my imaginative and prescient lurching round like my eyes are connected to cartoon springs, however he too is an elective struggle that I dash out of with an solely minorly flayed mind.
Nonetheless, I’m sad. I’m imagined to be Bohdan Beastmaster, subjugator of the abominable, and but I’m solely progressing in probably the most passive, least mutant-reliant method doable. Upon returning to the ex-cultist base, I’m rewarded with a elaborate camouflaged sniper rifle, as if the universe itself had been telling me “Come on, man, do that correctly.” No – I have to persist. I settle for the gun with the identical smile I gave my nan when she gifted me a Pixar’s Automobiles alarm clock at age 17, and proceed on to my subsequent objective: a army base wherein I can set up the recovered tech.
But once more failing to choose up any monster friends alongside the way in which, I arrive on the base moments after its guards are gunned down, then stumble upon the assailants within the tunnels beneath. It’s some turncoat members of the cult, who’re both combing the bottom for their very own nefarious functions or simply actually, actually need their sniper rifle again. The corridors are tight they usually’d outnumber me even with beast backup, however as ever, their totally automated firearms aren’t any match for my running-away-jutsu. I scramble up a ladder and again onto the floor, the place a person I don’t recognise bellows from atop a management tower that he ought to have killed me when he had the possibility.
That doesn’t slender it down a lot – I’ve been bumbling across the Zone with out a gun out for hours, buddy, there have been probabilities aplenty. Regardless, he’s blocking my path to the gizmo installer, so ascending the tower and neutralising him goes to be one battle I can’t simply e-book it from.
Casing his perch reveals dangerous information. Plan A is a bust: he’s up a ladder, so even when I’m going off, discover a mutant, and produce it again right here, it received’t have the ability to observe me up and kill him for me. Plan B, ignoring him and simply hoping I can set up the equipment earlier than he shoots me lifeless, received’t work both, as I bodily can’t work together when the receptacle whereas in fight. Miraculously, it seems to be as if I can attempt an surprising Plan C, as an Emission – a deadly, Zone-wide psychic storm blowout – begins to roll in. Because the winds choose up and the sky turns pink, I abandon the bottom of the ladder and take cowl within the lab downstairs, realizing the much more uncovered tower ought to depart my attacker open for a charring.
However no – because the sky clears and I climb again up, I’m met with extra gunfire. In my eagerness for this man to die by way of non-bullet means, I’d forgotten that members of his sect are resistant to Emissions, and all my cowering had achieved was grant him a mid-fight tea break.
It’s no good. I’m out of choices. He, apparently, won’t ever run out of bullets. I’ve travelled half the Zone, have wielded the facility of its mutants to wipe out skilled troopers, and even turned the tables by myself private manhunter, however this dweeb up a ladder goes to render all of it pointless. And he’s nonetheless taking pictures me.
You realize what? You’ll be able to have the sniper rifle again. Right here you go:
And with that, I’ve failed. My vow, my promise, by no means to kill with a weapon now lies shattered into as many items as this man’s ribcage. Or is it? He’s nonetheless respiration. He’s nonetheless gasping out threats. And I’ve the dialogue possibility to easily stroll away and depart him be. I believe I can get away with this, so long as he does not die.
Bollocks.
It’ve over. As I declare the hole victory of with the ability to insert one MacGuffin into one other, I image the spirit of my father and mentor, Boris Beastmaster, shaking his head and muttering private insults. “I’m sorry, father”,” I whisper. “Prick,” he responds. It’s worse than that – by abandoning my code, I’ve not simply failed a quest, however have misplaced my total motive for being. My motive to reside. What good is a beastmaster who can’t grasp beasts?
I ought to have identified, actually, that I’d be doomed from the beginning, and for causes that broaden nicely past one dude up a ladder. The Zone, in spite of everything, is close to sufficient a dwelling factor itself. It’s mercurial sufficient to each kill and reward those that courageous it. But whereas we will construct sensors that permit us scrabble round within the filth for artifacts, or scanners that may replenish their anomalous power, the Zone itself breaks so many legal guidelines of physics and arithmetic that’s basically unknowable – by no means thoughts comprehensible. And how will you tame one thing, even an extension of it, that you simply don’t perceive?
However, if my street goes to finish, I can’t let it finish with such a determined abandoning of my ideas. I’d say I’ve acquired one final good little bit of monster-wrangling left in me, and vengeance on one of many tower shooter’s cultist co-conspirators seems like the proper approach to exhaust it. I discover him hiding out a number of kilometers south, then instantly depart to go discover one thing with massive tooth to introduce him to.
In a provide shack down close to the southern swamps, I discover simply the factor: a Bloodsucker, who (in contrast to that no-life Buren) is all too completely happy to chase me the a whole lot of yards again the place I got here. Positive sufficient, the cultist continues to be there. Shocked and possibly fairly confused, he blasts me his with AK, however I’ve acquired ample medkits and nothing else left to lose. In his focus, he utterly ignores the beclawed glimmer that adopted me in, and inside seconds, the Bloodsucker bursts from his cloak to slash the traitor down in two swings.
I’ll not have been capable of bend these beasts to my will, however as that physique hits the concrete, I’m happy that I might a minimum of give them a nudge. Redemption, if not absolution. And so, with a sigh and a smile, I strategy the Bloodsucker myself and settle for the Zone’s judgement, falling quietly by the hand of my final chosen comrade.
