I’m back in the swamp. A new patch is out, and my saves are invalid, so I restarted. Well, ok, restarted again, I hit a game breaking bug several hours in and decied to piss about in the early stages until the next patch arrived. And now it’s here; bringing the bizzarely absent stamina bar to the HUD from it’s inventory screen hiding place, along with various other fixes.
I haven’t got past the Red Forest yet, so I haven’t seen all the game has to offer, but the swamps are easily my favourite of the new areas. You can’t see much beyond the reeds from the ground, so you have to navigate using the various landmarks that are visible through the fog. Get up high, and you can see clear sky and bandit groups moving through the paths, sometimes catching sight of muzle flashes as a battle rages in the distance. After having skipped through this area fairly quickly on my first run it’s been great fun to go exploring through the locations I’d missed, like the pump station in the North West.
The swamps also highlight a bit of a misstep in the atmosphere department. It’s the perfect place to have nasty creatures jump out of the dense reeds and try to claw your face off, and that has happened, but I suspect they were scripted encounters. The rest of the time you can clearly see mutants marked on your map, which takes a lot of the fear out of the situation. Not knowing exactly where they were was one of the original Stalker’s strengths, sound was the only way to get a decent warning most of the time, now you can see them approaching as red dots on the mini-map.
Clear Sky is less “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!” and more Russian guys shooting you in the face.
Somewhere In England 