KickStarter Chernobylite - survival horror action RPG set in Chernobyl

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Konjad]

I wonder if it's gonna be good.

 

[Jenkem]

 

[Jenkem]

game comes out of EA in a few days.. seems ''''''''''''''influencers''''''''''''''' are playing early

 

[Deadass]

So it's good or not

 

[Jenkem]

So it's good or not

I think most people on codex are waiting for the full release out of EA like myself or for reviews/impressions...

 

[rusty_shackleford]

from watching the vid it seems more like a walking simulator than an rpg

 

[Harthwain]

Some stuff I found when looking through developers' responses on Steam forum:

- This is NOT a shooter.

Spoiler

Although in many elements Chernobylite resembles Metro, unfortunately it is definitely closer to RPGs like Stalker or Fallout and this will not change. The story, choices and openness of the game are much more important to us than action.

Spoiler

Chernobylite is DEFINITELY not a shooter. If you expect a shooter or action games like Metro you will be disappointed. It's a survival horror RPG. Making a shootout is a decision that can have serious consequences.

Spoiler

Chernobylite is primarily a survival horror with RPG elements.

There is currently no game on the market that would resemble Chernobylite, but it is closest to Resident Evil combined with This War of Mine with elements of Mass Effect 2

Spoiler

In addition, each item you pointed out is made in a completely different way. For example, shooting (apart from the fact that the game encourages you to solve problems differently than shooting) is completely unlike an action game like Metro or Stalker. In Chernobylite, shooting is much slower, more difficult and more systemic, making it more like Resident Evil or Dead Space.

- This is NOT a realistic game:

Spoiler

Why do you think an RPG should be realistic? Train Igor, upgrade your weapons and you will be able to easily kill enemies with headshots without being detected.

Spoiler

Because Chernobylite is not an action game like Call of Duty, but an RPG like Fallout, Cyberpunk, Mass Effect or Borderlands. In any of these games, headshots don't mean instant death, only damage increases.

- It has many RPG elements, but it is NOT an RPG:

Spoiler

- Gaining experience and using it to improve main hero skills.
- A dialogue system that allows you to empathize and make numerous choices.
- A very extensive story branching and a lot of choices to be made that have a huge impact on how the story unfolds and what the game world looks like.
- Possibility to recruit companions and a system of relations with them, which has a key impact on the final mission.
- Ability to create and improve your equipment and weapons.
- The ability to expand your base in any direction.

Spoiler

There's a lot of RPG elements, however, our game is not an RPG if you think about the direct reference to Fallout or The Witcher. Characters are developing their skills, tools, and environments, going into interactions with each other, but the global focus is on providing a believable storyline.

- Core gameplay loop explained:

Spoiler

The biggest difference is core gameplay loop. In Chernobylite it looks like this:
1. I assign myself and my companions various tasks
2. I choose the place where I want to go to accomplish a specific task
3. I explore the world and avoid threats
4. I am gaining experience, new equipment and new companions
5. I go back to the base, distribute food, expand the base, train new skills
6. I'm starting a new day

 

[rusty_shackleford]

There's a lot of RPG elements, however, our game is not an RPG

Infinitron do your job

 

[Jenkem]

best dev quote from steam forums noted above:

Why do you think an RPG should be realistic? Train Igor, upgrade your weapons and you will be able to easily kill enemies with headshots without being detected. If that's too much for you, just lower the difficulty level.

b a s e d

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Looks way better than I thought it will, tbh fam. Still, I will definitely wait for the full release before droping any cash on this.

 

[fantadomat]

There's a lot of RPG elements, however, our game is not an RPG

Infinitron do your job

Yes,remove the butthurt kwan that screeches at every non kwan game.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/chernobylite-review/

CHERNOBYLITE REVIEW
Chernobylite is a rare game that makes you feel the weight of your decisions.

Chernobylite is a curious mash-up of ideas orbiting a pretty stiff first-person shooter, not unlike The Farm 51's previous game Get Even. But where Get Even felt like a game that couldn't get its ideas in order, coming across as aloof in its attempt to tell a poignant story, Chernobylite does a much better job of welcoming us into its world.

Its melancholy atmosphere permeates you like plutonium, confronts you with big decisions at every turn, and surrounds you with a well-written (though sometimes terribly voiced) core of grizzled stalkers who you'll need to befriend as you chase spectral visions of your long-lost wife around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. As physicist and former Chernobyl Power Plant employee Igor, this is why you've returned to the haunted area.

It's part first-person shooter, though it's quite possible to sneak through much of the game without firing a single bullet. It's part base-building survival game, as you gather resources to improve your base with crafting stations, bedding, and even mushroom gardens (mushrooms, it turns out, are integral to crafting everything from wooden walls to handheld nuclear weapons). It has some throwaway horror elements too, because apparently that's mandatory in any Chernobyl-based media.

But most successfully, Chernobylite is a game about choice, where you're constantly faced with decisions that may (or may not) meaningfully affect your story.

Early in the game, for instance, I killed a sketchy stalker who refused to give up information. Previously, I took the humane option with someone, and wound up trapped in a room fast filling with poison gas, so this time I took no chances. I killed them in cold, mildly irradiated blood, looted their corpse, and made my way back to base. Later on, I met a character who was very close to the sketchy stalker, forcing me to choose between lying or coming clean about my murderous whoopsie, and whether to invite them to join my group. Obviously, I went for the drama-baiting combo of lying and inviting them to my ragtag crew.

Interestingly, you don't have to stick with your choices. You see, Chernobylite is a substance that can open wormholes in time and space. It can teleport you from one place to another, or even let you revisit old memories via a dreamscape of floating rocks and non-Euclidean geometries. Each time you die, you wake up in this dreamscape where you can see how the key decisions you made are connected, and go back and change those decisions using Chernobylite shards as payment to whatever interdimensional god-force is running the show.

It's pretty ballsy for a game to lay bare the workings of its choice system like this, but given the breadth of Chernobylite's web of choices and possible outcomes, the devs have every right to want to show it off. Your choices will affect enemy activity in the area, how many allies you have in the Zone, and at one point even the topography of the game—you can, for instance, destroy the infamous Duga radar at the behest of a man believing himself to be in a good-vs-evil conflict with a Rat King.

It's a good kind of strange.

Between missions you hang out in your base, where you can cook, build improvements, explore other peoples' memories based on clues you find, or even just go straight to the Heist mission at the end of the game (where you'll almost certainly die if you've not assembled a crew and equipment, but it's there if you want it). When you're ready, you pick a mission set in one of six regions around the Zone—whether to progress the main story or search for clues. At the same time, you can send out your companions to scout future missions or gather resources.

These maps aren't huge, but they look wonderful. The Farm 51 actually went to the Exclusion Zone and used 3D scanning to recreate its terrain, textures and buildings. It gives the areas an intense verisimilitude that I can't stop snapping—grass and shrubbery reclaiming blocky clusters of Soviet apartments, smashed stained glass windows depicting doomed communist utopias, smoggy sunlight oozing through sickly canopies. As someone mildly obsessed with the crumbling vestiges of the Soviet empire, I find these environments mesmerising.

Beautiful and haunting though these areas are, they are a little lacking in substance. The only things you find are resources and clues relating to your story, there is no wildlife (even though the Exclusion Zone is renowned for it) and enemy AI rigidly sticks to their patrol routes or stands in one place—never sitting at desks or fighting radioactive monsters or taking a wazz. Friendly trader stalkers, meanwhile, simply stand around waiting for you to come to them. The developers could certainly have picked up a few tricks from Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl and its sequels about how to make the Zone feel more dynamic.

The combat gets a bit tangled between realistic shooter, stealth and RPG. Beyond a rather pathetic side-dash, there are no mechanics like sliding or cover-firing, while leaping over obstacles is very particular about what it counts as obstacle. I appreciate how easily enemies blend with the dense foliage, but this is undermined by the big healthbars that pop up above their heads, and their substantial bullet absorbance makes the mechanically 'meh' gunfights drag on a little too long.

Thankfully, stealth is a viable approach, so I focused on upgrading my revolver with a silencer and becoming a master of silent takedowns. Again, though, this feels a little threadbare as you can't hide bodies (not that the enemy AI is particularly miffed when they stumble upon the corpse of one of their own). It all speaks to a combat system that's stretched between multiple styles without particularly excelling in any of them.

What really gives Chernobylite its soul are the people you recruit to your base. There are five in total, each with their own traumas, missions and strange tales to tell. They range from stoic types straight from Chekhov stories to varying degrees of psychopath, but spend some time with them between missions and all these miscreants will end up growing on you.

I became particularly fond of Mikhail, blaring like a drill sergeant about everything from his father's boozy transgressions, to tarot readings, to an anecdote about radioactive sausages distributed throughout the Soviet Union—I imagine he'd be a great drinking partner until his eyes go wild and he insists you go with him to blow up an army barracks in the middle of the night.

It's solid, engaging writing, though I recommend using the Russian audio with subs unless you want Igor to push his voice like an over-eager Oxford academic from half a century ago.

You'll need to keep up your crew's morale by keeping them well fed, sufficiently bedded, as well as managing their disagreements when they chime in on key story decisions. Do you shoot down a helicopter without knowing who's in it? Is a friendly stalker fair collateral when taking out an enemy encampment? To whom do you hand the gun to finish off a key villain (if indeed you choose to execute them at all)? All genuine quandaries, where sometimes you'll be swayed by having to keep one character or another onside so that they're still with you come the final mission.

There are a few quirks in Chernobylite that seem to exist to tick certain boxes. It's been termed 'survival horror', but monster encounters are scarce, and beyond that the occasional jump-scare, creepy doll and hallucination of a jittery man in a gas mask don't really justify the label—if anything, they cheapen the experience. Similarly, the Black Stalker who beams himself into maps on a timer in later missions is more a nuisance than a threat when you realise he's rooted to the spot and can be blasted away. Mr. X he most definitely is not.

Maybe Chernobylite latches onto these recognisable tropes because its greatest strengths aren't easily conveyed through trailers or genre tags. Its cast of characters and its choice system are genuinely gripping, while its depiction of the zone is at times breathtaking (if a little postcardy and non-interactive). Like its motley crew of eccentric companions, Chernobylite is a flawed misfit that I can't help but like. With its sometimes scatty systems, ambition and silly sci-fi story, it could even join the pantheon of Eurojank classics—unless there's a rule against Eurojank games looking this good.

THE VERDICT
78

CHERNOBYLITE
An ambitious and atmospheric adventure undercut by some simplistic mechanics.

 

[Jenkem]

sounds good

 

[rusty_shackleford]

inf*nitron once again inconsistently applies the rules

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

It's not crpg, it's adventure game.

 

[Jenkem]

it's more of an RPG than certain GOTYs...

 

[Jenkem]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1016800/view/2983056479596286759

Chernobylite is available in full version for PC!
Enter the Zone and see what has changed
Hello Stalkers!
It's been a long road, but we finally reached the finish line. When we released Chernobylite on Early Access, even in our wildest dreams we couldn’t foresee the extent to which a project created by a small group of enthusiasts would grow.

Today we’re giving you the full version of Chernobylite!

Spoiler

How much the game has changed in Early Access?

We extended the game time three times. Now it takes an average of 25 hours to complete it.

We expanded the game with 15 new story missions, as well as numerous random events in all locations.

We’ve introduced 11 new characters. In addition to side characters such as Konstanty, Locksmith, Semyon, Vagabond, Volodya, we’ve added a new companion to the game - Olga

We supplemented the game world with 10 new maps. Including: prologue, Pripyat Central and Red Forest, NAR prison.

We've added new enemies: 4 new monsters and some new variants of NAR soldiers.

We’ve given you 5 new weapons with a whole range of upgrades at your disposal.

We tossed in a whole host of technical and gameplay improvements, such as character development, weapon and item crafting, difficulty levels, improved enemy AI etc.

The soundtrack for the game was composed by Mikołaj Stroiński, known among gamers as the author of music, incl. for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

What's new?
Those who have the game in Early Access will be happy that we've made a ton of bug fixes that were caught by us, as well as those that you reported to us on the Steam forum. Thanks again! But these are not the only novelties we’ve prepared for the game's premiere.

Technology:

• In cooperation with AMD, we have fully implemented FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0
  
• We improved memory management that could cause micro stuttering on slow HDDs and weaker computers.
  
• We have resolved the various crashes that were reported to us. The game should be more stable.

Additional:

• Heist level Finished: It is now 3 times longer and can be completed from start to finish in many different variants.
  
• Game ending: You can end the game in several ways and see an outro depending on your decisions.
  
• New weapon: Railgun. There are too few weapons in chernobylite? So here is the kinetic cannon. It uses the power of Chernobylite to instantly energize the coils and use them to create an enormous electromagnetic field that gives the projectiles great strength and speed.
  
• New base structure: Railgun Calibration Tools. It will allow you to create 14 upgrades that will have a considerable impact on the operation of the Railgun.
  
• Photo mode. The Chernobylite world is a great place to take some photos. We decided to make it a bit easier for you

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/game/chernobylite?as=1649904300

Strange Steam page.

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Screw it, i bought the game as it looks gorgeous, will check by myself how much crpg is here

 

[Gerrard]

- Core gameplay loop explained:

The biggest difference is core gameplay loop. In Chernobylite it looks like this:
1. I assign myself and my companions various tasks
2. I choose the place where I want to go to accomplish a specific task
3. I explore the world and avoid threats
4. I am gaining experience, new equipment and new companions
5. I go back to the base, distribute food, expand the base, train new skills
6. I'm starting a new day

So basically it's a chore simulator?

 

[Wulfric Pinewood]

Nope, game is okay, i will call it smaller Stalker for now. Graphics are great, there are npcs in the world and you are able to talk them, interact or recruit them. Game offers small crafting and building resort too. I will not call it crpg, it's more Stalker/Metro kind oriented with little crpg elements. It's nice anyway and play very smooth on max details thanks to DLSS. Climate is great tough. There is lot of walking and gathering too. It's nowhere near the Atom kind of crpg, but game is worth playing for any post apo fan. Still i wonder about it called rpg game, it's more stealth/shooter with adventure elements. So if You are looking for traditional crpg with stats, looks elsewhere. Here you have a base, companions and ability to explore zone in few levels. There is no kind of free exploration elderscrolls like, more a Metro given levels with main hub at your base. From the base you assign companions to various task - mainly getting supplies and you can go on missions [exploring] by yourself. Sense is to accumulate resources and companions for the so called Heist, where you go on final mission into reactor itself to reveal truth about your missing fiance Tatiana. And thats all. For me it's solid game with great atmosphere and little crpg elements.