The Complete mod for all three STALKER games transformed them from ugly vanilla base games into an extremely atmospheric shooter with excellent visuals.
To everyone that bitches about Complete being too easy: max out the difficulty in the options menu and the game is definitely not easy at all.
Difficulty settings are largely irrelevant in vanilla (and ZRP) Stalker. The game is actually EASIER if you pick HARDER difficulty settings, because it actually makes the enemies less bullet-spongy.
Vanilla Stalker is already "extremeley atmospheric" and has excellent visuals. All you need is ZRP to remove the vanilla bugs and you're good to go.
Misery IS overrated, because the tons of items and survival systems it adds, it adds with no coherence. However, visually Misery is the best Stalker experience you can get. It is way better than any Anomaly version* you can play. It is bleak, depressive, autumnal, it's like a Bela Tarr film. I still think that Misery+Gunslinger is the second best Stalker experience you can get, while the best experience is still just the Stalker SoC+ZRP.
And when it comes to Anomaly, many people seem to completely miss the point. Anomaly is a completely customizable sandbox utilizing the assets of all the Stalker games, and all of the most popular mods. It is extremely customizable and you can configure it however you want, to get the Stalker experience that you want.
* - a lot of people who play Anomaly play Anomaly with the default graphics settings and ignore the fact that there are several different visual settings (from DX8 to DX11 the last time I played), and these actually vary by a lot, including completely different armor models for different settings and stuff like that. DX11 settings are semi-modern graphics, while DX8 settings look almost vanilla. If you want, you can play Anomaly and have it looking like vanilla SoC.