Checkpoint Reached: January—February 2024

Quality over quantity. As usual, I focused on a handful of titles instead of playing dozens of games — I'm not a True Gamer™ and I'll never be one. In general, I followed the golden path between patient gaming with older games and a few fairly recent releases. Chornobyl and Pripyat, Night City and Dogtown, Fascist Britain, — the past months were an interesting trip which let me meet interesting and stimulating people of ancient cultures (and sometimes kill them).

Stalker Call of Pripyat

Books can make you do strange things. As an example, in the last days of 2022 AD, I had my second reading of the novel Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers. This reminded me that a copy of Call of Pripyat had been waiting on my hard drive for five years since I interrupted my playthrough. I heard the call of the Zone and then found myself celebrating the New Year while wearing the combat boots of Major Degtarev, the main protagonist of the game.

Only now, so many years since my first encounter with the Stalker trilogy, can I really appreciate it. Like many other fans, I find CoP to be my favourite part of the series. Sure enough, it still belongs to the so-called Eurojank genre, but the bugs and glitches aren't that much of a nuisance in comparison with the previous installments.

One of the things that makes Call of Pripyat my favourite Stalker game is Degtarev as a characterand his mission. Instead of playing an ordinary stalker or mercenary, like in the prequels, the player character is a military officer sent on a rescue mission. He is not purchasing a single quest for mostly selfish reasons, but rather doing reconnaissance work and collecting intel learning about the Zone, its inhabitants and factions. My return to Pripyat happened in a world undergoing dramatic changes — two years after another Russian invasion of Ukraine and, on a more personal level, almost two years spent learning Ukrainian. For that reason, I chose that language for my new playthrough and was pleasantly surprised — it's a mixed, bilingual version with some characters still speaking Russian. Needlessly to say, this increased the immersion level and made CoP an even more memorable experience.

Flashback 2 Demo

Close your eyes and try to imagine your sweet childhood memories as a person. Now imagine watching that person being flayed, shot and thrown into a ditch. This, basically, was my experience with the demo version of Flashback 2 released during the latest Steam Next Fest.

The original Flashback, released by Delphine Software back in 1992, was a milestone which helped to create a new subgenre called Cinematic Platformer. The players got a solid platformer with some point'n'click elements, gorgeous pixel visuals and realistic character animations, short cutscenes and, most importantly, enjoyable and challenging gameplay. About three decades later, Paul Cuisset, the man behind the original game, returned with an official sequel. One glimpse at the Steam reviews is enough to tell that it was a failure. Most reviews are negative and contain a lengthy criticism while the positive reviews don't really sound convincing. Although I didn't buy it, I spent some time with the free demo version and I sure can confirm that there's nothing to write home about. Some classics should be left at peace.

Cyberpunk 2077

During the two years after the original release of its flagship title, CDP Red has been tinkering with it in various ways, apparently wanting to erase the disastrous impression it made on many players at its launch. Just a few months before the second anniversary of Cyberpunk 2077's release, the creators of the Witcher trilogy made two important releases. Firstly, Patch 2.0 completely revamps both the skill trees and the cyberware system. Probably not everyone was thrilled with such a revolutionary change, but personally, I had a lot of fun learning the game systems anew and creating my own character build.

Moreover, during the Christmas sale, I finally bought Phantom Liberty, the first full-scale DLC which takes V into Dogtown, a part of Night City which wasn't available to players before its release. Our favourite troublemaker is given a devil's bargain: the New United States government will use its resources to free him from the accursed Arasaka implant if V manages to save the president herself after her plane was hacked and crashed right in the middle of Dogtown. The place just happens to be a robber-baron enclave ruled by the local incarnation of Colonel Kurtz, a renegade commander of the NUSA military who used his soldiers to turn this corner of Night City into a private fiefdom. Together with an elite hacker working for the feds, V steps into the dark, trying to bail out the head of the state.

Phantom Liberty really shows how good the CDP Red team is at delivering a prime cinematic experience. So we have a gripping, complex intrigue, solid acting and interesting characters, and finally different endings. And then there are the new combat mechanics, new high-tier weapons, a whole set of side missions and, finally, the exploration of an area that looks much different than the rest of cyberpunk Babylon.

Hearts of Iron IV: The New Order mod

Three years after the first full release of The New Order, one of the most popular total mods for Hearts of Iron IV, its development is stalled and large updates are a rarity. And yet, last year the fans received The Ruin package which adds content for two countries suffering under the Nazi jackboot. I spent a week or two playing both Britain and Ukraine, trying various paths and testing new mechanics. Generally speaking, it was an enjoyable experience, but it felt a bit underwhelming. Still, I'm glad to see that my favourite HoI4 mod isn't completely dead — after all, it made me like big strategy games again. Let's hope another major update arrives soon enough.

In the next episode...

My favourite Russian youtuber celebrated the beginning of March by releasing a video on the first Fallout game and, to nobody's surprise, it made me give in to nostalgia. After all, Black Island's postapo masterpiece was an important milestone in my game's life, so why wouldn't I want to back once again? Only now, after all those years, I recognise how many issues this game had at its release (at this point, I'm in the second town and Ian has already shot me in the back five times), but the setting, visual style and especially the soundtrack make up for all that hassle. When I'm done with the current playthrough, I'll try to enrich our beloved Hive Gaming community with a personal post about F1, but no promises.

Besides that, I have no concrete plans for the upcoming month. Spring is in the air, so I'll probably go back to 15th-century Bohemia via Kingdom Come Deliverance and finally try to get the hardest achievement: Path of the True Virgin. See you at the next checkpoint, lads!