First of all, welcome.  Let's get down to serious business.

The idea of the post-apocalyptic world has inhabited the American and human cultural consciousness for decades; in literature, film, and most recently gaming. At its core, it is an idea both romantic and terrifying to humanity. We find the concept of a world-changing catastrophe alluring for a few reasons; we almost unequivocally hope for our own survival, but find ourselves torn after that fact. As human beings largely comfortable with the status quo, the idea of having everything we know destroyed before us is to have our confidence in ourselves as effectual beings ripped from us. But, as democratically-minded and capitalistic creatures, we can see the post-apocalyptic scenario as the ultimate chance to start over, to rebuild ourselves and our world—and profit from it, or at least take pleasure in our ability to eke out a living. We also find the story behind each post-apocalyptic world tremendously fascinating, because the backstory is what we are living now—today our world is here, but in the tomorrow we are playing, our world is gone. What allies become enemies, what nemeses become friends, and who presses the big red button is all important to us because it serves as a warning about the potential for a man-made apocalypse, and a fictional history of the apocalypse comforts us because seeing how we might end our planetary dominance affords us a chance to avoid it.

One of the classic survivor stories is that of Fallout's Vault-Dweller, a survivor that appears random and inconsequential at first, but ultimately one that will change the face of the game's fictional world. Two of our greatest modern fears are incorporated into the backstory of Fallout's particular nuclear holocaust; waning fuel supplies, and conflict with China. Maybe developers Black Isle Studios wanted to send a message about the need to invest in alternative fuels and uphold our tradition of diplomacy above all. Maybe they just needed a captivating story to justify sending nukes sailing through the sky, and our fears were a good starting point. No matter what, I believe it goes deeper than the simple necessity for justification of the post-apocalyptic scenario. Maybe Black Isle's writers were just especially adept at picking out the issues that would unsettle their largely American audience the most—perhaps because Black Isle itself was American-based—but the everyday issues that they chose to take to their extreme conclusions tap into weak points in our collective cultural consciousness undeniably well.

In any case, we can sidestep any mucking about in the messy debate over the artistic intent of the developers and get into the interesting stuff—the interpretations we can make and their relationship to everyday issues. The Fallout series has received great praise since its debut for the epic scale and quality of its storytelling, but in some ways its canon is almost predictable, possibly by the virtue of those same modern issues taken to catastrophic levels that lend the backstory such sympathetic accessibility. Because of our extreme dependence on finite, foreign energy, and the rise of China as a potential new global rival, Fallout's story becomes so potentially real that it becomes obvious. Of course Americans are scared of Chinese influence, so of course we go to war with them in 2066. You can't miss our fears over global oil supplies, so obviously the catalyst for our nuclear apocalypse is the lack of oil to fuel superheated global economies. It still has the post-apocalyptic science-fiction flair to it—after all, it's not such a realistic scenario that it's already happened—but because Black Isle strove to create a believable canon, the interpretation doesn't go much further than asking what we are currently afraid of and wishing very very fervently won't happen.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky is enthralling because it is the exact opposite. Developed and published by a foreign company, with a post-apocalyptic scenario that is not quite apocalyptic, the game draws on issues not immediately apparent to an American audience for its emotional appeal. The post-apocalyptic fiction centers around a second Chernobyl accident that has far deeper ramifications than the first; unexplained phenomena that could have to do with the space-time continuum create “The Zone,” a place of scientific uncertainties and mystical potential. “Anomalies,” almost entirely invisible to the human eye, chew up unsuspecting “Stalkers” (the term given to most of those that explore The Zone), while animalistic mutants imbued with psionic powers hunt them. Clearly, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s fiction is held together with a particular richness that requires extensive explanation, an occasional complaint about science fiction in general and a potential pitfall of post-apocalyptic storytelling—to get so distracted with giving the audience the proper what-why-when-where-how that the actual story is neglected. The virtue of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s concoction of complicated science fiction is that it provides an explorable canon left wide open for interpretation while remaining rooted to modern issues—namely the Chernobyl accident and the occasional tempestuousness of the Eastern European political sphere. Unlike Chinese influence and oil prices, these are not often the first things on the mind of an American citizen—even an informed one. These concerns are less obvious to us, and so they intrigue us in ways other than by sparking our fears.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s fiction is not based on the absolute terror of waking up and finding the sun has failed to rise that post-apocalyptic fiction tends to evoke. It convincingly portrays fantastic things—like “pseudodogs” that create mirror images of themselves to confuse their prey—in a frightening way, and so The Zone is frightening on an individual scale, but not necessarily the global scale that the post-apocalyptic genre is frequently attached to. Because the apocalypse was contained within the relatively small radius of The Zone, and the game's story pays practically no attention to the outside world, our concerns are limited to our immediate survival in this twisted world while there is at least no mention of similar mysticism plaguing the outside world. No news is good news. That general blanket of numbing, awesome fear that covers the landscape of a world gone awry is not gone—essential as those scattered ashes are for a post-apocalyptic world—if anything it is sharper for its concentration in The Zone. And its more apparent meaning as metaphor than literal possibility has some interpretations that both draw upon and supersede its connection to the real world.

The storyline is borrowed, after all—but in a unique way. It is fashioned after the Russian science fiction novel Roadside Picnic, which is an allegory for the Chernobyl disaster. However, while S.T.A.L.K.E.R. adopts many aspects of Roadside Picnic's plot—some entirely verbatim, like “The Zone” and “Stalkers”—S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is not an allegory for Chernobyl, since it specifically takes place within the disaster zone. The game is about something else entirely. Here, because S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s literalism ends at Chernobyl, we can take that leap of interpretive faith that Fallout doesn't quite afford us.

Therein lies why this path of thought is not just updated but entirely justified by the late summer release of the prequel—Clear Sky—to its predecessor—Shadow of Chernobyl—and how the former transcends its historically-rooted canon to tie into a new, current fear reborn from a past era.

Significantly more attention is paid to the nature of The Zone in Clear Sky than in Shadow of Chernobyl—for which the alteration of the human condition while confined within The Zone was a major focal point—after all, Clear Sky's namesake comes from the previously unknown “Clear Sky” faction, a group of largely pacifistic scientifically minded types that make it clear from the outset that The Zone is alive and is reacting to something that has messed with its metabolism, as it were. They saved your life and seem to have a better idea of what's going on than the rest of The Zone's illicit denizens, so you're inclined to believe them. It's alive in the same way an ecological system is alive, and it's been gravely wounded by human meddling.

This sort of characterization makes The Zone sound a lot like an environmentally styled commentary, which ties in well with the Chernobyl underpinnings that criticize irresponsibility. But there is a second important facet of the exposition of The Zone. Both major factions in the game have distinct stances on how to reconcile human existence with this new, unpredictable, alien presence of The Zone; to simplify, the “Duty” faction seeks to destroy The Zone, while “Freedom” seeks to preserve it. Both factions speak of how The Zone accelerates the corrosion of technology—part of the rationale why there are so few working vehicles in The Zone and why weapons degrade so quickly. They both express curiosity and a degree of fear about another lifelike aspect of The Zone, that it grows larger and more violent in response to attempts to suppress it—something especially worrisome for Duty. It is a pattern of escalation between those that misunderstand and fear The Zone and The Zone itself. The more they fight it, the more it fights back. It becomes clear that the mutants of The Zone are not a mishmash of Chernobyl chaos—rather, they are more of a personal army, focused and controlled. It creates a sort of doomsday message in the possibility that humanity might fight The Zone so much that this thing that they don't understand may destroy them in response, summoning the old apocalyptic fears. The course of the game never gets anywhere near that point, and it is mostly a haze of fear in the background, but its continued relevance is apparent, for this, too, can be taken beyond literalism. This difficult relationship that humans have with the distinctly inhuman Zone is one of mutually assured destruction. The Zone is here to stay, humans have tapped into its potential, realized the threat, and now the potential for devastation must be faced instead of ignored.

So can Clear Sky be taken as a commentary on weapons of mass destruction, for which the idea of mutually assured destruction is most relevant? The game hails from Ukraine, after all—a front row seat to what some in the Western media have termed a resurgence of Soviet imperialism. And of course, nothing fits more snuggly into a Cold War mentality than nuclear weapons But perhaps it is too much of a stretch—it is rather doubtful that GSC Game Worlds had all of this in mind while developing Clear Sky. Then again, some of our greatest literature affords us vast interpretations equally wonderful as their intended messages that keeps it at least somewhat modern and relevant and still worth reading. And so perhaps we ought to take note that Clear Sky has been released in timely coincidence to these newfound fears of a fledgling reinvented Soviet Union, and we should still view our own personal zones of alienation and uncertainty with care, respect, and caution. We see also that we have come full circle, through Chernobyl and The Zone and back to the nuclear apocalypse, just as the third installment in the Fallout series is being released. We have seen what the recklessness and irresponsibility of humans can lead to, have been given a glimpse of the unimaginable, and now have the chance to halt it in our day and age.