NUCLEAR OPTIONS

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

- Robert Zak

NEED TO KNOW

WHAT IS IT?

A non-linear shooter with a focus on survival and player choice

EXPECT TO PAY

£31.50

DEVELOPER

The Farm 51

PUBLISHER

All in! Games SA

REVIEWED ON

Ryzen 7 5800H, Nvidia GeForce 3070, 16GB RAM

MULTIPLAYER

No

LINK

chernobylgame.com

Chernobylite is a curious mash-up of ideas orbiting around a pretty stiff first-person shooter framework. But it feels more inviting thanks to its evocative setting and cast of grizzled scavengers. Despite some shortcomings, it succeeds as a game about choice, where you’re constantly faced with quandaries that may meaningfully affect the hero Igor’s journey as he chases spectral visions of his wife around the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Killing a sketchy character early on might lead to an awkward impasse with his wife later, split-second decisions about whether or not to save stalkers from patrolling army guards will dictate how many allies and enemies you have in the Zone, and at every key point you’ll have companions radioing in to persuade you to do stuff.

Each time you die, you wake up in a dreamscape where you can see how the key decisions you made are connected, and go back and change those decisions using mysterious Chernobylite shards as payment to whatever interdimensional god-force is running the show.

It’s pretty ballsy for a game to lay bare its choice system like this, but given the breadth of Chernobylite’s web of choices, the devs have every right to want to show it off.