Come back to this game in like 2-4 years. Find whatever Grok the author of the GAMMA modpack for the old games has put together and see if the game actually functions properly at that point. Most of the long term fanbase for this game were expecting jank and not bothered by it because they were waiting to see if the base game was at a standard that modders could work from to fix and develop further into what the old stalker games became in the 14 year gap. The GAMMA modpack itself is worthy of review its a cool experience.
Honestly “my house house burnt down, now I need to abuse the noosphere to afford a new one” is a more relatable motivation than half of games these days
Not every protagonist needs to be motivated to 'save the world from wibbly wobbliness'. Sometimes it's nice to have a more personal goal that still remains the same even if we stumble onto a save the world plot. If only because there's no point getting money to fix your house if the world isn't around to live in.
It’s unironically a perfect motivation for an open world game. It’s important, but you can also fuck around a lot with side quests because you *do* have other places to stay, the only one being affected is you and no one else is in imminent danger.
@@cybertramon0012 I say give me a break from escathological overblown save-the-world-from-its-nigh-end reasons. I just wanna be a lil' guy for once without having to resort to Animal Crossing.
@@Lilac_Lotus Agreed. It allows for a very flexible timeframe, so it avoids the problem of higher stakes motives making goofing off with random sidequests feel out of place. It's also a very neutral motive, so you can play the character however you want without it clashing with the motive. And while it's ultimately a very specific problem, there are as many ways to tackle it as there are ways of getting money, so basically ANY progress is relevant in the big picture.
I think it took me about 30 hours of gameplay to pick up on the fact that the protag's primary stake in the plot has almost nothing to do with the future of the zone or humanity, but finding which dorky physicist he needs to beat up for trashing his 1-bedroom apartment with ensuite laundry. Skif lives an explicitly empty and pointless life outside the zone. The only reason the plot happens is because his TV doesn't work anymore so he decides to punch Slavic Elon in the mouth because he has nothing better to do.
In the novel, the main reason they go there and risk their lives is for money. The main character, Red, was once idealistic but throughout the novel the reader sees him becoming more and more cynical. He does have a better motivation; however, he's willing to commit an awful trade to get it. For a story about a post-soviet hell, a man wanting a new TV is a bigger motivation than most Westerners will realize. A book that I read, talked about how Russian punkers would make their own crude guitars because there was no other way.
lol if youre up to the up to the part in the game where you go to the non run down area you specifically get called out on this spoiler i guess: the lady specifically says youre a nobody with no friends or family, youre probably here because you wanted an escape from youre boring life i would say that the game really established the theme that the zone really captivates people more than just making money off the artifacts
"Loved a good book, but loved a good fight more." Skif is a rotmaxxer who's bones yearn for adventure, he says he's going there for a paycheck but he's really going for an excuse.
the "right mood" ponder is spot on. There are times when I simply do not care about STALKER at all. I live in Finland, so I get to experience more than fucking enough of miserable wet, dark forests. And I remember from the military how wonderful it is to be wearing gas masks, which protect you really well against oxygen as well. Then there are times, such as recently, when I am completely obsessed with it. There's just something neat about a partly alien, post apocalyptic world that is just this one pocket in the real world.
Even though the A-life system doesn't work properly, there's just this constant apprehension with it when you're trying to wander through an anomalous field for that artifact.
"I live in Finland, so I get to experience more than fucking enough of miserable wet, dark forests." I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I find it hilarious that you got so sick of your own miserable wet, dark forests that you had to borrow ours for the Alan Wake games.
@@luukeksifrozenhillbillyeur3407 I live in said Twin Peaks town (the town the dinner is in), and it does indeed have a nice character to it! But it's also even darker and rainier than the rest of the PNW 😭
That's what the publisher THQ cooked up at the time to avoid getting sued over copyright. Originally it was supposed to be an acronym for the device/project that brainwashes people but that was cut.
A tidbit that is probably only interesting to me: The soviet era novel (Roadside Picnic) that inspired the Stalker series also inspired a Japanese light novel series called Otherside Picnic, and a major plot thread of the series focuses on the romantic relationship between the two main female characters. So while many Eastern Europeans of Slavic ancestry can say they have a cousin Yuri, Stalker can say it has a Yuri cousin.
@@ReverendTed I will! Let's see... "Dear Firearms Pedants, We do apologise, but you appear to have mistaken us for people who give a damn. Yours, Everyone other than you on the entire planet."
The most annoying bug I've encountered is random weapons appearing in my inventory and second primary weapon slot. I mean it's kind of nice of the gun gods to think of me, but I don't REALLY want my assault rifle swapped out for a broken ass Dragunov sniper rifle in the middle of some heated CQB. I know Yahtzee isn't a big fan of open world games, but I'm really enjoying Stalker 2, though I did play the crap out of the previous 3 installments so I knew what to expect.
@@starmaker75 In the lore of the game it's not really the nuclear waste. The meltdown was caused by scientists experimenting with psychic abilities. Think Stranger Things, except instead of opening a gate to an alternate world, they altered a portion of ours, which, combined with the meltdown had some unexpected side-effects.
Ch*e*rnobyl is the Russian spelling, Ch*o*rnobyl is the proper Ukrainian spelling. The series used to use the former but changed to the latter in Stalker 2 for obvious reasons
I think we should just meet each other halfway and spell it with an A. That's what _my_ language does XD Edit/Addendum: This is a joke. At the end of the day I totally understand the push for Ukrainian-based English forms, and if, say, Germans were to try and take over Western Poland I would also complain about English speakers using Breslau and Posen.
The funny thing about the mutated animals bit is that there are in fact mutant animals in the exclusion zone, but just not in the Fallout sense. In fact, the whole area has effectively become a nature reserve.
@parkerdixon-word6295 yeah, that one. Additionally, there's a herd of Przewalski's horses living there now too. I forget how they ended up there, but that makes them the first pure wild horses in Europe since the tarpan went extinct.
HBO Chernobyl wants people to believe it is an IRL fallout wasteland meanwhile there's people there living the regular village life just with poor cell coverage. There's been dozens of medial works because it's a legit fascinating topic and they didn't find anything serious. For fucks sake the biggest offender Cs-135 has a half-life of 30 years so you have to be real interested in getting radiation poisoning to find any outside of vehicle graveyards.
@@GallowglassVT A lot of people also don't realize that just because something is not fit for human lives, doesn't mean it isn't fit for other animals. Humans can and often do live into their late 80's and 90's, some even into their 100's. That means living in a iradiated location like Chernobyl or Fukushima, which has a high likelyhood in causing cancer after prolonged exposure isn't feasible because you will live long enough for cancers to develop and end your life prematurely. However, if your a species like wolves, who only live like 8-12 years, you're not really alive long enough to develop cancers from the location, or if you do, by the time it threatens your life, you're already approaching death anyways. Which is also why there are abunch of health wolf populations in Chernobyl as well
I remember seeing at least 1 obituary of a stalker dev that died during the war. Having gotten the game out while the country is in an existential war is kind of an achievement in itself.
@@Klovaneer If the war hadn't started, he'd still be alive and developing for the game. Not to mention, he had long-time friends and colleagues still working on it that had to grieve his death. These things don't happen in a vacuum.
The animals acting weird isn't because their AI is breaking, it's because, as I've come to understand it, they essentially have the same AI as humans but only equipped with melee weapons and a low self preservation threshold, and when they can't reach the player they default to running for cover.
the fact that breaking their pathing make them run for cover is kinda amazing, in the old games all you had to do was find a box and slowly kill them as they tried to circle you. but now they hide from you, so you need to get down and wait for them to come.
@@danilooliveira6580 which I can sort of understand as a way of stopping the players from cheesing the mutants. It is kinda stupid(and funny,) though, to see a whole pack of dogs simultanelusly skedaddle behing buildings the second you step on a car. And start simultaneously coming towards you the second your first toe touches the ground.
@@danilooliveira6580 Same thing happens to deathclaws in fallout, if you get on a rock they can't access they just straight up go back to where they were before lol
Y'all, Chornobyl is the Ukrainian way of writing it, Chernobyl is the Russian way. Originally they still used the Russian spelling but yeah, that changed for obvious reasons.
As the english dubbing populates what's supposed to be a gritty setting with Terry Pratchett characters, I very quickly made the decision to switch to Ukranian voices with english subtitles, and haven't looked back. Instant immersion. The gunplay is actually great. If you get shot at, seek cover, move from cover to cover to isolate targets and get better angles, and never pop out where they expect you to. I love getting into shootouts in STALKER.
can't wait 'til the A-Life gets up and running again. Without this system, the old titles would have died long ago for me. Nothing like evaluating a hit job on how likely it is that the target gets lost to the zone ... he's currently on his way through red forrest? well, in the meantime I'm on my way the quest giver ^^
@@SirButtz The tree is better than nothing. It's been a rare occurance for me, but yeah spawner they're using in place of A-Life can be irritating at times. A-Life is apparently on the way, so I'm pretty excited to see how it changes things!
The shootouts are a bit different from the originals, in the originals you can sit in a good bit of cover and line up shots all day, in Stalker 2 you need to shoot, move, shoot, move. The gameplay is a little janky but it is a big improvement over the gunplay and mutant behaviour from the originals (which you would certainly hope for)
The enemy can Xray vision my location to such a scary degree, that I can be crouched behind a solid concrete wall that surrounds their entire base in a big square, moving quietly, and they can still throw a grenade at me with precision that I would die if not the the mentioned concrete wall between me and the explosion. Please tell me more about popping out where they don't expect you to be. I am very interested.
Personalty i see that "concept"(as slavjank) As a cheap excesses for bugs and weird design choices. Especially in the era where everyone is able to make a game what do these even mean.
@@TuriGamer not true. with american jank the game runs horribly on even the highest hardware but the microtransaction shop works perfectly. with european jank the game runs ok, the bugs are funny, and you only pay once
One of the things I loved most about the original Stalker(s) was strength through equipment and experience. With experience, you can get through the early bits without dying, but equipment makes the late game possible. You don't get better because some number went up, as it were, but because YOU got better. Haven't played 2 yet, but I will be doing so in due time.
It's roughly the same in 2. Early game, you go down in a few hits but once you get some proper armor you start to get better durability and can take more hits. Oh you can still see your health melt away under concentrated fire and certain mutants fuck you up regardless but it's still a better system than in looter shooters where you only get better because you got guns with bigger numbers attached. That being said, guns found later in the game do tend to be more effective than early game ones even if they use the same ammo but you need some sort of equipment progression. Skifs pistol you start the game with never stops being useful though since it weighs almost nothing, ammo for it is incredibly plentiful and it is cheap to maintain.
Not complaining about Stalker not having levelling or anything, but can both upgrade your stats/gear/etc AND get personally better as a player at the same time though, it's not strictly one or the other. I'm pretty sure that basically every game with leveling and such has difficulty progression designed under the expectation that both are happening anyway.
@@Alloveck Of course. Most games with upgrade trees do require the player to get better and understand the skills they get and upgrade, but I really admire how Stalker does it. It really is just you, your weapon, however good your armor is, some buffs from artifacts, and your wits. You're not wrong, though, and I don't think either system is inherently better.
its exactly the same in 2, but a little bit too forgiving imo. Im not quite sure if thats because i was used to playing stalker anomaly though, so it might just be that im out of touch with the base games now.
Ima disagree with the comments here and say this is the main weakness of stalker 2 for me. I'm on veteran and I really hate how fast I became a unstoppable killing machine; once you have the ak74 with scope and extended mag and 3 cheap as fuck upgrades for skiffs pistol, Skiff is basically an unkillable death bringer who can tank 10 bullets and keep popping syringes while 1 tapping bandits with headshots for as long as your finger can keep tapping the buttons. Not only that, but the game absolutely drowns you in ammo, meds, alcohol, etc. That being said the game is still awesome, still my GOTY, but I really really am looking forward to mods improving on the survival/difficulty aspect because as it is dying in combat to ballistics is a true rarity for me just 10 or so hours into the game. Any time a character in side quests is like "you have to do this or me and my 15 men compound will kill you" it's genuinely not difficult to just say fuck it and murder every one of them while jamming yourselves with syringes. It at times gives way to a farcry style power fantasy at points and just isn't really the feeling I want in a STALKER game. I don't fear the irradiated mutants anymore, I just load up the SPAS12 shotgun and run around the corner chasing after them to kill them as quick as possible if that makes sense.
The wandering accents personally seemed to suggest that people had been coming to the zone from all over the world and not simply from the surrounding region. That said, a few different demographics other than white and black might have driven that point home a bit more.
I could buy that. After all, the original novel of Roadside Picnic didn't take place in Chornobyl at all, instead taking place in some place called "Harmont" which was probably somewhere in the vicinity of Quebec and New England, and that was just one of six Visitation Zones spread across the world in a "smooth curve" based on the procession of Deneb. With the promise of hitting paydirt with a good artifact, or even just experiencing unearthly wonders beyond normality, any Visitation Zone would likely be a beacon for would-be adventurers and treasure-hunters across the globe. Hell, if the Visitation happened in the Indiana Jones continuity, Doctor Jones would almost certainly make a trip to the Zones, whether they be in Cumbria, Tohoku, Quebec, Chornobyl, the Olympic Peninsula, wherever. *Indy:* "Controllers... why did it have to be Controllers?" *Controller:* "In a perfect world... men like me would not exist. ...BUT THIS IS NOT A PERFECT WORLD."
This would totally make sense if it wasn't so bashed together. Even in the original trilogy, the mercenaries faction were hinted to be coming from Europe and America, and Freedom primarily using NATO equipment was also never outright confirmed to be composed exclusively of surrounding territory members. What doesn't make sense is the heavy american or british accents on characters with obviously slavic names. It gets worse when in the course of a single dialogue, Skif and another person speak of a third character, but both pronounce the third character's name vastly differently because it's pretty clear one of the voice actors does not know how it would be pronounced in Russian/Ukrainian. Clear Sky, despite the English localization at times being rather memeworthy, at least tried by making Steve Blum do an incredibly forced slavic accent.
Jumping out of reach of mutants doesn't mess up their pathing, it makes them search for cover to hide behind until you come down. I've found it to works pretty well, it just takes them time to reach the new spot sometimes.
As someone who really liked the previous games, I found rediscovering areas in great graphics and meeting characters from the previous games to be incredible. There's also a lot more going on story wise, but I will admit it's probably harder to follow if you don't know what happened in Clear Sky or what the Brain Scorcher was. I've had nothing but a blast this whole time.
As always, the man nails it. That being said, I am around 95 hours deep into Stalker 2 and have probably seen a bit above half the story. I just get sidetracked exploring shit and then dragging my over-encumbered butt back to base just to sell it and then repeat the process. All in all, 10\10, love the game, worth the wait of 14 years.
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, Yahtzee just pronounced it "Ess-tee-ayy-ell-kay-ee-arr: Clear Sky". He has grown so much as a critic since then...
Stalker is at its best when you have a five button mouse, so you can assign bandage and health kits to your thumb for instant use. Some people say you should assign quick save and load to those buttons instead.
They changed it from the Russian to the Ukrainian spelling of Chornobyl because -well, it goes without explaining 😅 Despite a "less than ideal " launch and A-Life 2.0 being...well non-existant it's been an amazing game thus far.
Some Stalker 2 thoughts; There are just some choices that are poorly executed regardless of the buggines. Rat swarms are a cool idea, but they just amount to 15 or 20 of these silly little rat models running around and taking turns to jump at you, and then disappearing into cover when you jump on a box. Ditto with dog packs. Making the mutants tougher is a good idea, but it just amounts to these bullet sponge mutants lunging at you, running away, and then lunging at you again. The only mutants I've enjoyed fighting are Bloodsuckers, and even they have just been made spongier and slightly trickier because they run beside you rather than straight in front of you. Human enemies continuously go between being insanely aware of your position and tactical, and just standing still while you shoot them. The game is in serious need to get the Cyberpunk 2077 treatment. Stealth is completely broken, and this is exacerbated by the enemy spawns. It doesn't matter how stealthy or quiet you try to be, as soon as you shoot any enemy with a silenced gun, they all know where you are. They usually spot you anyway, regardless of distance/light/sound level. They can also shoot you with pinpoint accuracy through walls btw. Enemies will literally "pop in" on top of you, while you are already trying to deal with another group e.g. I dealt with a pack of 9 dogs and another pack spawned right behind me. The smaller firefights are tough and rewarding, but when you have to deal with a big group of enemies, who all immediately know where you are, and grenade spam you, while you can barely see them because the game is so dark, it starts to get a bit grating. You can't save during combat anymore either.
@@veeas11tbh, all of the other stalker games came out essentially unfinished as well. This one aint even that bad when compared to Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky at their releases (Clear Sky is still a mess till this day).
@@r68saga31 Yeah, but... those were made by a small group of underfunded devs. And those games were not, in any way, being marketed as AAA (I know, I hate that description too, but here we are). This time, the team was quite large and they had a lot of funding. Yes, the invasion, relocation of part of the team, that all happened. But that's no excuse for A-life, which was supposed to be the biggest draw of the game, to be not functional. Not buggy, but not working at all. Don't take me wrong, I like the game. But I can only play for a few hours and I have to take a break from the fun breaking nonsense for a day or two, for all the reasons @blackdragoncyrus mentioned. In contrast, I can play Stalker: CoP the whole day and it's still fun.
@@Duwurf I'm not super surprised. Partly because developing in Ukraine even back after 2014 was difficult; 4A had to partially relocate to Malta, and then had to fully relocate after 2022 because of all the difficulties running a studio there while working on Metro Exodus. Then I also think you have to consider the history of GSC Games as a company, which isn't exactly trouble free (reminder, a lot of the founding staff of 4A were from GSC, having been the core programmers and artists behind SoC, laid off after SoC, which is probably a starting point for troubles behind a full sequel to Stalker). Again, not an excuse, more an explanation as to why I'm not surprised and why I don't think anyone else should really be surprised.
Those rat swarms were some hilarious jank. They're like Dishonored rat swarms, but not good. They should have just stuck with those individual rat lads, those work just fine.... usually.
STALKER is a backronym that supposedly stands for Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers and Robbers and in the game universe it's like a catch all for people who are in the zone without any authorization. In Roadside Picnic and the movie Stalker it doesn't really stand for anything. It was basically just chosen by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky because it "sounded cool" and they wanted an English word as Roadside Picnic takes places somewhere in the midwest.
@franksloe5087 The movie Stalker is at best only inspired by Roadside Picnic. None of the locations or characters from the book is featured in the movie. It should be noted though that in Roadside Picnic there are multiple zones but we don't learn of any exact locations. Nothing says there isn't a zone in Chornobyl
@@franksloe5087 Oh, you're talking about the cooling towers that can be seen in the background of the bar scene towards the end. It's not the last shot, the last shot is the Stalker's daughter using telekinisis and that's not a nuclear powerplant, it's a coal or oil power plant. You can see the smoke stacks beyond the cooling towers. Cooling towers aren't used just for nuclear power plants, other types of plants use them too to condense steam back into hot water that is then pumped back into the boilers, thereby saving energy. But whatever head cannon works for you lol
I honestly really enjoy STALKER 2. Dunno whether I'm just lucky, but I haven't really experienced any bugs in the >40 hours I've played. Game runs great and I've only crashed once and that was an exception_access_violation error which was subsequently fixed in a patch. The graphics are very good, it's immersive and I find it fun to explore the zone.
I've got 160 hours. After restarting twice from game-breaking bugs, I've done all the side-quests and am running around with the Diamond Exo, a Saiga and "Veteran" Vintorez (all upgraded), the fun is mostly in the new places to see.
You absolutely experienced bugs, you just didn't realise it and lucky. The replaced my second weapon slot with another gun will happen. One time it happened 5 weapon switches in a row, thankfully that time it was all yellow snipers which sold quite nicely. Don't worry, your equipped gun gets moved into your inventory which leads to Why am I over weight?! STALKERS bugs have multitudes.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for its fans is a bit like Dark Souls 1 is for Souls fans. It's jank, in some ways blatantly unfinished, it can be unforgivable and/or broken in dumb ways, it's been technically done better in other games, but at the end of the day it's home.
Scythians had superior horseback archery skills and bow and arrow technology of their day. Strelok means "archer", "marksman", "shooter". Kind of carrying forward the "archaic word for "dude who's good with a rifle"" naming from SoC
It's been quite an experience to see the game being finished and polished around me and frankly it just drew me it. When it told me to go north as soon as the first area opened, I fucked off and went east, bummed around and just really got into the whole wandering around mindset. But then again, I like Death Strandings and the original Stalker games and I know that it's all about well aimed single fire shots to not waste ammo.
@@nogginscratcher in the Transporter 3 movie and Gordon Ramsay's shows (maybe even Anthony Bourdain's) they called it "chicken Kiyv". Those are my only references.
It's basically S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but on a newer and more stable engine. Most of the people asking for this got exactly what they wanted, and that's enough for them. Anything thing else they want, they'll mod in. New people will still be befuddled as to why the games have a cult following.
There's 2 main issues. One, a large percentage of people who liked the original games actually played one or more of the mods, and they have no idea or have forgotten which features came from mods and which were in the game. I myself thought looting mutants for sellable trophies was a normal thing but apparently not. Two, incredibly high system reqs, terrible performance, and basically UE5 being a blight on the world of game development as usual.
@@Sotanaht01 "Can it run Unreal 5?" is going to be the new "Can it run Crysis?" The main difference being, CryEngine2 was remotely optimized. Not the best optimization, but leagues better than most (if not all) UE5 games.
@@Sotanaht01 people being such entitled little nerds that they think modded features are vanilla is so cringe. It's like confusing a classic book with the romantic fanfic someone wrote about it to be horny about and then complaining to the OG author that the characters are no longer a queer couple
@@Sotanaht01 Wait, looting mutants for sellable stuff really is a mod-specific concept? Seriously? ...Wow, guess I really don't know what the actual vanilla experience was anymore. Looting mutants makes so much sense both as a gameplay concept and by in-universe logic that I can't imagine the designers NOT originally including it.
The seamless open world in this game is an incredible achievement. The only loading screens are sleeping and dying. You can even go inside buildings or under ground without being interrupted.
I think it's so funny how media keeps presenting that as if its a difficult choice. Do you want to be entirely restricted in your free will or be able to actually make a change even if that means letting a couple crazy people go wild for a bit? Of course everyone is going to side with the nutters.
Woah, what a blast TO the past. Yahtzee's review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R; Clear Sky, was the VERY FIRST ZP I'd ever seen. It affected me so much, I only read the title of it as "es-tea-ayy-el-kay-ee-are Clear Sky" any more.
What I appreciate from Stalker is it rewards players for being slow and methodical, you have to plan routes around known danger areas. Running into ruins without a plan gets you killed. Run and gunning doesnt work, you dont have enough bullets for that. I do wish the crafting/loot system was expanded though. And outside of money for upgrades or repairs, exploring areas doesnt do a whole lot to upgrade your character so there is little incentive to deviate
Yea, reminds me heavily of death stranding in a way. Where simply getting to where you want to go and surviving the world along the way is 75% of the game. Love it.
As a stalker veteran, its opposite of what you are saying. You are slow and methodical in anomaly and first 3 game. In stalker 2 with how spongee the mutants are. Grab a shotgon, and sprint face first into them and humans. Mid to late game, grab a scope and go for headshots to not waste ammo on human foes. Mutants you run into them and fill em with lead. You have infinite medikits anyways
As a long time Ukrainian fan, I want to thank you for acknowledging the development hell because of the war. The team literally had to move to another country to continue due to constant bombings and light/internet shutdowns due to russian terror bombings of the electrical infrastructure. And at least one of the developers volunteered to the army to protect his home and died on the frontlines. I was waiting for this review anxiously, expecting you to be much more brutal on the bugginess. So thank you. Besides, the team already is working on patches. And separate thanks for calling it “Ukrainian-russian war”. Many people in the free world (by possibly just not putting much thought into it or saving time) call it something like “Ukraine war” or “Ukrainian conflict”. Which makes it sound like it’s our problem and fault, shifting the focus and the blame on the victim and defender from the criminal and the aggressor. Much love from Ukraine. Believe it or not, you have many fans here. I kinda learned English back in 2010s by your videos, which allows me to work on a high paying job and support my family through the war. So although I wasn’t “captured by Somalian pirates and didn’t hum the ZP theme for them to recognise it and spare me”; your work did help me greatly in a different way :)
I know this will sound wrong, but Stalker 2 being bugged on release is like water being wet. Or rather like a bread having some butter on it - makes it better. I am sure developers will fix most of them. Patches are coming out regularly, as much as they can with electricity problems and bombs falling. But I specifically pre-ordered it and playing it currently to first experience it at full junk. Just like the first one. And damn the game has just amazing atmosphere and sound design.
Wanted to make the joke about the spelling change but watched the first thirty seconds of the review first XD The thing is, after 2022 people noted that a lot of the English spellings of Ukrainian city names are actually based on Russian versions of those names and so people adjusted. See also Odesa and Kyiv.
I was really hoping Yahtz would make a joke about the fact that his one exposure to the series was the equivalent of Super Mario Bros: the Lost Levels being the only 2d Mario platformer you've played.
When you duck while moving thou the shrapnel anomaly you don't get damage or bleeding. One of the biggest problems of this game is the dis-balance of how expensive it is to kill the monsters compared to the reward. You don't loot anything from monsters so the only reward is a bit of satisfaction and occasionally the ease of searching through an area without being chased around. I feel like the game could do better in this regard, if not loot than some kind of respect from other characters somehow. What I like that it is hard and unforgiving in the way that there is no guarantee that you will come back richer in loot or credits than you started. If you're too careless repair cost and lost of ammo will outweigh the income. But it is also not too hard on STALKER difficulty. I managed to stack up quit an arsenal and 70k credits while moving into the 3rd area.
I played on the hardest difficulty on my first playthrough, and you're right, I had to quell my curious-open-world-game instincts and avoid areas on the map I haven't been to because I didn't know what was there and I didn't know if it would be worth the repair costs. Sometimes I would try to make a break for an old familiar spot for sanctuary, only to find it was abandoned and overrun with (shudder) snorks... By the endgame I was so exhausted fighting M******* I just made a beeline for the end of the game... juuust like I did in the first STALKER. There's a mod to add loot to the mutants but I don't think it works atm.
I personally prefer that mutants don't give you anything, it makes you avoid them as much as possible since they're just a waste to deal with and even more discourages gung-ho approach
That's not a problem, that's the zone. The mutants have always been resource sinks in the franchise. They're meant to be a danger that you actively want to avoid where possible like many of the anomalies with cheap, crap artifacts.
Yeah, I don't mean that it is bad. But just avoiding one characteristic part of what makes Stalker the game it is, is still a bit unfortunate in a way. In the big picture it makes sense. But in the moment to moment gameplay it is odd. Like I said, loot is not the only form of reward thinkable.
@@miagi1337 I feel like it would make the game worse by making you *want* to fight mutants sometimes, which imo is against the design philosophy of the game. It's one of those things that feels unusual because we're used to "kill something that's hard to kill"="reward", but that not being the case is one of the important parts of the game's core, along with "no exp system"/"skill trees" and combat being deadly in general
I tried stalker 2 for a bit, wandered around for a while just exploring. Then I found a base so I decided to expore it. I snuck into a sniper tower and shanked the sniper, looked around and saw nothing. I climbed back down and headed into the base. Second sniper tower, that was previously empty, had an enemy in it now. No problem, I snuck in and shanked them too. I climb back down and check a building and nearby points on entry. All clear. I start sneaking in the other direction and suddenly there's 4 enemies that just spawned in behind me already spotting me.
0:30 Well it was also planned to release in 2012 before getting cancelled for reasons I don't know as of right now and then popping back up in 2018 with a plan to release in 2022 and _that's_ where the Russia-Ukraine war interrupted the release.
I'm so glad you had the same experience with this game as me. I thought I'd just got old and sh*t at games with the amount I was dying. That and the load times on Xbox was atrocious. Walk out, die, wait 30 secs to reload, go die again, reload for another 30 secs over and over.
They pretty much dropped it before the original game launched, but "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." is short for Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers and Robbers.
Not quite actually. It stood for the brainwashing methodology the C-Consciousness used to program sleeper agents, which is why they have it tattooed on them (and why the protagonist in the first game is called Marked One). However, they ended up dropping this plot point later in development after they already had the title and character design. When THQ published they English version, they came up with the Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, and Robbers backronym. So it wasn't created until after the first game launched.
There's a Nigel Farage* joke in there somewhere. *British politician who is so frequently photographed with a pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other (to "prove" that he's a "man of the people" even though he's rich) that people sometimes joke that they're permanently glued to his hands.
So S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has evolved into an acronym over time. Initially when the Strugatsky brothers wrote Roadside Picnic they simply spelled the word “stalker” and I don’t believe that the movie written based on the book used the word as an acronym either. I’m not sure when and where it started being used as an acronym. It stands for Scavengers Trespassers Adventurers Loners Killers Explorers and Robbers. Truly a mixed bag of personality.
@@_Ciaran_Maher I apologize, I wrote all of that based off of memory. I don't remember where I heard it from but I was under the impression there were two movies based directly off the book. I changed the wording.
3:07 Log Horizon fans watching season 3 who started on season 1 probably felt your pain. I binged the first two seasons before it came out myself, having never watched it before.
Stalker 2 is a masterpiece in its own! Yeah, alot of the scenery looks the same but have you looked outside? The scenery and lighting is beautiful. Theres some jank with enemies spawning behind you sometimes but once they get the A-life fixed up and some of the performance hitches, the game will be perfect!
This is the closet we’re ever getting to a Pathologic 2 review, unless the 3rd comes out sooner than anticipated. Anyway thought yahtz would be a bit harsher on STALKER but I’m pleasantly surprised not played myself personally tackling the 1st game currently
Was not expecting Tony Abbot to catch a stray in this video, but I am 100% here for it. I haven't finished watching the video yet. but now I'm expecting a Peter Dutton reference on account of his head looking like a potato. Now that I think about it, if someone told me that Petter Dutton is Slavic, I would not be surprised; nor if they had said he came out of the ground.
@ I’m well aware, I came across him through the Australian Gamer Podcast with Matt and Yug while he still lived in Brisbane and opened the Mana Bar during that period. Still surprised to hear a PM mentioned from that long ago 😂
4:17 The absolute whiplash of suddenly hearing mention of Sir Onion Eater in 2024 😂 I know Yahtzee lived in Aus for a while, but it's still an absolute jolt to see anything referencing Australian Lore from any internet sources no specifically run by Aussies. We're not invisible hooray! 😜
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
Use code secondwind at incogni.com/secondwind to get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan.
wibbly wobbly
I'll work on it
Come back to this game in like 2-4 years. Find whatever Grok the author of the GAMMA modpack for the old games has put together and see if the game actually functions properly at that point. Most of the long term fanbase for this game were expecting jank and not bothered by it because they were waiting to see if the base game was at a standard that modders could work from to fix and develop further into what the old stalker games became in the 14 year gap. The GAMMA modpack itself is worthy of review its a cool experience.
Honestly “my house house burnt down, now I need to abuse the noosphere to afford a new one” is a more relatable motivation than half of games these days
Not every protagonist needs to be motivated to 'save the world from wibbly wobbliness'. Sometimes it's nice to have a more personal goal that still remains the same even if we stumble onto a save the world plot. If only because there's no point getting money to fix your house if the world isn't around to live in.
The motivation could even expand onto a place with a yard, not a view just yard views a wayy too much
It’s unironically a perfect motivation for an open world game. It’s important, but you can also fuck around a lot with side quests because you *do* have other places to stay, the only one being affected is you and no one else is in imminent danger.
@@cybertramon0012 I say give me a break from escathological overblown save-the-world-from-its-nigh-end reasons. I just wanna be a lil' guy for once without having to resort to Animal Crossing.
@@Lilac_Lotus Agreed. It allows for a very flexible timeframe, so it avoids the problem of higher stakes motives making goofing off with random sidequests feel out of place. It's also a very neutral motive, so you can play the character however you want without it clashing with the motive. And while it's ultimately a very specific problem, there are as many ways to tackle it as there are ways of getting money, so basically ANY progress is relevant in the big picture.
I think it took me about 30 hours of gameplay to pick up on the fact that the protag's primary stake in the plot has almost nothing to do with the future of the zone or humanity, but finding which dorky physicist he needs to beat up for trashing his 1-bedroom apartment with ensuite laundry.
Skif lives an explicitly empty and pointless life outside the zone. The only reason the plot happens is because his TV doesn't work anymore so he decides to punch Slavic Elon in the mouth because he has nothing better to do.
In the novel, the main reason they go there and risk their lives is for money. The main character, Red, was once idealistic but throughout the novel the reader sees him becoming more and more cynical. He does have a better motivation; however, he's willing to commit an awful trade to get it. For a story about a post-soviet hell, a man wanting a new TV is a bigger motivation than most Westerners will realize. A book that I read, talked about how Russian punkers would make their own crude guitars because there was no other way.
@@bluemooninthedaylight8073 washing machines are miracles of technology if you believe the early invasion rumors.
lol if youre up to the up to the part in the game where you go to the non run down area you specifically get called out on this
spoiler i guess: the lady specifically says youre a nobody with no friends or family, youre probably here because you wanted an escape from youre boring life
i would say that the game really established the theme that the zone really captivates people more than just making money off the artifacts
Honestly one of the most realistic driving goals in a video game ever, human anger and pettiness 🤣
"Loved a good book, but loved a good fight more." Skif is a rotmaxxer who's bones yearn for adventure, he says he's going there for a paycheck but he's really going for an excuse.
the "right mood" ponder is spot on. There are times when I simply do not care about STALKER at all. I live in Finland, so I get to experience more than fucking enough of miserable wet, dark forests. And I remember from the military how wonderful it is to be wearing gas masks, which protect you really well against oxygen as well.
Then there are times, such as recently, when I am completely obsessed with it. There's just something neat about a partly alien, post apocalyptic world that is just this one pocket in the real world.
Even though the A-life system doesn't work properly, there's just this constant apprehension with it when you're trying to wander through an anomalous field for that artifact.
"I live in Finland, so I get to experience more than fucking enough of miserable wet, dark forests."
I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I find it hilarious that you got so sick of your own miserable wet, dark forests that you had to borrow ours for the Alan Wake games.
@@SimuLord😂😂 haha, Oregon here, and playing through Alan Wake 2, I was like “yup. Nailed it.”
@@SimuLord hahaha, true. You got hills, though. Ours are just completely flat. You also got that certain flavour of small town, like in Twin Peaks.
@@luukeksifrozenhillbillyeur3407 I live in said Twin Peaks town (the town the dinner is in), and it does indeed have a nice character to it! But it's also even darker and rainier than the rest of the PNW 😭
"... large animal commonly associated with Ukraine..."
The correct answer is bear, yes. But the _fun_ answer is European bison.
Painfully, the bear is the Russian national animal.
Yup, Zubr would fit better
@@ThavronMakes Yeah...that was the joke--dark as it may be. I suggest you look up, I suspect there's a lot of things going over your head right now.
@@OmegaEnvych eh, majority of them are in the forest right on the border between Poland and Belarus (on the other side of Belarus from Chernobyl).
European Bison = Wisent. Which is a word I want to hear Yahtzee say lol
If someone's curious the acronym stands for Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers and Robbers
Actually it stands for "The word Stalker was trademarked and we wanted to reference the book!"
Nah, Yahtzee's are better.
we're not.
That's what the publisher THQ cooked up at the time to avoid getting sued over copyright. Originally it was supposed to be an acronym for the device/project that brainwashes people but that was cut.
Oryginal oryginal "stalker" was just cool word that director making movie found fitting without knowing it meaning
A tidbit that is probably only interesting to me: The soviet era novel (Roadside Picnic) that inspired the Stalker series also inspired a Japanese light novel series called Otherside Picnic, and a major plot thread of the series focuses on the romantic relationship between the two main female characters. So while many Eastern Europeans of Slavic ancestry can say they have a cousin Yuri, Stalker can say it has a Yuri cousin.
replying to this solely for mentioning Otherside Picnic, a Light Novel I actually own!
Wow. That joke was so bad my brain took a minute to force reset after reading it. For that I congratulate you sir/ma'am/other.
@@seichhornchen I can think of no higher compliment.
@@GrouchierBear I loved that last sentence.
Skif is basically just The Dude from The Big Lebowski. That apartment really tied the bloc together.
Hahaha true.
There's something intrinsically funny about a guy who launches a massive vendetta because of some trivial slight like that.
Skif abides.
"Not the most heroic reason"
Well, yeah.. it's STALKER, not Fallout.
Wait till he learns that in the original book, the guy did all this to ask an anomaly for money
Neerrrrd.
All of the people in the Zone are there for selfish reasons. Even the good guys are bastards.
Ah right its cringedark so everybody is evil, my bad
Wait... Was I supposed to be behaving heroically in Fallout?!?!
*quietly removes primed grenade from harmless NPC's pocket.*
Clippy the Ammo Clip only helps write 1 kind of document:
Death Warrants.
I'd have thought he'd be quite good at writing magazines...
Magazines would've stayed in business if they hit their mark.
And obituaries.
"Hey! It looks like you just called a magazine a clip! Would you like help drafting an apology letter to all the firearm pedants?"
@@ReverendTed I will!
Let's see...
"Dear Firearms Pedants,
We do apologise, but you appear to have mistaken us for people who give a damn.
Yours,
Everyone other than you on the entire planet."
Honestly STALKER has the perfect excuse for bugs. In-universe they’re just the Exclusion Zone being weird.
stop rinsing the joke
So while is this game buggy? Because of the nuclear waste magic
The most annoying bug I've encountered is random weapons appearing in my inventory and second primary weapon slot. I mean it's kind of nice of the gun gods to think of me, but I don't REALLY want my assault rifle swapped out for a broken ass Dragunov sniper rifle in the middle of some heated CQB.
I know Yahtzee isn't a big fan of open world games, but I'm really enjoying Stalker 2, though I did play the crap out of the previous 3 installments so I knew what to expect.
@@starmaker75 In the lore of the game it's not really the nuclear waste. The meltdown was caused by scientists experimenting with psychic abilities. Think Stranger Things, except instead of opening a gate to an alternate world, they altered a portion of ours, which, combined with the meltdown had some unexpected side-effects.
Pretty sure Yahtz himself made that joke 14 years ago
Ch*e*rnobyl is the Russian spelling, Ch*o*rnobyl is the proper Ukrainian spelling. The series used to use the former but changed to the latter in Stalker 2 for obvious reasons
"original" lol ok sure bud
I think we should just meet each other halfway and spell it with an A. That's what _my_ language does XD
Edit/Addendum: This is a joke. At the end of the day I totally understand the push for Ukrainian-based English forms, and if, say, Germans were to try and take over Western Poland I would also complain about English speakers using Breslau and Posen.
@@S3anyBoy Found the seething vatnik.
@barthvader95 nah we should use a y. In fact, we should make all the vowels y's so it chyrnybyl.
@@S3anyBoy Yes, original. It's in Ukraine, they get to choose how to spell it.
The funny thing about the mutated animals bit is that there are in fact mutant animals in the exclusion zone, but just not in the Fallout sense. In fact, the whole area has effectively become a nature reserve.
Oh, the real-life one you mean.
@parkerdixon-word6295 yeah, that one. Additionally, there's a herd of Przewalski's horses living there now too. I forget how they ended up there, but that makes them the first pure wild horses in Europe since the tarpan went extinct.
HBO Chernobyl wants people to believe it is an IRL fallout wasteland meanwhile there's people there living the regular village life just with poor cell coverage. There's been dozens of medial works because it's a legit fascinating topic and they didn't find anything serious. For fucks sake the biggest offender Cs-135 has a half-life of 30 years so you have to be real interested in getting radiation poisoning to find any outside of vehicle graveyards.
@@GallowglassVT A lot of people also don't realize that just because something is not fit for human lives, doesn't mean it isn't fit for other animals.
Humans can and often do live into their late 80's and 90's, some even into their 100's. That means living in a iradiated location like Chernobyl or Fukushima, which has a high likelyhood in causing cancer after prolonged exposure isn't feasible because you will live long enough for cancers to develop and end your life prematurely.
However, if your a species like wolves, who only live like 8-12 years, you're not really alive long enough to develop cancers from the location, or if you do, by the time it threatens your life, you're already approaching death anyways. Which is also why there are abunch of health wolf populations in Chernobyl as well
it's funny to think that human presence is vastly worse for nature than literal radioactive particles in the air and soil.
Yahtz and Bear Grylls would make an ultimate symbiotic partnership, Yahtz takes the piss out of games and Bear Grylls uses it to hydrate
Its such a good impression, i had no idea he had that in his locker.
This was an excellent postscript punchline, bravo.
I remember seeing at least 1 obituary of a stalker dev that died during the war. Having gotten the game out while the country is in an existential war is kind of an achievement in itself.
He was an actual volunteer combatant on the frontlines though, not shelled in the office or anything.
@@BadHotPotato Except they didn't move out until the war started, and one of the devs died fighting in the war.
@@Klovaneer If the war hadn't started, he'd still be alive and developing for the game. Not to mention, he had long-time friends and colleagues still working on it that had to grieve his death. These things don't happen in a vacuum.
@@PocketDrummer Yes, very sad. Africa has about dozen wars going at any given time but they don't develop any games so who cares.
gsc are headquartered in prague and as far as i'm aware they've been there since before the war even started
Not once did he pronounce it by it's proper title: 'Ess Tee Ay Ell Kay Ee Arr'. I'm deeply disappointed.
🎵ess tee ay ell kay, ee arr
Dogs can’t climb up on to cars 🎵
@@JordanManfrey To the tune of Hot To Go?
@@barthvader95 Kars 4 Kids jingle
*its
@@JordanManfrey And Skif-O was his name-o?
The animals acting weird isn't because their AI is breaking, it's because, as I've come to understand it, they essentially have the same AI as humans but only equipped with melee weapons and a low self preservation threshold, and when they can't reach the player they default to running for cover.
That sounds simonteniosly ingenious and really stupid
the fact that breaking their pathing make them run for cover is kinda amazing, in the old games all you had to do was find a box and slowly kill them as they tried to circle you. but now they hide from you, so you need to get down and wait for them to come.
@@danilooliveira6580 which I can sort of understand as a way of stopping the players from cheesing the mutants. It is kinda stupid(and funny,) though, to see a whole pack of dogs simultanelusly skedaddle behing buildings the second you step on a car. And start simultaneously coming towards you the second your first toe touches the ground.
@@Vlakod lmao welcome to game development
@@danilooliveira6580 Same thing happens to deathclaws in fallout, if you get on a rock they can't access they just straight up go back to where they were before lol
Yahtzee - "Can I get an ounce of leeway?" The STALKER franchise - "We don't do that here."
True. The game gave me so little leeway it gave me a gamebreaking bug on the tutorial mission 🤣
@@eldibs sure the game can. God can give you all the leeway he wants once you’re dead.
Y'all, Chornobyl is the Ukrainian way of writing it, Chernobyl is the Russian way. Originally they still used the Russian spelling but yeah, that changed for obvious reasons.
@TuriGamer Dog do you read the news? It's not about being pedantic it's about Russia invading Ukraine.
Ooh, thanks for the language lesson! Didn't know this
@TuriGamer Just like how nobody was going to change to Kyiv? Oh wait, except everyone did. Now stop simping for Russia and go back under your bridge
@@TuriGamer This is one of those times im reminded that there are a lot of 16 year olds on the internet I shouldn't bother arguing with dumb takes.
@@jacksonstarr1447 So it will be renamed to Chernobyl soon? ;)
As the english dubbing populates what's supposed to be a gritty setting with Terry Pratchett characters, I very quickly made the decision to switch to Ukranian voices with english subtitles, and haven't looked back. Instant immersion.
The gunplay is actually great. If you get shot at, seek cover, move from cover to cover to isolate targets and get better angles, and never pop out where they expect you to. I love getting into shootouts in STALKER.
Except when a hostile patrol spawns in the middle of an open field and your only cover is a tree slightly thinner than you are
can't wait 'til the A-Life gets up and running again. Without this system, the old titles would have died long ago for me.
Nothing like evaluating a hit job on how likely it is that the target gets lost to the zone ... he's currently on his way through red forrest? well, in the meantime I'm on my way the quest giver ^^
@@SirButtz The tree is better than nothing. It's been a rare occurance for me, but yeah spawner they're using in place of A-Life can be irritating at times. A-Life is apparently on the way, so I'm pretty excited to see how it changes things!
The shootouts are a bit different from the originals, in the originals you can sit in a good bit of cover and line up shots all day, in Stalker 2 you need to shoot, move, shoot, move. The gameplay is a little janky but it is a big improvement over the gunplay and mutant behaviour from the originals (which you would certainly hope for)
The enemy can Xray vision my location to such a scary degree, that I can be crouched behind a solid concrete wall that surrounds their entire base in a big square, moving quietly, and they can still throw a grenade at me with precision that I would die if not the the mentioned concrete wall between me and the explosion. Please tell me more about popping out where they don't expect you to be. I am very interested.
good to know that eurojank is not dead
Eurojank is the best jank.
Eurojank has lost all meaning when all corners of the world put out the same unfinished crap
Slavjank feels like gaming in my teenage years, so I love Stalker 2
Personalty i see that "concept"(as slavjank) As a cheap excesses for bugs and weird design choices. Especially in the era where everyone is able to make a game what do these even mean.
@@TuriGamer not true. with american jank the game runs horribly on even the highest hardware but the microtransaction shop works perfectly. with european jank the game runs ok, the bugs are funny, and you only pay once
As one poster put it: Walk through the Red Forest, killing bandits and looting ammo and supplies. Then go home a boot up Stalker 2.
One of the things I loved most about the original Stalker(s) was strength through equipment and experience.
With experience, you can get through the early bits without dying, but equipment makes the late game possible. You don't get better because some number went up, as it were, but because YOU got better.
Haven't played 2 yet, but I will be doing so in due time.
It's roughly the same in 2. Early game, you go down in a few hits but once you get some proper armor you start to get better durability and can take more hits. Oh you can still see your health melt away under concentrated fire and certain mutants fuck you up regardless but it's still a better system than in looter shooters where you only get better because you got guns with bigger numbers attached.
That being said, guns found later in the game do tend to be more effective than early game ones even if they use the same ammo but you need some sort of equipment progression. Skifs pistol you start the game with never stops being useful though since it weighs almost nothing, ammo for it is incredibly plentiful and it is cheap to maintain.
Not complaining about Stalker not having levelling or anything, but can both upgrade your stats/gear/etc AND get personally better as a player at the same time though, it's not strictly one or the other. I'm pretty sure that basically every game with leveling and such has difficulty progression designed under the expectation that both are happening anyway.
@@Alloveck
Of course. Most games with upgrade trees do require the player to get better and understand the skills they get and upgrade, but I really admire how Stalker does it.
It really is just you, your weapon, however good your armor is, some buffs from artifacts, and your wits.
You're not wrong, though, and I don't think either system is inherently better.
its exactly the same in 2, but a little bit too forgiving imo. Im not quite sure if thats because i was used to playing stalker anomaly though, so it might just be that im out of touch with the base games now.
Ima disagree with the comments here and say this is the main weakness of stalker 2 for me. I'm on veteran and I really hate how fast I became a unstoppable killing machine; once you have the ak74 with scope and extended mag and 3 cheap as fuck upgrades for skiffs pistol, Skiff is basically an unkillable death bringer who can tank 10 bullets and keep popping syringes while 1 tapping bandits with headshots for as long as your finger can keep tapping the buttons. Not only that, but the game absolutely drowns you in ammo, meds, alcohol, etc.
That being said the game is still awesome, still my GOTY, but I really really am looking forward to mods improving on the survival/difficulty aspect because as it is dying in combat to ballistics is a true rarity for me just 10 or so hours into the game. Any time a character in side quests is like "you have to do this or me and my 15 men compound will kill you" it's genuinely not difficult to just say fuck it and murder every one of them while jamming yourselves with syringes. It at times gives way to a farcry style power fantasy at points and just isn't really the feeling I want in a STALKER game. I don't fear the irradiated mutants anymore, I just load up the SPAS12 shotgun and run around the corner chasing after them to kill them as quick as possible if that makes sense.
The wandering accents personally seemed to suggest that people had been coming to the zone from all over the world and not simply from the surrounding region. That said, a few different demographics other than white and black might have driven that point home a bit more.
I could buy that. After all, the original novel of Roadside Picnic didn't take place in Chornobyl at all, instead taking place in some place called "Harmont" which was probably somewhere in the vicinity of Quebec and New England, and that was just one of six Visitation Zones spread across the world in a "smooth curve" based on the procession of Deneb.
With the promise of hitting paydirt with a good artifact, or even just experiencing unearthly wonders beyond normality, any Visitation Zone would likely be a beacon for would-be adventurers and treasure-hunters across the globe. Hell, if the Visitation happened in the Indiana Jones continuity, Doctor Jones would almost certainly make a trip to the Zones, whether they be in Cumbria, Tohoku, Quebec, Chornobyl, the Olympic Peninsula, wherever.
*Indy:* "Controllers... why did it have to be Controllers?"
*Controller:* "In a perfect world... men like me would not exist. ...BUT THIS IS NOT A PERFECT WORLD."
This would totally make sense if it wasn't so bashed together. Even in the original trilogy, the mercenaries faction were hinted to be coming from Europe and America, and Freedom primarily using NATO equipment was also never outright confirmed to be composed exclusively of surrounding territory members. What doesn't make sense is the heavy american or british accents on characters with obviously slavic names. It gets worse when in the course of a single dialogue, Skif and another person speak of a third character, but both pronounce the third character's name vastly differently because it's pretty clear one of the voice actors does not know how it would be pronounced in Russian/Ukrainian.
Clear Sky, despite the English localization at times being rather memeworthy, at least tried by making Steve Blum do an incredibly forced slavic accent.
A Bear Grylls piss-drinking joke? In the year of our Lord and Saviour 2024?
It's an older meme sir, but it checks out. I was about to upvote it. Shall I hold?
Haven't laughed this hard in a while, a real sucker punch from behind
Well, it IS a video about a thing that was relevant 15 years ago.
Was looking forward to Yahz’ review of Ess-Tee-Ay-Ell-Kay-Ee-Ar: Heart of Chernobyl
Was waiting for that hahah
Dont forget the "HEURGH" for the colon.
Jumping out of reach of mutants doesn't mess up their pathing, it makes them search for cover to hide behind until you come down. I've found it to works pretty well, it just takes them time to reach the new spot sometimes.
As someone who really liked the previous games, I found rediscovering areas in great graphics and meeting characters from the previous games to be incredible. There's also a lot more going on story wise, but I will admit it's probably harder to follow if you don't know what happened in Clear Sky or what the Brain Scorcher was. I've had nothing but a blast this whole time.
As always, the man nails it.
That being said, I am around 95 hours deep into Stalker 2 and have probably seen a bit above half the story. I just get sidetracked exploring shit and then dragging my over-encumbered butt back to base just to sell it and then repeat the process.
All in all, 10\10, love the game, worth the wait of 14 years.
This is one of my favourite games of the year, but I think reviewing it with a deadline would absolutely make me despise it.
I've only waited 12 years, but the game is still half-baked and the mechanics frustrate me to no end.
Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, Yahtzee just pronounced it "Ess-tee-ayy-ell-kay-ee-arr: Clear Sky". He has grown so much as a critic since then...
That was one of the first reviews of his I remember watching, weird to think it was over a decade ago...
Stalker is at its best when you have a five button mouse, so you can assign bandage and health kits to your thumb for instant use. Some people say you should assign quick save and load to those buttons instead.
They changed it from the Russian to the Ukrainian spelling of Chornobyl because -well, it goes without explaining 😅
Despite a "less than ideal " launch and A-Life 2.0 being...well non-existant it's been an amazing game thus far.
The game is eminently playable already if you install several mods, it's half-baked but we let Bethesda get away with that until Starfield so
Some Stalker 2 thoughts;
There are just some choices that are poorly executed regardless of the buggines. Rat swarms are a cool idea, but they just amount to 15 or 20 of these silly little rat models running around and taking turns to jump at you, and then disappearing into cover when you jump on a box. Ditto with dog packs. Making the mutants tougher is a good idea, but it just amounts to these bullet sponge mutants lunging at you, running away, and then lunging at you again. The only mutants I've enjoyed fighting are Bloodsuckers, and even they have just been made spongier and slightly trickier because they run beside you rather than straight in front of you. Human enemies continuously go between being insanely aware of your position and tactical, and just standing still while you shoot them. The game is in serious need to get the Cyberpunk 2077 treatment.
Stealth is completely broken, and this is exacerbated by the enemy spawns. It doesn't matter how stealthy or quiet you try to be, as soon as you shoot any enemy with a silenced gun, they all know where you are. They usually spot you anyway, regardless of distance/light/sound level. They can also shoot you with pinpoint accuracy through walls btw. Enemies will literally "pop in" on top of you, while you are already trying to deal with another group e.g.
I dealt with a pack of 9 dogs and another pack spawned right behind me. The smaller firefights are tough and rewarding, but when you have to deal with a big group of enemies, who all immediately know where you are, and grenade spam you, while you can barely see them because the game is so dark, it starts to get a bit grating. You can't save during combat anymore either.
right real cyberpunk 2077 vibes. but is that the norm now? i pay $60 for a game essentially still in beta?
@@veeas11tbh, all of the other stalker games came out essentially unfinished as well. This one aint even that bad when compared to Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky at their releases (Clear Sky is still a mess till this day).
@@r68saga31 Yeah, but... those were made by a small group of underfunded devs. And those games were not, in any way, being marketed as AAA (I know, I hate that description too, but here we are). This time, the team was quite large and they had a lot of funding. Yes, the invasion, relocation of part of the team, that all happened. But that's no excuse for A-life, which was supposed to be the biggest draw of the game, to be not functional. Not buggy, but not working at all.
Don't take me wrong, I like the game. But I can only play for a few hours and I have to take a break from the fun breaking nonsense for a day or two, for all the reasons @blackdragoncyrus mentioned. In contrast, I can play Stalker: CoP the whole day and it's still fun.
@@Duwurf I'm not super surprised. Partly because developing in Ukraine even back after 2014 was difficult; 4A had to partially relocate to Malta, and then had to fully relocate after 2022 because of all the difficulties running a studio there while working on Metro Exodus. Then I also think you have to consider the history of GSC Games as a company, which isn't exactly trouble free (reminder, a lot of the founding staff of 4A were from GSC, having been the core programmers and artists behind SoC, laid off after SoC, which is probably a starting point for troubles behind a full sequel to Stalker).
Again, not an excuse, more an explanation as to why I'm not surprised and why I don't think anyone else should really be surprised.
Those rat swarms were some hilarious jank. They're like Dishonored rat swarms, but not good.
They should have just stuck with those individual rat lads, those work just fine.... usually.
I, for one, was not expecting a reference to Australia's third worst Prime Minister in my Yahtzee video. Well played.
Remember, in the zone, there are no bugs, only anomalies
STALKER is a backronym that supposedly stands for Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers and Robbers and in the game universe it's like a catch all for people who are in the zone without any authorization.
In Roadside Picnic and the movie Stalker it doesn't really stand for anything. It was basically just chosen by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky because it "sounded cool" and they wanted an English word as Roadside Picnic takes places somewhere in the midwest.
@franksloe5087 The movie Stalker is at best only inspired by Roadside Picnic. None of the locations or characters from the book is featured in the movie.
It should be noted though that in Roadside Picnic there are multiple zones but we don't learn of any exact locations. Nothing says there isn't a zone in Chornobyl
@@franksloe5087 Oh, you're talking about the cooling towers that can be seen in the background of the bar scene towards the end. It's not the last shot, the last shot is the Stalker's daughter using telekinisis and that's not a nuclear powerplant, it's a coal or oil power plant. You can see the smoke stacks beyond the cooling towers. Cooling towers aren't used just for nuclear power plants, other types of plants use them too to condense steam back into hot water that is then pumped back into the boilers, thereby saving energy.
But whatever head cannon works for you lol
Yahtzee either missed the opportunity to call it the heart of CHOREnobyl, or im not that funny. That said i like the game
Funny that you bring up Clippy the Ammo Clip - Cyberpunk 2077 actually did this lol
I honestly really enjoy STALKER 2. Dunno whether I'm just lucky, but I haven't really experienced any bugs in the >40 hours I've played. Game runs great and I've only crashed once and that was an exception_access_violation error which was subsequently fixed in a patch. The graphics are very good, it's immersive and I find it fun to explore the zone.
I've got 160 hours. After restarting twice from game-breaking bugs, I've done all the side-quests and am running around with the Diamond Exo, a Saiga and "Veteran" Vintorez (all upgraded), the fun is mostly in the new places to see.
You absolutely experienced bugs, you just didn't realise it and lucky. The replaced my second weapon slot with another gun will happen. One time it happened 5 weapon switches in a row, thankfully that time it was all yellow snipers which sold quite nicely. Don't worry, your equipped gun gets moved into your inventory which leads to Why am I over weight?! STALKERS bugs have multitudes.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for its fans is a bit like Dark Souls 1 is for Souls fans.
It's jank, in some ways blatantly unfinished, it can be unforgivable and/or broken in dumb ways, it's been technically done better in other games, but at the end of the day it's home.
Stalker 2 is no SoC
@@chillhour6155 Obviously a video game isn't a System on a Chip /j
Fun fact Skif is Ukrainian spelling of Scythian.
I wonder if he hates rainbows too? The Scythian in Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP certainly did.
Scythians had superior horseback archery skills and bow and arrow technology of their day. Strelok means "archer", "marksman", "shooter".
Kind of carrying forward the "archaic word for "dude who's good with a rifle"" naming from SoC
@@bluegum6438 Scythians just lived on the territory of modern Ukraine.
@@Skytalez that too, but Scythia was a lot bigger than just Ukraine
@@bluegum6438 It depends on the period we talking abomaut, also Scythians occupied only part of modern Ukraine territory.
Not gonna lie, I'd watch a NatGeo documentary narrated by Yahtzee.
HI Yahtz. The same Irishman who wrote _Teddy Bears' Picnic_ wrote Istanbul (Not Constantinople). Now isn't that fun to know.
It's been quite an experience to see the game being finished and polished around me and frankly it just drew me it. When it told me to go north as soon as the first area opened, I fucked off and went east, bummed around and just really got into the whole wandering around mindset.
But then again, I like Death Strandings and the original Stalker games and I know that it's all about well aimed single fire shots to not waste ammo.
Love the subtle second layer of the joke at 0:25 using the old spelling of Türkiye
"Kiev" instead of "Kyiv" too, although I'm not _certain_ whether the name of the breaded chicken dish changes to match.
@@nogginscratcher in the Transporter 3 movie and Gordon Ramsay's shows (maybe even Anthony Bourdain's) they called it "chicken Kiyv". Those are my only references.
It's basically S.T.A.L.K.E.R, but on a newer and more stable engine.
Most of the people asking for this got exactly what they wanted, and that's enough for them. Anything thing else they want, they'll mod in.
New people will still be befuddled as to why the games have a cult following.
There's 2 main issues. One, a large percentage of people who liked the original games actually played one or more of the mods, and they have no idea or have forgotten which features came from mods and which were in the game. I myself thought looting mutants for sellable trophies was a normal thing but apparently not.
Two, incredibly high system reqs, terrible performance, and basically UE5 being a blight on the world of game development as usual.
@@Sotanaht01 "Can it run Unreal 5?" is going to be the new "Can it run Crysis?" The main difference being, CryEngine2 was remotely optimized. Not the best optimization, but leagues better than most (if not all) UE5 games.
Newer, yes, stable, no. They should have sticked witth UE4 instead of switching to hyped up unoptimised garbo UE5.
@@Sotanaht01 people being such entitled little nerds that they think modded features are vanilla is so cringe. It's like confusing a classic book with the romantic fanfic someone wrote about it to be horny about and then complaining to the OG author that the characters are no longer a queer couple
@@Sotanaht01 Wait, looting mutants for sellable stuff really is a mod-specific concept? Seriously?
...Wow, guess I really don't know what the actual vanilla experience was anymore. Looting mutants makes so much sense both as a gameplay concept and by in-universe logic that I can't imagine the designers NOT originally including it.
The seamless open world in this game is an incredible achievement. The only loading screens are sleeping and dying. You can even go inside buildings or under ground without being interrupted.
The Teleporter Anomaly is a loading screen that stutters so hard, it freezes the game for a second or three
"Fascists vs. Nutters" I pick the Nutters every time, it just feels... good.
I think it's so funny how media keeps presenting that as if its a difficult choice. Do you want to be entirely restricted in your free will or be able to actually make a change even if that means letting a couple crazy people go wild for a bit? Of course everyone is going to side with the nutters.
My favourite Thick of It episode
@@NexusSomnia Haven't seen that one. The last British comedies I've viewed were Snuff Box and Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.
Your explanation of the core combat loop is so accurate for STALKER games.
There are quite a few items that mitigate bleeding, so like in most RPGs you can just ignore it if your build is right.
Woah, what a blast TO the past. Yahtzee's review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R; Clear Sky, was the VERY FIRST ZP I'd ever seen. It affected me so much, I only read the title of it as "es-tea-ayy-el-kay-ee-are Clear Sky" any more.
What I appreciate from Stalker is it rewards players for being slow and methodical, you have to plan routes around known danger areas. Running into ruins without a plan gets you killed. Run and gunning doesnt work, you dont have enough bullets for that. I do wish the crafting/loot system was expanded though. And outside of money for upgrades or repairs, exploring areas doesnt do a whole lot to upgrade your character so there is little incentive to deviate
Yea, reminds me heavily of death stranding in a way. Where simply getting to where you want to go and surviving the world along the way is 75% of the game. Love it.
After all this is the title which Escape From Tarkov is inspired from, although gameplay in tarkov is too slow for comfort being a PvP game
As a stalker veteran, its opposite of what you are saying. You are slow and methodical in anomaly and first 3 game. In stalker 2 with how spongee the mutants are. Grab a shotgon, and sprint face first into them and humans. Mid to late game, grab a scope and go for headshots to not waste ammo on human foes. Mutants you run into them and fill em with lead. You have infinite medikits anyways
As a long time Ukrainian fan, I want to thank you for acknowledging the development hell because of the war. The team literally had to move to another country to continue due to constant bombings and light/internet shutdowns due to russian terror bombings of the electrical infrastructure. And at least one of the developers volunteered to the army to protect his home and died on the frontlines.
I was waiting for this review anxiously, expecting you to be much more brutal on the bugginess. So thank you. Besides, the team already is working on patches.
And separate thanks for calling it “Ukrainian-russian war”.
Many people in the free world (by possibly just not putting much thought into it or saving time) call it something like “Ukraine war” or “Ukrainian conflict”. Which makes it sound like it’s our problem and fault, shifting the focus and the blame on the victim and defender from the criminal and the aggressor.
Much love from Ukraine. Believe it or not, you have many fans here. I kinda learned English back in 2010s by your videos, which allows me to work on a high paying job and support my family through the war.
So although I wasn’t “captured by Somalian pirates and didn’t hum the ZP theme for them to recognise it and spare me”; your work did help me greatly in a different way :)
You will be liberated from zelensky soon. Dont worry
Everything feels bigger and small at the same time
I know this will sound wrong, but Stalker 2 being bugged on release is like water being wet. Or rather like a bread having some butter on it - makes it better. I am sure developers will fix most of them. Patches are coming out regularly, as much as they can with electricity problems and bombs falling. But I specifically pre-ordered it and playing it currently to first experience it at full junk. Just like the first one.
And damn the game has just amazing atmosphere and sound design.
If my STALKER game isn't jank on release I don't want it
Wanted to make the joke about the spelling change but watched the first thirty seconds of the review first XD
The thing is, after 2022 people noted that a lot of the English spellings of Ukrainian city names are actually based on Russian versions of those names and so people adjusted. See also Odesa and Kyiv.
i feel like it goes too far sometimes. "Kyivan Rus" is the goofiest example, because the city's name wasn't spelled like that in those times
Odessa was named after some Greek settlement. The word is as much Russian as it is Ukranian.
I was really hoping Yahtz would make a joke about the fact that his one exposure to the series was the equivalent of Super Mario Bros: the Lost Levels being the only 2d Mario platformer you've played.
A studio getting constantly fucking bombed manages to make a better game than studios with 10x the budget and no bombs.
When you duck while moving thou the shrapnel anomaly you don't get damage or bleeding.
One of the biggest problems of this game is the dis-balance of how expensive it is to kill the monsters compared to the reward. You don't loot anything from monsters so the only reward is a bit of satisfaction and occasionally the ease of searching through an area without being chased around. I feel like the game could do better in this regard, if not loot than some kind of respect from other characters somehow.
What I like that it is hard and unforgiving in the way that there is no guarantee that you will come back richer in loot or credits than you started. If you're too careless repair cost and lost of ammo will outweigh the income. But it is also not too hard on STALKER difficulty. I managed to stack up quit an arsenal and 70k credits while moving into the 3rd area.
I played on the hardest difficulty on my first playthrough, and you're right, I had to quell my curious-open-world-game instincts and avoid areas on the map I haven't been to because I didn't know what was there and I didn't know if it would be worth the repair costs. Sometimes I would try to make a break for an old familiar spot for sanctuary, only to find it was abandoned and overrun with (shudder) snorks...
By the endgame I was so exhausted fighting M******* I just made a beeline for the end of the game... juuust like I did in the first STALKER.
There's a mod to add loot to the mutants but I don't think it works atm.
I personally prefer that mutants don't give you anything, it makes you avoid them as much as possible since they're just a waste to deal with and even more discourages gung-ho approach
That's not a problem, that's the zone.
The mutants have always been resource sinks in the franchise. They're meant to be a danger that you actively want to avoid where possible like many of the anomalies with cheap, crap artifacts.
Yeah, I don't mean that it is bad. But just avoiding one characteristic part of what makes Stalker the game it is, is still a bit unfortunate in a way. In the big picture it makes sense. But in the moment to moment gameplay it is odd. Like I said, loot is not the only form of reward thinkable.
@@miagi1337 I feel like it would make the game worse by making you *want* to fight mutants sometimes, which imo is against the design philosophy of the game. It's one of those things that feels unusual because we're used to "kill something that's hard to kill"="reward", but that not being the case is one of the important parts of the game's core, along with "no exp system"/"skill trees" and combat being deadly in general
"Mom, Yahtzee's in his room weaponizing his jank again!"
Your writing gets better and better, man. Modern Charlie Brooker if that's not an insulting comparison.
I tried stalker 2 for a bit, wandered around for a while just exploring. Then I found a base so I decided to expore it. I snuck into a sniper tower and shanked the sniper, looked around and saw nothing. I climbed back down and headed into the base. Second sniper tower, that was previously empty, had an enemy in it now. No problem, I snuck in and shanked them too. I climb back down and check a building and nearby points on entry. All clear. I start sneaking in the other direction and suddenly there's 4 enemies that just spawned in behind me already spotting me.
0:30 Well it was also planned to release in 2012 before getting cancelled for reasons I don't know as of right now and then popping back up in 2018 with a plan to release in 2022 and _that's_ where the Russia-Ukraine war interrupted the release.
2:23 good ol skippy from 2077
I'm so glad you had the same experience with this game as me. I thought I'd just got old and sh*t at games with the amount I was dying. That and the load times on Xbox was atrocious. Walk out, die, wait 30 secs to reload, go die again, reload for another 30 secs over and over.
I like that the anomalies are giant elemental orbs. Stop killing me and let me PONDER YOU, ORB!
The first monster you meet is super fast bastard with huge amounts of health and damage that also turns invisible.
It certainly sets the tone.
I love how it counts your deaths. It's either leading up to an achievement or Psycho Mantis is going to tell me I suck
They're not bugs, they're anomalies!
2:55 Slightly Terrible Accents Linguists _Kouldn't_ Endure Repeatedly
They pretty much dropped it before the original game launched, but "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." is short for Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers and Robbers.
"Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, Bank Robbers, Train Robbers, Ass Kickers, Sh*t Kickers...AND METHODISTS!"
ruclips.net/video/fLpmswBKVN4/видео.htmlsi=bhnCyNgikGdEIXvc
Not quite actually. It stood for the brainwashing methodology the C-Consciousness used to program sleeper agents, which is why they have it tattooed on them (and why the protagonist in the first game is called Marked One). However, they ended up dropping this plot point later in development after they already had the title and character design. When THQ published they English version, they came up with the Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers, and Robbers backronym. So it wasn't created until after the first game launched.
Surely The Angry Lions Know Every Reason 2.
Allow me to be pedantic and say that it’s *inversely* proportional, not indirectly proportional.
But Freedom aren't lunatics. They're organized, militant hippies but they're not crazy, just debatably wrong.
When everyone is a lunatic, you have to be in the zone... being slightly less is a distinction.
As a duty and monolith guy. They certainly are lunatics and high on top
They made a new Ess-Tee-Ay-El-Kay-Ee-Ar game?!
2:50 "..occasional long holidays in America." C'mon Yatz noone in the US says "Budge up a bit" Outta be "Op, lemme skootch on in here."
0:19 Pretty sure that chernobyl is a russian pronounciation and chornobyl is ukrainian, thus they changed it.
Nice touch to end on a meme from 2010
I don't think Linford Christie would be entirely happy with all of those acronyms.
Kouldn't be upset with all of them surely?
I had a shotglass stuck to my left hand it was highly amusing.
There's a Nigel Farage* joke in there somewhere.
*British politician who is so frequently photographed with a pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other (to "prove" that he's a "man of the people" even though he's rich) that people sometimes joke that they're permanently glued to his hands.
Hate to be that guy but...
Should have been Maggie, the Mag Companion...
Since it's a mag, not a clip. Lol.
Proof I am a good boy and watch the ads at the end of the video- Yahtz's 'human hand' graphic pointing at us at 5:33 is backwards. :P
4:47 Is that another reference to Don Hertzfeldt's classic "Rejected"? Hoyoo!
I love don hertzfeldt. You ever watched it's such a beautiful day?
@@MK-zj8sc Went to the special in-theater screening (with "ME") earlier this year, ayup.
Rejected is so good.
I am extremely disappointed Yahtzee didn’t pronounce it as S T A L K E R like he did in the olden days
Clippy was canonically voiced by Gilbert Gottfried. Who would Ammo Clippy be voiced by?
Ronald Ermey.
So S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has evolved into an acronym over time. Initially when the Strugatsky brothers wrote Roadside Picnic they simply spelled the word “stalker” and I don’t believe that the movie written based on the book used the word as an acronym either. I’m not sure when and where it started being used as an acronym.
It stands for
Scavengers
Trespassers
Adventurers
Loners
Killers
Explorers and
Robbers.
Truly a mixed bag of personality.
There's another roadside picnic movie?
@@_Ciaran_Maher I apologize, I wrote all of that based off of memory. I don't remember where I heard it from but I was under the impression there were two movies based directly off the book. I changed the wording.
Not that bad for a videogame being developed inside of an active warzone mind you.
Linford Christie = S.T.A.L.C.E.R.
3:07 Log Horizon fans watching season 3 who started on season 1 probably felt your pain. I binged the first two seasons before it came out myself, having never watched it before.
That Bear Grillz impression was spot on.
Stalker 2 is a masterpiece in its own! Yeah, alot of the scenery looks the same but have you looked outside? The scenery and lighting is beautiful. Theres some jank with enemies spawning behind you sometimes but once they get the A-life fixed up and some of the performance hitches, the game will be perfect!
This is the closet we’re ever getting to a Pathologic 2 review, unless the 3rd comes out sooner than anticipated. Anyway thought yahtz would be a bit harsher on STALKER but I’m pleasantly surprised not played myself personally tackling the 1st game currently
Was not expecting Tony Abbot to catch a stray in this video, but I am 100% here for it. I haven't finished watching the video yet. but now I'm expecting a Peter Dutton reference on account of his head looking like a potato. Now that I think about it, if someone told me that Petter Dutton is Slavic, I would not be surprised; nor if they had said he came out of the ground.
Scavengers, Trespassers, Adventurers, Loners, Killers, Explorers and Robbers (STALKER) is what it's supposed to spell
Australia mentioned! Although we try not to talk about Abbott
He would know, he lived in Australia for 13 years, including through the Abbott government
@ I’m well aware, I came across him through the Australian Gamer Podcast with Matt and Yug while he still lived in Brisbane and opened the Mana Bar during that period. Still surprised to hear a PM mentioned from that long ago 😂
@@tomb4628 Damn. Jealous.
I've gotten used to running across youngins that have no idea he used to live in Australia. I feel so old.
The faction system being described as the the classic fascists vs the nutters killed me
Took me this long to realize the backgrounds are not flat colors and had gears and other stuffs on them
The bear grills impression got me real good. Good night sweat bear.
Good night, sweat bare is how I normally sleep in summer.
That was actually a pretty accurate impression of Bear Grills' speaking cadence.
4:17 The absolute whiplash of suddenly hearing mention of Sir Onion Eater in 2024 😂
I know Yahtzee lived in Aus for a while, but it's still an absolute jolt to see anything referencing Australian Lore from any internet sources no specifically run by Aussies. We're not invisible hooray! 😜