Chernobylite, right, is what’s known as a technogenic compound. We found bits of the “lava-like glassy material” in the ruins of the Chernobyl powerplant after it exploded, slopped into a continually melting, still hot structure called the Elephant’s Foot. Wikipedia informs me it is a “crystalline zirconium silicate with a high (up to 10%) content of uranium as a solid solution”. What horrors man hath wrought.

Chernobylite is also a videogame about slinking through segmented recreations of the real world’s exclusion zone, completing missions while being harangued by the ghost of your dead wife and avoiding monsters that are clawing their way out of spacetime. I wish I found all this half as interesting as it sounds. Or as tenth as interesting as accidental radioactive lava glass.

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To my partner’s enduring frustration, I never got around to Stalker. What I have instead is a photo book of Soviet Bus Stops and an enduring love of massive, decaying concrete monstrosities. Thus, while I might not have the frame to judge Chernobylite, a singleplayer survival shooter from The Farm 51 as a worthy successor to Stalker, there are certainly enough brutalist oddities to pique my interest.

While it might not have well-considered public rest-stops, Chernobylite is dropping us back into the exclusion zone for some supernatural gunfights, launching into early access today.

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Since their succesful Kickstarter bagged double their target, Poland-based The Farm 51 have announced that their ambitious Stalker-esque survival horror Chernobylite will enter Steam Early Access on the 16th of October, with a full release an estimated 10 to 14 months later. It’s a game, not a mineral or a low-calorie power plant.

By 2030, 12% of people on Earth will have worked on a game set in or around Pripyat, but this one looks like it’s doing its own thing rather than blindly copying. The environments, 3D scanned from the real area, look rather shiny too. You can see for yourself below.

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