Video games, or more so the people who play them, I suppose, have this annoying thing where they assign a genre name as an insult. I don't want to reignite the discourse around JRPG as a term, but it certainly was used in quite a derisive and othering manner in its earlier years. The term walking sim was used more as a point of ironic degradation, even though it was perfectly apt in many ways. Then there's Eurojank, a sort of real but not technically real genre that describes ambitious but imperfect games made by European developers. And Andrii Verpakhovskyi, designer on the original Stalker games, doesn't think such jank should be geologically categorised.

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STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl is getting its first proper expansion this year, titled Cost of Hope, and it looks stuffed to its icky mutant gills with classic STALKER series beats that the base game – while a powerfully engrossing survival FPS – missed out on. The Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant returns as an explorable, doubtless horrible addition to the game’s open world, and the story concerns the conflict between the rival Freedom and Duty factions that’s been simmering since the original STALKER.

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