The Game Where You Scrape Out a Living in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: G.A.M.M.A., version 0.9.4

Aug 06, 2025

WAR IS MY SIDE-HUSTLE

I can’t remember the last time I felt this cozy in a video game. Out back, a roaring campfire crackles and spits. A young man gently plucks out a soft ballad on his acoustic guitar while the other reprobates tell jokes and share tall tales of their exploits in the Zone. I lift my gaze from an old magazine and watch the Sun retreat behind the distant treeline. From my perch in the attic crawlspace of some long-gone Babushka’s dacha, I enjoy a panoramic view of the countryside’s rolling hillocks and verdant meadows. In spite of everything, I can’t help but wear a carefree grin. Ukraine is so very beautiful in the summertime.

My PDA beeps in my pocket, and I pull it out to see an icon lazily tracking down the road from Limansk. Ah, wonderful! They’re almost here. I set down the beer I’ve been nursing and thumb a few rounds into my antique Karabiner. It’s been over eighty years since my great-grandfather yanked it from the icy clutches of some Waffen-SS coward in exurban Stalingrad, but I know how to maintain it, and the thing still works a charm. Hitler’s war machine wasn’t much for marching in the winter, but I can’t deny that Fritz could, at the very least, manufacture a fine rifle.

Through binoculars, I watch my mark crest a hill, flanked by a couple of squadmates. It’s unclear to me why the barkeeper wanted this mercenary “dealt with,” and even less clear why he wanted to pick a fight with Uncle Sam. But I’m not being paid to ask questions, and I probably wouldn’t like the answers if I knew them. Suddenly, the three men snap to attention and raise their bulky American hardware to eye-level. Surely they haven’t seen me from 200 meters away, right?

Indeed not. From a thicket charges a mutated boar, nearly the size of an ox. I hear the distinctively sedate popping noise of 5.56 cartridges as the imperiled pindosy desperately spray at the monster, apparently unaware that the boars’ skulls are too thick to penetrate with small arms fire. It viciously gores one of the men, who tumbles to the ground and provides just enough of an opening for his allies to fell the beast. My target gingerly approaches his wounded comrade, and I line up my ironsights. With an earsplitting crack, I send a thick, jacketed round downrange and straight through his shoulderblade. He crumples in a heap, and the remaining man sprints off in the direction from which he came. That’s right, you imperialist craven. Run and tell them what you’ve seen!

I saunter over to find my target exsanguinated and his lieutenant mortally wounded. The latter writhes and chokes, in too much pain to scream. What a rotten way to go. I draw my Stechkin and hasten his journey before riffling their pockets in search of potted meat and used matchbooks. Their weapons are filthy and broken down — God only knows how their handlers thought they’d find NATO-spec maintenance tools in Warsaw Pact country, but that’s PMC bureaucracy for you. The bolting mechanism in this M4 looks okay, though. Maybe I can jam it in the Vietnam-era platform I have back at HQ. I rip it out and cast the rest of the weapon on the asphalt in a pile of loose steel. I leave the cadavers as a peace-offering for the dogs.

As I return to the cottage to collect my gear, I again hear the sultry tones of my gopnik acquaintance’s guitar. Throughout the cacophony, he never stopped strumming for a moment. His pals burst out laughing at a punchline. I finish off my beer and set out for my next job. Another day in the Zone.

Where to begin with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: G.A.M.M.A.? It’s the most popular face of the most ambitious mod of the most legendary video game ever to come out of Ukraine, and it left a first impression unlike any other I’ve gotten from a first-person shooter or a survival game. We’re in for an info-dense first look, so I suppose it’s only right that we begin with a bit of a history lesson.

So in case you’re new to the post-Soviet tradition of Eastern European video game design, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl1 was a Ukrainian-made first-person shooter from 2007. Set in and around an alt-history Chornobyl, its central premise was that the Exclusion Zone of nuclear meltdown fame played host to a second apocalyptic disaster twenty years after the first incident. But instead of causing boring old nuclear contamination, this second catastrophe peppered the landscape with inexplicable anomalies of physics that destroy anything they touch and which occasionally disgorge valuable artifacts. This gave rise to a new economy of scavenging: armed freelancers of various factional affiliations now regularly cross into the Exclusion Zone (or just “Zone” for short) and risk it all to enrich themselves and/or their shadowy enablers. These freelancers, called “stalkers”2 in-universe, do battle against the Zone and against one another as competing ideologies and good-old-fashioned desperation bring them into conflict.

I could spend pages waxing poetic about why S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: SoC was a massively important watershed moment for the modern video games industry — and am indeed in the process of so doing for next week’s newsletter — but I’ll hold off on that for now. For our purposes today, the important part is that SoC was an international success and got two sequels, both of which added new playspaces and new mechanics. Then in 2018, an extremely ambitious and talented fan created S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly, a stand-alone mod and asset repack that combined the maps and best mechanics from each of the official games for use in one gigantic stalker sandbox. It also implemented its own original storyline, as well as a smattering of entirely new game mechanics that sought to make the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. more immersive, captivating, and threatening.

Anomaly is also available completely free of charge, thanks to the original publisher’s uncommonly generous fan content policy — unlike many modding projects of this nature (e.g., Tamriel Rebuilt), you don’t even need to own the original games in order to download and play it. For that reason, we can quickly skip ahead to my recommendation: unless you hate first-person shooters and/or the heavily desaturated environments of northern Ukraine, you’ll most likely get something out of Anomaly or its derivatives. By “derivatives,” I refer to any of several significant modpacks, i.e., curated and optimized sets of additional community-created mods layered atop the base Anomaly installation. Some of these projects can get absolutely byzantine.

That brings us to Grok’s Automated Modular Modpack for Anomaly, or G.A.M.M.A. for short. To play it, the would-be stalker need only run the titular creator’s automated installer script, which autonomously downloads Anomaly and then patches it with hundreds of community-made enhancements. At time of writing, the official modlist contains an eye-watering 458 individual addons, pre-configured by the venerable Mod Organizer 2 with which PC game-modding grandees will be familiar. I finally figured out how to get it all running correctly on Linux so, this week, we’re going to dive in headfirst and see just what all of that gets us. Short answer: easily the best survival-shooter I’ve ever played. Long answer: hoo, boy… buckle in.

*Above: My computer screen immediately before booting* S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: G.A.M.M.A. At right is a portable instance of Mod Organizer 2, which does all the heavy lifting. At left is all the stuff I need to emulate a Windows environment so that I can run it on Linux. This is all much more straightforward if you’re still on Windows.

LIFE IN THE ZONE

I’m not personally acquainted with any Eastern European mercenaries, although I have it on reliable authority that they’re a headstrong bunch whose affects trend larger-than-life. I guess one would need these qualities in order to willfully violate a military blockade and thereby strand oneself in Eurasia’s least habitable environment, and that’s where you come in. Specifically, you are a freelancer, mercenary, or plain-old opportunist from one of nine3 playable factions who crossed into the Zone for unspecified reasons, although the acquisition of wealth and power are presumably chief among them. The character creation screen has you select your faction, a portrait, your starting items, and a variety of difficulty options, then drops you right into the world and sets you loose with very little ceremony.

The first thing you’ll notice about G.A.M.M.A. is that it’s a PC game through and through. Almost every single key on the keyboard is mapped to a specific function, and the menus are thoroughly mouse-driven. In lieu of standard user interface, you get an exceptionally capable PDA, which is rendered as a physical object in your character’s hands. Your guy even manipulates the controls in concert with your own input, which is a surprisingly immersive touch. Your PDA enables you to browse jobs, communicate with other Stalkers, read up on lore, and so on. It also works as your game map, and there’s something appealingly tactile about lifting a screen to my face to read a map instead of opening a thematically disconnected UI element to do so.

The second thing you’ll notice is… dear God, this game is complicated. You’ll presumably want to open your inventory to equip your starting items and whatnot, whereupon you’ll begin to appreciate just how many interlocking systems are at work. Taking a gun in hand and putting bullets into it is easy enough, but you’ll notice in so doing that almost every physical component of every weapon is individually simulated. While exploring your immediate surroundings, you’ll find all sorts of random loot with mysterious purposes like loose swatches of textile and various broken electronics. Experimentation reveals that the latter can be disassembled with the grooming kit I started with, which fills my inventory with scrap electronic components. The crafting system in this game is positively baroque, but we’ll need to find a toolset to make proper use of it. Guess it’s time to get to work.

Above: The equipment interface, plus a detail view of a crappy shotgun I found in a stash. The barrel is perfect, so shot damage and penetration are at their highest. The machinery is damaged, though, and about one shot in ten will misfire until I replace the worn parts.

G.A.M.M.A. doubles down on one of SoC’s more underdiscussed design choices, namely character progression through carefully choreographed itemization. Rather than training a set of skills and increasing your character’s intrinsic power, progression is based on very precise and thoughtful control over when you get better equipment. In the original games, this meant that you’d find more powerful guns and armor for sale only after completing certain story prerequisites. G.A.M.M.A. instead removes weapons and armor from traders altogether, compelling you to scavenge whatever kit you intend to use. Crucially, weapons and armor found in the wild or taken from fallen stalkers are almost always in a terrible state of disrepair. If you try to use them anyway, your guns will constantly jam and your armor won’t deflect so much as a stiff breeze. The repair system is exceptionally detailed. You buy or scavenge the individual parts, or create them using the repair kits corresponding to the tier of item in question.

These maintenance-related items, as well as the toolkits you need to make use of them, are the foundation of G.A.M.M.A.’s secondary gameplay loop. Like weapons and armor, toolkits are not for sale — they can only be found in hidden stashes, the locations of which are often given as rewards for completing tasks. Finding a toolkit in one of these is a real thrill, because it implies that you’ll soon be able to upgrade your arsenal and thereby survive the game’s more dangerous and lucrative regions. This is also the biggest factor behind G.A.M.M.A.’s steep learning curve, and it took several hours for the maintenance systems to click even with the dynamic tutorial system added by the most recent major update. But once it did click, something amazing happened. Every dilapidated piece of Soviet-era crap I found on dead bandits ceased to feel like ordinary video game loot and began to feel like an opportunity. One can structure entire play sessions around getting a cool-looking weapon operational. And when you equip a new gun for the first time, your character excitedly manipulates and examines it in first-person with a self-satisfied giggle. It’s charming, engaging, and kind of hilarious.

But until such time as men can digest bullets, you’ll need more than ordnance to survive the Zone. This being a survival game, your character needs regular nourishment, hydration, and sleep in order to remain competitive as an unaccountable killer. Food and water are almost as expensive as ammunition, which forces you to stay more or less constantly busy in the early game so that you don’t run out of sausage money. As for resting, you can only sleep when you’re tired, so you’ll generally want to carefully plan out your days so that you become weary by nightfall. Failing that, you can knock yourself out with booze and sleeping pills at the cost of inferior recovery. See, unless you’re wearing more tactical gear than a Texan militia captain, you do not want to travel the Kyivan wastes after the sun goes down.

That’s a decent segue into the medical system, which must be the grittiest I’ve seen in a modern 3D video game. You do not want to get shot in G.A.M.M.A. You might be able to shrug off a small-caliber round or two if they strike your armor, but a solid hit is devastating. Your vision blurs, your character grunts and whimpers in pain, and hemorrhages can kill you in seconds if you don’t immediately find cover and bandage yourself. Afterwards, you’ll probably be in too much agony to effectively fight back. You can run away, assuming your legs aren’t broken, or you can overcome the pain by self-administering any of several analgesics. Of course, you’ll then have to rejoin the fight while high as a kite, barely able to stand up straight. This is all punctuated with some gorgeous and evocative first-person animations. It’s immensely effective. During one firefight, I got shot square in the gut and realized my only chance of survival was to take fentanyl while desperately crouched behind half-cover. As my guy flicked the syringe and plunged it into his arm while bullets cracked past his ears, I swear I felt the exact same sense of exhilarating dread that I got from the last twenty minutes of Taxi Driver. Damn, this is my kind of FPS.

So, those are my first impressions of the ground-level gameplay — when it all comes together, it’s like a playable war film. But Anomaly in general and G.A.M.M.A. in particular are far more than just gunfights against impoverished Slavs. Let me tell you a little about the Zone’s denizens as I knew them.

MEETING THE LOCALS

It takes a certain kind to pull up roots and resettle in an active conflict zone, particularly when said zone is replete with bloodthirsty mutants and bone-crushing gravitational anomalies. Unsurprisingly, friendly people are few and far between, and certain factional affiliations will turn nearly all of Eastern Europe against you. In my campaign, I chose the beginner-friendly faction of free stalkers called the Loners. Despite the name, Loners maintain a relatively cohesive organizational hierarchy and are almost never found alone. Foreign mercenaries, bandits, and the Ukrainian military shoot them on sight, but most of the Zone’s other inhabitants are happy to cooperate with Loners in return for money or aid.

I begin my campaign in the so-called Rookie Village, which also happens to be the starting location in Shadow of Chornobyl. The settlement is organized and protected by a relatively flat leadership structure of experienced stalkers. The notoriously rotund smuggler Sidorovich deals in basic supplies and regularly furnishes the military with bribes to keep them from cracking down on the village. All of them, as well as the rookie stalkers who make their homes here, will gladly provide us with a steady stream of work as long as we prove ourselves reliable. “Reliable” in this context basically equates to “martially capable and disinclined toward asking too many questions,” which is just as well — I’ve got pretty decent aim, and I’m too busy getting my head around the game mechanics to spend time wondering about local politics.

The first job I take is essentially a diegetic tutorial in which a grizzled veteran takes me on a boar hunt. It takes about half a dozen tries to nail all three boars with my Cold War sidearm without getting all four of my limbs broken in the attempt. When I finally manage it, my tutor leads me to an irradiated anomaly field and points out an artifact lying in the open. He hands me a blister-pack of radioprotectant Indralin tablets and tells me to dose up before I go, so I do. I’m glad I did. Aside from several hard-to-see disturbances in the gravitational field that could each crush me into a lump of charcoal, the area is encased in an invisible bubble of ionizing alpha particles that immediately start chewing through my organs from the inside. By the time I secure the artifact — this one being a lump of radioactive carbon isotopes with anti-ballistic properties — my lungs are starting to dissolve and my character hacks like a chain-smoker with every breath. The veteran is pleased with my success and hands me a shoulder of Nemiroff to “flush out the glow.”4 It’s effective, but I struggle to walk and aim straight for awhile thereafter.

When I return to the Rookie Village, I hock the artifact and some boar parts at Sidorovich’s trading post and start looking for more jobs. Not yet wanting to tangle with armed human enemies, I take a few mutant-hunting contracts. The game has a clever way of building mystique in these kinds of assignments: job-givers will rarely be able to identify the precise species that you’re to cull, instead giving you vague descriptors like “diurnal herbivore” or “nocturnal predator.” In my case, this caused me to quake in my boots on the whole journey to my first hunt only to be pleasantly surprised that my quarry was a single malnourished housecat. That made me overconfident for my second hunt, and I blithely meandered into an encounter with a tentacle-faced humanoid mutant that caused me to hallucinate false copies of itself. It effortlessly dicked me down while I shat in terror.

The mutants of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. were already spooky and threatening way back in the 2007 FPS. In the time since, the folks modding Anomaly have done a terrific job making them come across more like folkloric monsters than ordinary sci-fi radiation mutants. Wandering through a forest or an enclosed space is chilling even in broad daylight with these things around. Getting caught in the wilderness after nightfall with only a headlamp for light is fucking terrifying, especially when you know as a matter of objective fact that, yes, there are flesh-eating monsters in yonder wood. Wielding a gun does surprisingly little to ease the tension, and watching a betentacled monstrosity emerge from the ink-black darkness while I frantically tried to clear a jam was more viscerally frightening than every Slender: The Eight Pages clone put together. So too was finding myself unable to shoot at a psychic mutant as I realized that my character was slowly bringing his gun to his own chin instead. The panicked whimpers really sold it — shout out to the voice actor who so faithfully channeled a man being telepathically forced to blow his own brains out.

Gruesome horror notwithstanding, mutants are absolutely worth hunting if you have the wherewithal to bring them down. Early-game weaponry will barely scratch the sinewy hide of anything bigger than a dog, but patient stalkers will have access to shotguns and hollow-point ammunition before long. The mutants’ anomalous physiologies are of considerable interest to science, and so their parts fetch a handsome price on the black market. Their flesh can also be cooked into meals that can temporarily imbue the diner with various anomalous properties of his own. This will flood your intestines with ionizing radiation, of course, but that’s nothing a plug of Stoli can’t fix. Besides, learning to cook is much cheaper in the long run than buying stale crackers and expired kolbasa at warzone prices.

On the way back to the Rookie Village, I loot a hidden stash and find a relatively decent Ithaca 37 shotgun. I spend my mutant-hunting money on buckshot and spare parts and get the thing operational and, with new confidence, take a job to hunt down a troublesome bandit who’s taken refuge in an abandoned village. When I show up, I count three bandits and a lot of usable cover, so I opt for a stealthy approach. One is relatively isolated in a corner, and I’m able to sneak through the tall grass and quietly stick him with my hunting knife as if this were Far Cry. The next bandit is patrolling nearby, walking away from me. I start to sneak towards him, but blunder through a shrub and noisily rustle it. He turns to face me. Oh, well. I instinctively pull the trigger, vaporizing his gonads and bringing him to the ground.

“Yob tvoyu mat!” calls an unseen voice. Suppose that’ll be the third one. “Pozhaluysta kupite mne Kalash blyat!” I shout at my screen in what little Russian I recall from playing competitive Counter-Strike back in the day. The next thirty seconds feel like ten minutes as the two of us try to outmaneuver one another. The enemy AI is absolutely terrific, being entirely capable of flanking or aggressively pushing to put pressure on the player. This particular bandit slows his pace so that I can’t hear his footsteps, and I start to get worried. But I catch a break and spot him through the corner of a broken window, allowing me to quickly reposition and put a shell through his balaclava. My PDA beeps in recognition of the completed mission. I tear off their patches as souvenirs and begin plotting my next moves.

At time of writing, I’ve put around fifteen hours into G.A.M.M.A., and I think it’s fair to say that this was enough for a modest first impression at best. I’ve yet to complete either of the missions that open up the more northerly regions of the game, and am probably not all that close to so doing. I think I have a decent handle on the core gameplay but, from what I’ve seen on YouTube, the difficulty ramps up substantially as you progress. Its systems give me a sense of immense depth, and I’m sure I’ll be discovering new mechanics and strategies for ages. Version 0.9.4 was released just weeks ago, and is the most accessible version yet by virtue of the new tutorial system. You can bet I’ll be writing about G.A.M.M.A. again come version 1.0, and quite possibly before then, as well. But to close out for today, I want to discuss it on a meta level and see if we can’t learn something from its uncommon design.

A S.T.A.L.K.E.R. GAME FOR 2025 (AND BEYOND)

As I presaged earlier, it’s my opinion that S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl is one of the most important video games ever made. That its popularity endures nearly two decades after its original release is testament to this, and the mind-boggling dedication of its modding community is yet more so. I haven’t even mentioned other huge and comparably popular Anomaly modpacks like Escape from Pripyat and H.A.C.R., both of which I still need to try. Together, these projects represent what I see as a glimpse into the future of independent game development in this dawning era of deprofessionalization. G.A.M.M.A. definitely has a certain auteur energy to its curation and presentation, but it’s a deeply collaborative endeavor at heart. Just look at this sample of community polls from the official Discord server:

*Above: a selection of player-outreach efforts from* G.A.M.M.A.’s creator. He does this sort of thing all the time and, as you can see, responses are reliably enthusiastic. Perhaps no other game of this scale reflects so much of its community’s aspirations in its core design.

Aside from my excitement at finally getting it running on Linux, I wanted to talk about G.A.M.M.A. precisely because of how it so masterfully exhibits this paradigm of player-oriented development. It’s first and foremost a game for enthusiasts, with its development priorities determined by community feedback and by a shared desire to realize a complete vision of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s mechanical potential. Marketability, accessibility, and other tokens of widespread commercial appeal are essentially nowhere to be found (aside from the new tutorials, which help a lot). It’s a way of creating games that couldn’t possibly exist within the traditional boundaries of professional development, and I think it’s all the better for it.

See, the professional games industry as we know it ultimately never existed for the purpose of making the best possible gameplay experiences, except insofar as “best” can be taken to mean “most commercially viable.” Hiring a staff of people and developing a game with the intention of turning a profit necessarily requires that compromises be made in order that the principal investment can be predictably recovered in the first place. It’s been all too obvious of late that the industry’s ceaseless, unsustainable growth has increasingly motivated a shift of resources from satisfaction over to engagement at all costs. You can probably see why I’ve spent the past several weeks immersed in free modding projects for decades-old games — they were designed specifically for my delectation as a fan of their genres and, since they’re free projects developed by passionate volunteers, no obeisance need be paid to the alienating machinery of for-profit industry. It’s all passion, all the time. It’s a tonic for all these miserable headlines I keep seeing about the sorry condition of high-level game development.

While we’re on the subject, it’s hard to overstate just how uncompromising G.A.M.M.A. feels as a work of artful curation. I’m not being glib when I compare it to a playable war movie. Another benefit of lacking any incentive toward broad commercial appeal is that the game is free to shock and disturb the player in ways that a profit-motivated publisher would never countenance. It’s a game about the realities of surviving an armed conflict unregulated by treaties or norms, and is about as psychologically effective as you’d expect from such a premise. Bullets break the sound barrier inches from your ears. Needles pierce your flesh as you desperately try to stay awake while gouts of blood spurt from your arteries. Men are shot through their vital organs, and their stoic warrior façades dissolve into scenes of helpless terror as they loudly suffocate on their own viscera, entirely conscious of their impending doom. And when it’s all over, you get paid just enough to replenish your supplies, if that. When I wrote about the different ways in which game designers deliberately make their players suffer last week, this is precisely the sort of thing I had in mind.

It’s in these details that Anomaly and G.A.M.M.A. truly distinguish themselves from their late-2000s source material. The original three S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are fairly bleak experiences in general, but never feel quite so oppressively hopeless even in their darkest moments. Where SoC depicted Chornobyl as a sort of living hell on Earth, G.A.M.M.A.’s central message seems to be that war is an even worse hell than Chornobyl. In fact, it’s so hellish that it can make you enduringly grateful for a few moments of peace in a bombed-out dacha before you shoot a clueless stranger through his shoulderblade with a piece of Wehrmacht surplus. It forces you to remember the ludicrous injustices that produce these kinds of hotzones in real life, and about the staggering human cost of war-profiteering. It’s an example of shooter design at its most emotionally potent, and it’s the kind of emergent storytelling that we need from violent video games in 2025 and beyond.

Alright, let me mop my sodden brow and wrap things up for this week. G.A.M.M.A. is a terrific and uncompromising title into which I’ll most likely sink hundreds of hours, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans and to any relatively confident player of FPS games who was intrigued by this writeup. It’s a tough recommend for a general audience on account of its high difficulty and involved mechanics, so I’d suggest checking out vanilla Anomaly if you’re on the fence. And if you haven’t played any S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games, I’m really hoping I can convince you to give Shadow of Chornobyl a try at the least. Next week, we’ll talk about that game’s remarkable history and about the indelible legacy it’s left on modern gaming and modern culture writ-large. It’s shaping up to be one of the better things I’ve written — looking forward to seeing you there.

Til next time <3

Thanks for reading to the end! Have you tried G.A.M.M.A. or any other Anomaly modpacks? Any cherished memories of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. worth sharing? Tell me about it below!