Video Game / Chernobylite

Igor Khymynuk on the left, the Black Stalker on the right.

Chernobylite is a Survival Sandbox with RPG Elements, developed by the Polish developer The Farm 51, who had earlier created Get Even (2017). The game was based off of their earlier experience creating a VR model of Pripyat; it was funded on Kickstarter on May 11th, 2019, and released into Steam Early Access on October 16th, 2019, with a full release for PC on July 28, 2021, and for consoles on September 7, 2021.

The protagonist is a scientist named Igor Khymynuk, whose fiancé Tatyana went missing at the time of the Chernobyl disaster, who comes back the Exclusion Zone to search for her thirty years later. Or rather, he is interested in seizing Chernobylite, the mineral formed as the result of nuclear meltdown which was found to have a range of properties defying conventional physics up to and including the potential to control the flow of time, and using that to reunite with Tatyana no matter what. However, Igor isn't the first person to have thought of that, the Exclusion Zone once again hosts a sizeable presence of Russian forces from the specially formed NAR division.

Gameplay is a mixture of Survival Sandbox, Stealth-Based Game, and Renovating the Player Headquarters. At the start of each day you pick an area of Pripyat for Igor to search for clues about Tatyana, along the way you collect resources, and at night you build up your base to give you access to more advanced equipment.

On April 26, 2022, Chernobylite received a free Nex-Gen upgrade which significantly improved the game's visuals, and an Updated Re-release in the form of the Enhanced Edition.

While S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the obvious reference point, this game has no direct relation to it. It is also unrelated to, CHERNOBYL: The Untold Story another 2019 game whose storyline directly involves the Chernobyl disaster.

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Tropes present in Chernobylite:

• Action Survivor: Igor's a physics scientist with little to no experience with firearms, but he's capping NAR soldiers like a pro within a few hours of raiding the zone (though he seems to feel pretty bad about it). Killing in self-defense during a hot firefight doesn't hurt his psyche (usually), but it is guaranteed to take a hit if he uses a lethal takedown on an enemy or snipes an unaware enemy.
• Alien Kudzu: The titular chernobylite is a strange crystal that appeared in the wake of the reactor meltdown in 1986. It feeds on radiation to fuel its own growth, and there's plenty of radiation in the Zone. About halfway through the game you're told that it is estimated to cover the entire Zone within no more than 30 days. Oh, and it's also partially organic, alive, and sentient.
• An Interior Designer Is You: Turning your Player Headquarters from a decrepit warehouse into an at least somewhat cozy living space for your crew forms an important part of the gameplay. Neglect it and you won't be having a crew for long. The build system itself seems heavily inspired by the one from Fallout 4 in terms of looks and controls.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • You enter and leave your mission areas the same way: with your portal gun. No need to cross the whole map to reach an extraction point, just spawn a portal and you're back at base. This even works in the middle of combat in case you've bitten off more than you can chew.
  • Instead of manually assigning food rations to every companion, you can give them the same as Igor's with the press of a single button.
  • Gun Accessories need to be crafted only once and can then be applied to any number of guns free of charge.
  • Vendors you've encountered before are usually marked on the map the moment you arrive, making them easy to find in case you need to stock up. That said, their appearance appears to be largely random, so this isn't exactly a reliable way to acquire supplies even so.
  • The comfort values of base items stack up no matter how they're arranged, eliminating the need to build actually functional interior decorations. If you're lazy or unimaginative, just throw a bunch of potted plants in a dark corner and your companions are happy. It's still more satisfying to make the place look nice, though.
  • If you just need to pass a day for some reason, like farming companion rep through the VR Inception machine, you can do so from the mission screen without going on a mission yourself.
• Artificial Stupidity: The enemy AI isn't all that bright. NAR mercs are pretty good shots, but they have no concept of cover or even basic tactics like flanking. If an enemy suddenly rounds the corner you were hiding behind, it was most likely an accident on their part. All they normally do in open combat is slowly move in your general direction while lining up a shot every time they spot you. If you take the stealth route, they take a long time to spot you and don't give a damn when coming across any dead/unconscious buddies of theirs you left lying around.
• A Storm Is Coming: The Black Stalker's appears in a storm of green lightning. When the zone starts having green lightning storms, that's the game telling you he's onto you and about to arrive in a few minutes.
• Behind the Black: Igor gets ambushed by a freaking Hind helicopter in the last third of the game. He's on the roof of a tall building when the things suddenly rockets into view from below. No-one ever comments on how Igor managed to not hear the thing earlier. Granted, Hinds are relatively quiet, but definitely not that quiet.
• BFG: The game includes a powerful rail gun that acts like a semi-auto rifle that just punches through almost everything, but the true BFG of the game is the Plasma Gun which even functions similarly to the classic Doom BFG: A slow moving green ball of energy that explodes on contact and kills pretty much everything around it. At that point the game goes from "how does Igor survive" to "how does NAR survive him?"
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Professor Semonov, your old mentor who is currently the NAR's chief scientist, convincingly claims to be a Reluctant Mad Scientist being forced to work for the NAR, but the Ariadna flashbacks prove he's a cold-blooded sociopath and the game's human Big Bad, eagerly engaged in cruel human experimentation and the real mastermind behind NAR's many war crimes, who thoroughly deserves a bullet to the head, though due to the game's consequences system killing him may bite you in the ass later on regardless.
  • The ending reveals that for most of the game, the Tatyana you've been hearing was actually the Chernobylite entity manipulating you into becoming its conduit into the human world (though the inhuman growling she occasionally lapses into probably clued you into that earlier). You only encounter the real Tatyana on a few occasions.
• Bittersweet Ending: Both endings that don't involve opening the door for chernobylite to invade our reality rid the Zone of the malevolent Alien Kudzu, but the Reject ending costs Igor his life whereas the Destroy ending kills Tatyana instead, meaning his whole mission was All for Nothing. Depending on how well you prepared and executed the Heist, either ending may also get some or even all of your companions killed, but even if they survive they don't exactly get sunshine-and-rainbows happy endings.
• Boss-Only Level: The final level of the game, the climactic Heist on the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, has no real combat to speak of, instead consisting of a series of scripted events in which you must make decisions which determine whether your companions live or die. The only real fight in the level is the Final Boss confrontation with the Black Stalker.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Basic guns like the revolver, the assault rifle and the shotgun are really all you need to survive in the Zone. They're reliable, easy to handle, heavily customizable to suit your personal preferences, and most importantly, ammo is plentiful because it can be scavenged in the game world. The AK and the revolver stick out in particular - the former is carried by the vast majority of human enemies, while the latter's ammo is by far the most abundant in random drops. These two can also accept a Hollywood Silencer, making them even more useful in a game that strongly encourages stealth combat. Last but not least, all three guns have perks associated with them that buff their damage output by up to 50%.
  • The crossbow isn't flashy but so useful it borders on game-breaking. Yes, it's expensive to craft and you can't scavenge its ammo, but this ammo can be recovered from dead enemies, making it effectively unlimited if your aim is true. It's also very accurate, completely silent and extremely powerful, able to one-shot almost any enemy except for the absolute strongest Elite Mooks and bosses (and those just barely survive a headshot). It's only real downside is its atrocious rate of fire, but if you play your cards right, its lengthy reload sequence will rarely be a problem.
• Brainwashing for the Greater Good: For a very loose definition of "greater good". You can build a device called VR Inception that lets you improve your companions' opinion of you by breaking into their minds while they sleep. This is done via a Roguelike minigame of sorts that pits you against 15 waves of randomly picked enemies, with a Boss Battle every five stages. If you make it to the end, you can add one favorable decision event to one companion per run. While the machine does offer a get-out-of-jail-free card of sorts in case you really messed up a relationship, it's an arduous process clearly not meant to be used frequently.
• Breakable Weapons: Averted, which actually makes a lot of sense despite not being given an explanation. All firearms in the Zone are tried and proven Soviet-era workhorses like the Nagant revolver or the ever-popular AK-47 that are famous for their ruggedness and reliability in almost any environment. Taking them for a spin for a few hours each day won't bother them much, and Igor's probably giving them proper maintenance offscreen once he's back at base.
• Call-Back: The Ariadna device is an improved version of the Pandora device from Get Even. Igor, its inventor, even mentions Pandora in a flashback, suggesting the game shares a universe with Get Even. If you have subtitles on, Igor's boss is revealed to be Grace from Get Even.
• The Caper: Most of the game is spent assembling intel and members for "The Heist" the missions to break into Chernobyl and rescue Tatyana. The preparations are tracked on a board labelled "The Heist" in the base.
• Capitalism Is Bad: Discussed. It's made abundantly clear that most of the current problems in the Zone are the fault of NAR, a powerful corporation whose only motivation is to make as much money as they possibly can even though the otherworldly forces they're meddling with could easily spell The End of the World as We Know It. However, with Igor being a mostly loyal scion of the Soviet Union, socialism and communism are dissected at length, too, and found to be just as bad, only from a different angle.
• Chernobyl: The setting of the game, obviously. Large parts of the lovingly detailed Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are yours to explore, with the final goal being the stricken power plant itself.
• Climax Boss: You and your team take down General Kozlov, the field commander of NAR, just before your final heist on the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
• Cool, but Inefficient:
  • The crossbow's penetrating bolts are mostly a liability. Nailing two or more enemies in one shot is certainly cool, but setting this up is rarely worth the hassle, plus it makes recovering the bolt afterwards a whole lot harder, if not outright impossible.
  • The game's two Energy Weapons also fit the bill. They're definitely powerful, but both the weapons themselves and their ammunition are expensive to craft, and with no-one but Igor carrying them in the Zone, scavenging ammo from fallen enemies or supply crates is impossible, putting a heavy drain on your scarce resources if you want to use them regularly (and if you don't, they just clutter your inventory). They also don't really do anything that the Boring, but Practical guns like the AK, the shotgun or the crossbow can't do almost as well, if not better. Another drawback is that neither energy weapon can be buffed with perks, and the plasma cannon can't even be modified.
  • Speaking of energy weapon modification: the railgun can be equipped with a regenerating magazine. Infinite ammo for a powerful gun? Yes please! Until you realize the magazine only recharges out of combat (and very slowly at that), leaving you with a single mag per battle that is virtually guaranteed to run out long before all enemies are dead.
  • The Makarov pistol is basically king of this trope. It suffers from the same shortcomings as the energy weapons in terms of ammo supply, but without their high damage output as compensation. That it can be converted from a standard slugthrower into an energy pistol of sorts doesn't change anything about either drawback - it still deals poor damage, has poor range, and still uses unique ammo that can only be crafted.
• Cool Old Guy: Igor is in his 50's or 60's at minimum, yet is able to survive quite handily in the Zone, defeating both hostile soldiers and otherworldly creatures. Sashko even comments that Igor is impressively spry for a pre-Perestroika Soviet-era scientist. ( However, it turns out your character is a sort of clone and was actually born in the late 1980's. Though the real Igor is still an example of this trope, as he's the Black Stalker). Tarakan is also elderly, and has set up boobytraps all over Pripyat as well as managing to kill multiple NAR soldiers (including nailing one to a wall with multiple fence posts) when they finally came for him.
• Creepy Doll:
  • The opening cutscene simply provides a first-person view of the abandoned hospital, and lingers on a doll placed on a bare bed frame, before said doll's eyes mysteriously flash green.
  • Dolls found in the Zone in-game exhibit similar, as well as heading turning, talking like dead loved ones, and disappearing. You can also decorate your base with them.
• Cycle of Hurting: Dealing any amount of damage to an enemy staggers them briefly. Keeping up the pressure with constant hits makes it virtually impossible for lone enemies to retaliate. It doesn't matter all that much against basic mercs due to their low health, but can be a lifesaver when up against Heavy Armored Soldiers. Notably, Igor himself is immune to this.
• Damsel in Distress: Igor risks everything for his incursion into the exclusion zone in order to potentially find and save his missing bride, Tatyana, even if it'll require altering the past.
• Deadly Gas: The Zone is dotted with pockets of sickly-green toxic gas that'll drain your health like crazy if you get caught in it without a gas mask and enough filters on hand. The gas clouds are often so thick that visibility inside is reduced to near zero, piling another hazard on top.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: All weapons except for the plasma thrower can be modified, often in pretty significant ways. There's the usual fare like bigger magazines or different sights, but you can also change the function of a gun, most notably the assault rifle, which can be rebuilt into a designated marksman rifle or a light machine gun (which is par for the course for the legendarily rugged and versatile AK-47 platform).
• The Determinator: Pretty much every named character in the Zone, really. Nothing's actually stopping them from leaving to start a better life elsewhere, but they all have something to accomplish first and they will accomplish it no matter what's in their way. Player Character Igor is the standout example of course, but his companions and many side characters aren't far behind. Olga outright mentions in her "more health points" training that unshakable determination can sustain a person far beyond their normal breaking point.
• Determined Homesteader: True to real life, there are still people living in the Zone (called "samosiels") that just won't leave no matter who or what is trying to chase them off. Your companion Olga is one of them.
• Dialogue Tree: A simplified dialogue tree with two options occasionally shows up; sometimes it's used for flavour (like when deciding how to respond to teasing from your guide in the prologue), and at other times for story decisions like determining the fate of the mind control array.
• Disaster Scavengers: The Chernobyl meltdown is widely considered one of the worst (man-made) environmental disasters in human history, and you're right in the middle of the wasteland it left behind. The only faction there with an actual supply line is the NAR and their armed goons. Everyone else has to make do with scrounging for supplies among the detritus left behind by the Soviet liquidators decades ago, or steal what they need from NAR. A significant part of your total playtime will be devoted to picking up everything remotely useful you can find in the game world.
• Dragon-in-Chief: Colonel Kozlov, the NAR's military leader, is the leader of the NAR forces around Chernobyl, but he's a standard military officer and it's his superpowered Chief of Security, the Black Stalker, who represents the greatest threat faced by Igor.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Any impact Igor's actions and experiences in the Zone are having on his state of mind can be washed away with vodka. Remarkably, chugging an entire bottle of the stuff in one go seems to have no effect on him other than clearing his conscience - no screen blur, no wobbly movement, no shaky aim... nothing. Dude's tough.
• Easily Forgiven: A companion's reaction to you acting in opposition to their own agenda rarely affects your in-game relationship and follow-up dialogue in any meaningful way. You can crash their carefully laid out, years-in-the-making plan and they will chew you out for it, but as long as your Alliance Meter survives the hit, they'll stick with you regardless. Only a scant few decisions result in a companion dropping your ass right then and there.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The chernobylite infestation has spawned a number of creepy monsters called Shadows or Lurkers that can suddenly appear out of portals anywhere, at any time. The most numerous version is a zombie-like humanoid creature with a glowing green lump of chernobylite-warped tissue for a head. Another acts like a stationary turret/mine hybrid usually stuck to a wall somewhere. It looks arachnoid when it reveals itself to launch green plasma blasts at whatever happened to get too close to it, and can teleport to different spots in the vicinity to outmaneuver you.
  • The ending reveals that chernobylite isn't just a quasi-magical crystal but itself a sentient, malevolent multidimensional entity with a single-minded desire to invade our reality. It has manipulated many of the events in the Zone since the reactor meltdown in 1986 to this end, one of which was the creation of the Player Character as an avatar for its invasion. Whether or not it succeeds is up to a Last-Second Ending Choice by the player.
• Eldritch Location: The insides of the chernobylite-created wormholes are quite bizarre, generally consisting of disjointed pieces of the real world floating in an endless framework of geometric chernobylite crystal formations. Time flows much slower there, to the point that an old man trapped in a wormhole might find a way out just in time to attend his grandson's funeral. It gets even more bizarre when you learn that chernobylite is a sentient multidimensional entity, and traveling through wormholes essentially means moving through this Eldritch Abomination's body.
• Elite Mooks: Sergeants have twice as much health as regular NAR soldiers, Armored Soldiers favor shotguns and have almost three times as much health and require at least 3 headshots or several torso shots to kill, and Elite Soldiers have better skill and over 4 times as much health and take multiple headshots to kill.
• Everything Sensor: Igor carries a self-designed gadget that, when triggered, sends out a pulse that highlights any and all salvage items in a pretty large radius, which includes such diverse items as herbs, flammable chemicals, electronic components and, with some investment in the skill tree, even enemies both alive and dead. How exactly this works is never touched upon, but given the game's propensity to use chernobylite to Hand Wave anything that defies the laws of physics as we know them, the stuff probably has something to do with it.
• Face–Heel Turn: Companions that leave your group due to your Relationship Values reaching 0 may show up during the Heist, acting in opposition to your group.
• The Faceless: Almost every single character wears a face-concealing gas mask. The only in-game character model whose face you ever see is Tatyana and even she is mostly seen from behind at a distance. Sashko, Olga, and Colonel Kozlov wear mouth-only masks rather than full face concealing masks, but it still obstructs much of their face.
• Featureless Protagonist: The first-person perspective prevents us from seeing Igor's face. While the other characters have portraits in their dialogue windows that show what they look like under their masks, Igor's portrait has him wearing a mask that obscures most of his face.
• From Bad to Worse: The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone isn't exactly one of the world's most inviting places to begin with, but its condition deteriorates rapidly as the game progresses. By the time you're ready to launch the heist, most of the Zone is covered in uncontrolled chernobylite growths, thick fog and toxic gas clouds, hostile monsters roam unchecked, and the sky unleashes devastating electrical storms with increasing frequency.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: It's estimated about halfway through the story that chernobylite will cover the whole Zone in about 30 days thanks to its uncontrolled self-replication. Continue playing for that long and you'll be shown that this estimate is pretty much on point.
• Gas Mask Mooks: Initially averted with the NAR mercs wearing either balaclavas or full-face helmets. However, as atmospheric conditions in the Zone continue to deteriorate, the non-heavy mercs eventually start wearing gas masks. This doesn't make them any more resilient to player attacks, but has the nice bonus of Igor occasionally finding gas mask filters on their bodies.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: The default melee option. It is also surprisingly viable simply because the enemy AI often freezes up when you are up in its face, unable to either shoot or melee back.
• Greater-Scope Villain: NAR, the psychotically greedy Megacorp that controls the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, seeking to exploit its secrets for mentary gain, consequences be damned. They're the ones funding the experiments run by Professor Semonov, who in turn projects his will through NAR's mercenary army and his right-hand man, the Black Stalker.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Boris, Igor's colleague and close friend from back before the Chernobyl power plant went belly-up. Turns out he was jealous of Igor all along, especially when it came to his wife Tatyana, who he tried to put the moves on behind Igor's back. When that fell flat he ratted her out to the KGB with made-up allegations of treason. And then he went ahead with phase-3 chernobylite tests on himself and became the Black Stalker, all because he Did Not Get the Girl.
• Green Rocks: The titular chernobylite is a very straight example, literally being a glowing green crystal that stores unlimited energy within it. While it is technically a real mineral formed as a result of the nuclear meltdown, the near-mystical properties the game awards it (up to and including being able to power the portals through spacetime) are obviously fictional.
• Grid Inventory: As classic as they come. Armor occupies four tiles (2x2), weapons two, everything else one tile apiece. Stack sizes are fairly low, especially for ammo, so most of your inventory will probably be taken up by your ammo supply. Companion perks can be unlocked to nearly double the total inventory size.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: As the game progresses, the Chernobylite infestation at the Nuclear Power Plant gets bigger and bigger. On the final day (Day 15 in the initial build, though it gets pushed further and further as more content is added), the power plant explodes and you get sent back in time to Day 1, though you get to keep your level, inventory, and base progress and retain knowledge of the future you can use to change the outcome of events (such as being able to recruit Tarakin immediately on the 1st day by knowing exactly what to say to him on the radio, instead of having to do several missions to earn his trust). In the latest build of the game, this also occurs if you die. Most of this was eventually scrapped for the 1.0 release in favor of a more traditional linear story progression, although you can still change past events between dying and "respawning".
  • This gets deconstructed when it's revealed that each 'time travel' caused Igor to shift into an alternative timeline, meaning all the horrible decisions you made in each iteration have real consequences for the alternate timelines, which the Chernobylite entity will use to troll you by making the ghosts of your 'erased' decisions call you out. Also, some of the other loop's survivors are disgusted that they are forced through the loops for your benefit.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: The prologue has a truck full of guards not being able to see two men helping a third man over a fence. However apparently they're not that bright as their CO yells at them for being idiots because the truck they found didn't drive itself there.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Keeping all your companions at or near neutral disposition can be real tough without knowing in advance how many chances you'll get to influence their opinion, for better or worse.
  • The final mission involves nearly a dozen decisions, almost all of which can screw you over big-time if you choose wrong. Some of the correct choices aren't even available unless you've made very specific decisions much earlier in the game, and you will lose companions if you don't/can't pick these options. The fact that the game normally lets you go back in time to change past events won't help you here because all of these final choices need to be made in a row. This also ties in with the point above, with the final mission becoming near-impossible to finish in a satisfying way if one or more of your companions left you prior to launching the heist.
  • There's a locked safe in the Kopachi area that's easy to find, but figuring out how to open it is another matter entirely. The nearby locksmith obviously has something to do with it, but good luck getting him to help you. His spawning is also RNG-dependent, so even if you completed the necessary steps to gain his help, he might not be there to tell him and trigger the next phase of this unmarked quest.
  • The game never bothers to tell you what your companions' various stats actually do. It's probably safe to assume that they influence what type of missions each companion is good at (i.e. resistance and firepower giving bonuses to combat and ammo salvage missions), but the exact mechanics remain a mystery. This also extends to companion equipment, with Gun Accessories providing stat buffs that aren't mentioned anywhere in the weapon upgrade menu, leaving it to the player to find out through trial and error.
• Gun Accessories: All weapons can accept upgrades to their magazine, grip, barrel, sights and more (or the closest equivalent if the weapon in question doesn't actually contain a certain part, like the crossbow obviously lacking a barrel).
• The Heavy: The Black Stalker is the most consistent overarching threat to Igor's mission, but he's not the one who's actually pulling the strings behind the scenes.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Heavily Armored Soldiers are the toughest enemy soldiers, wearing heavy body armor that gives them a whooping 1000 health^note normal soldiers have 120 hitpoints and most importantly, an inability to do takedowns on them.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • It's possible to get General Kozlov himself to help you during the Heist if you took the right actions throughout the game. If you save his nephew Glyeb (the boy being held hostage by NAR in the prison), send him to the village, and prevent Kostya from poisoning the village, Kozlov will locate Glyeb and the boy will convince his uncle to help you.
  • Most of the endings involve some cooperation between the stalkers and the remaining NAR troops, either after NAR pulled out of the Zone in the good endings, or in an Enemy Mine situation to combat the escalating Shadow presence in the bad one.
• Hollywood Silencer: Available for the revolver and the assault rifle, and played somewhat realistically inasmuch as that they merely muffle the gun's report, not suppress it completely. That said, they still make that standard "pfft" or "plop" sound Hollywood popularized. They're also fairly inconsistent in their effect - sometimes you can pop a whole fireteam in the head without raising an alarm, but more often than not they seem to have no effect at all, instantly alerting every enemy in the area as soon as you pull the trigger.
• Hostile Terraforming: The chernobylite infestation is having a terrifying effect on the Zone. The stuff overgrows and often consumes anything it comes into contact with, it mutates organics into utterly alien lifeforms, and its mere presence gradually shifts the Zone's climate from relatively normal to an inhospitable hellscape full of toxic gas clouds, random radiation outbursts and eery electrical storms that rain green lightning strikes down on Earth.
• Hypocrite: Igor is an arbitrary sceptic who keeps dismissing exotic hypotheses on the nature of chernobylite simply because they don't meet his standards of the scientific method. A major pillar of the scientific method consists of constantly challenging your own world view to explore new theories on phenomena that don't fit into the established framework. The problem is that Igor is utterly unwilling to entertain anything that doesn't mesh with his narrow, Soviet-era understanding of the world, making him at least as guilty of violating the scientific method as anyone else he talks to.
• Implacable Man: The Black Stalker attacks you at several points in the story. He has a whooping 3000 health (standard soldiers have 120 health), uses Teleport Spam to move around, and attacks you with a Chernobylite energy weapon that deals heavy health and radiation damage. Several shotgun blasts to the face will cause him to retreat, however.
• Interface Screw:
  • Taking damage in combat can cause effects like camera shaking and slowed movement from trauma. This incentivizes the use of stealth.
    • The stationary Shadow creatures attack with green plasma projectiles that obscure the entire screen for about a second every time they score a hit, making it even harder to retaliate.
  • Toxic gas clouds severely limit visibility, to the point that it can become impossible to see things two steps in front of you.
  • A minor example is Igor's gas mask ending up with a cracked visor after an early-game cutscene. Fortunately you can just craft or buy another one that doesn't have the crack.
• Item Crafting: A significant element of the game.
• It's Probably Nothing: In the prologue, Igor loudly climbs over the perimeter fence, which attracts the attention of two nearby NAR soldiers and forces your two guides to abandon their attempt to climb over themselves and just flee back to the sewer entrance. The guards say it was rats, prompting their CO to yell at them that the truck they found on patrol didn't drive itself there.
• I See Dead People: Soon after crossing the power plant's perimeter, Igor starts hearing the voice of Tatyana and sees visions of the power plant's ghosts.
• Laser Sight: Used to telegraph incoming fire. When a NAR merc draws a bead on you, a red laser lights up from his gun as a clear warning to get behind cover. It's an astoundingly reliable system, too. Laser? A shot will follow in about a second regardless of whether or not the shooter can actually hit you. No laser? Time to shoot back.
• Lockpicking Minigame: Notably averted. To open a locked door, all you need is a set of lockpicks. That's it. If you have lockpicks in your inventory, just interact with the door and it's open. Apparently Igor's a bit of a secret master burglar.
• Loot Boxes: In what feels like a hilarious Take That! aimed at the rest of the gaming industry, Chernobylite introduces Evgeny, a minor NPC who appears randomly throughout the Zone to sell you literal loot boxes (as in, a box full of random stuff he looted since the last time you met) for one unit of food apiece. Igor is completely flummoxed by the concept of paying for a box with unknown content, but if you indulge Evgeny you'll notice that his loot boxes almost always contain large amounts of random ammo or crafting materials that far exceed the value of the bit of food he asks for in return.
• MacGyvering: Igor may be a crappy scientist, but his technical skills are impressive. Give him a bunch of scrap, some random electronic components, a bit of fuel and (for some reason) herbs and mushrooms, and he will turn them into a fully functional coilgun that can teleport its bullets through walls.
• Magnetic Weapons: One of the craftable weapons is a railgun. At least that's what the game calls it despite it clearly being a coilgun, with more than one of its Gun Accessories outright mentioning the coils. It acts more or less like a battle rifle that can be upgraded to shoot through walls (although not because of outrageous penetrative power as these weapons normally do, but by somehow teleporting the bullet to the other side of the wall).
• Mauve Shirt: Anton, one of the two mercs that accompany Igor in the prologue mission, gets just enough dialogue to make it seem like he'll become a major side character. Then the group gets ambushed by the Black Stalker and Anton is casually executed to showcase just what you're up against.
• Maximum HP Reduction: Another Fallout 4-inspired mechanic, radiation damage reduces your maximum health and must be cured separately before you can heal back to full.
• The Mole: Olivier turns out to have been hired by Dr. Semenov to spy on Igor during his expedition into the Zone, which explains why he always argues for Igor to not kill Semenov or pursue vengeful/excessively violent actions against NAR. However, he's also been genuinely helping Igor due to anger at the Black Stalker for killing Anton, which wasn't part of the plan.
• Monumental Damage: Some of Pripyat's most recognizable landmarks like the Duga radar or the Ferris wheel can be destroyed during missions, depending on your choices.
• Multiple Endings: The game has at least 3 different endings, based on 2 Last-Second Ending Choice. There's also a "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue that tells you the individual fate of each main character after the end of your adventure.
  • Destroy: You destroy the portal, preventing Chernobylite from entering the human world. However, this results in Tatyana's death as she was being used by NAR to power the portal. She considers it a Mercy Kill, given the state NAR was keeping her in.
  • Commune: After entering the portal, you merge with the Chernobylite entity, allowing Chernobylite to fully invade the human world, which will eventually lead to humanity being assimilated by it.
  • Reject: After entering the portal and confronting the Chernobylite entity, you sacrifice yourself to break its control over space and time, removing Chernobylite from the world.
• Mundane Utility: Chernobylite can be used to break space and time, but the basic property of the mineral is probably its most useful: it absorbs radiation to grow, leaving the otherwise deadly and contaminated reactor area of Chernobyl cold and nearly radiation-free. All your anti-radiation technology uses Chernobylite in it. But even that is not the most mundane use for it: you can make fancy decorations with it around your base just for fun.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: After you complete the prologue, it's strongly implied that Igor's travels through the space-time continuum using chernobylite are shattering the very fabric of space-time itself, as anomalies like storms of green lighting begin to show up. The Black Stalker straight up tells you that you have to die because all your teleporting around searching for your missing wife is screwing up the space-time continuum.
• No-Gear Level: Igor gets captured at one point and has to escape an old prison complex with nothing but stealth takedowns and the occasional MacGyver'd trap until he can reclaim his equipment near the exit. Strangely, his captors never bother to remove his body armor.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The eldritch Shadow creatures are little more than the chernobylite's creepy immune system of sorts, mindlessly attacking anything they consider a threat to their host. Chernobylite itself may be evil, but the Shadows are no more malicious than a serial killer's leukocytes are.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: The game's default dialogue is native Russian with subtitles. However, if you choose the English dialogue option, everyone will speak English with incredibly British accents, despite most of the characters being Eastern European. This actually makes it impossible to tell the nationality of characters who are supposed to be foreigners, such as a pair of flashback characters who seem to be foreign agents of an unspecified non-USSR nation.
• Older Than They Look: Igor is easily pushing sixty, if not older, but his portrait makes him look like he's in his late forties at most. It's a subtle hint that he isn't the real Igor, but a thirty-something quasi-clone of him.
• One-Hit Polykill: Railgun shots overpenetrate most targets, potentially killing two or more enemies with one shot. The crossbow can also be upgraded to do this.
• 1-Up: Adrenaline syringes revive you to full health when your health is depleted to 0. You start the game with one, and can craft additional ones, but having the equipment to do so requires being pretty far into your base's construction.
• Optional Stealth: It is possible to avoid some NAR troops, or sneak up on them to get stealth kills. This is helpful, as killing enemies lowers your psyche and has detrimental effects (though nothing a little alcohol or mushroom soup can't cure). Unlike the developers' previous game, Get Even, killing enemies doesn't affect the game's ending, unless they're a major character. That said, unless you're an outrageously efficient fighter, combat is strongly discouraged simply due to the disproportionate strain it puts on your limited resources. It's generally best to just sneak past enemies wherever possible, and to thin out the herd stealthily before engaging the rest where it isn't.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Igor is a socially awkward Soviet-era bookworm who stopped keeping up with pop culture several decades ago, assuming he ever spared a thought for it to begin with. Most of his heist crew are half his age or younger, which leads to a bunch of conversations where Igor has no idea what the youngsters are talking about.
• Power Up Letdown: The unmarked Kopachi Safe sidequest spans almost the entire game, which would suggest an appropriately powerful endgame reward for finishing it. The actual reward (unlimited battery power for Igor's flashlight) is practically useless because by the time you can access it, you won't be needing it anymore even if you tried.
• Press X to Die: You can construct at your base a suicide chamber whose only purpose is to kill you. Eliminating yourself this way is one of the only ways to die without losing some items. You can use it to reset the Groundhogs Day Loop.
• Private Military Contractors: The soldiers in the Zone aren't actually soldiers but private corporate security forces in the employ of a shadowy company called NAR. There's explicit (derisive) mention of "Wagner rejects" serving among them, thus associating them with a real-life PMC that had gained infamy during the time of the game's release due to their involvement in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that began with the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014.
• Professor Guinea Pig: The Black Stalker is Igor's old colleague Dr. Boris Glukhov, who injected himself with Chernobylite nanoparticles believing that small doses administered over a long period could turn him into a superhuman without the horrific consequences seen in other test subjects. He was at least partially successful, though he is no longer human or even technically alive.
• Psycho for Hire: Averted hard with Olivier. While he won't hesitate to kill when he has to, most of his skills he teaches you are about avoiding combat and killing. He also expresses concern about potential civilian causalities, and doesn't hold Anton's death against Igor.
• Punch-Clock Villain: The NAR mercs Igor keeps running into have no personal beef with him. They're just there for a paycheck, and if their Enemy Chatter is anything to go by, they don't want to be in the Zone any more than he does. This even extends to their leader General Kozlov who, despite being a ruthless entitled asshole, is still only doing his job to protect NAR's facilities as best he can.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Your heist crew is a... colorful bunch, to say the least, consisting of a surprisingly moral mercenary who's also secretly The Mole, an irascible and foul-mouthed scavenger, a hardened street criminal with an agenda of his own, a trigger-happy Determined Homesteader who started out as a Greenpeace activist, and an old schizophrenic lunatic with an unhealthy obsession with rats. Needless to say that keeping them all in line is anything but trivial. The only thing they all seem to agree on is that the general in charge of the NAR forces in the Zone is an asshole that needs to die, although the question of how he should bite it already triggers the next conflict.
• Random Number God:
  • Whether or not an enemy attack hits you seems entirely random. Sometimes a merc nails you across half the map, other times he misses despite standing right in front of you.
  • The success chance of your companions on their daily scavenging missions is percentage-based. The maximum value you can achieve is 99%, so there always a miniscule chance of failure.
• Relationship Values: Each of Igor's five companions has strong feelings about certain aspects of his mission, and what pleases one of them will almost always piss off someone else. Balancing their opinions so that none turn their back on him before the final mission forms one of the game's most important elements... if you're going for the Golden Ending, that is. You can finish the game without a full crew, but the result won't be pretty.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The game references multiple real-life events that had just happened, or were still happening, by the time of its full release, with a notable focus on military conflicts. Examples include the Syrian civil war, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict^note minus the full Russian invasion in 2022, which was launched barely a year after release, and the escalating deployment of mercenary armies as deniable warfare assets. It also takes potshots at the growing number and influence of Megacorps and the sociopathic behavior they keep getting away with.
• Sanity Meter: Killing enemies lowers your psyche level, which has detrimental effects. You can dull the guilt and raise your psyche with either alcohol or mushroom soup.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: The dynamic between Igor and Tatyana. He's a socially awkward scientist with no time to spare for frivolous things like recreational sport or human interactions. She's a lively, outgoing woman with a love for ice skating, dancing, Western music, and playing the violin. Nobody, not even Igor and Tatyana themselves, can understand how they ended up together, or more specifically, how he ended up with her.
• Scenery Gorn: Chernobylite is 50% this, 50% Scenery Porn. It's obviously set in the crumbling ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and surrounding areas like the Ghost Town of Pripyat, but the game's insanely detailled, 3D-scan-derived maps, coupled with beautiful lighting (especially if you have raytracing capabilities) make for some melancholic yet absolutely gorgeous views. That said, progressing through the story continually shifts the Zone into outright scenery gorn thanks to the titular substance and its effects on the environment.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Team members whose Alliance Meter bottoms out will become disillusioned in your leadership and will permanently leave the group, even potentially showing up in the final mission to try and screw up your plan.
  • Semenov, the game's human Big Bad, will do this if he survives the events of the game. Realizing his evil megalomaniacal plans almost got him killed, he'll decide to retire into obscurity.
  • One of the side events is about a NAR deserter who just wants out of the Zone. Ironically, if you save him from summary execution, he turns into a gunrunner and ammo vendor that continues to prowl the Zone until the end of the game.
• Self-Deprecation: Olga, who teaches the inventory management skill (which increases your inventory size), lectures you in the middle of her lesson about how the only woman on the team being the only one to teach inventory management is a sexist stereotype (she's wrong, Mikhail also teaches a skill related to inventory size). It's pretty clear the developers are taking the piss rather than making a serious statement about anything.
• Serious Business: Hardbass, to the point that two NPCs come close to shooting each other over a disagreement on what does or doesn't constitute good hardbass.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Making the right decisions to balance out your companions' opinion of you, as well as enable a successful final mission, can be quite tricky at times. Fortunately you can always go back to change past events to a more favorable outcome, which is then immediately retconned into your timeline (actually it isn't; you're leaving your previous timeline behind to deal with the mess you created while you jump to a different one). All you need is a bit of chernobylite... and to die first. You can even build a suicide chamber to be able to mess with the space-time continuum without having to leave the comfort of your base.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Shotguns deal heavy damage at close range and are the best weapons for indoor combat, especially against Shadows, but ammo for them is somewhat rarer than for the revolver or assault rifle.
• Shout-Out:
  • The whole game is basically a Chernobyl-themed version of the Suicide Mission from Mass Effect 2, complete with interconnected Loyalty Missions and the outcome of the final mission depending strongly on assigning the right job to the right companion.
  • Several gameplay features like the base building and the radiation damage mechanics are lifted straight from Fallout 4. The Chernohost Shadows also look and move almost identically to that game's depiction of ghouls.
  • In the tutorial mission, Igor reads his is Geiger counter and says "3.6... Ummm, not great, not terrible."
  • Early in the game you can encounter a clearly deranged guy who's sitting on a chair while waving a gun around. Talking to him repeatedly triggers lines of dialogue that, among others, reference H. P. Lovecraft or the classic FPS Blood.
  • During their first conversation, Olga says that the monsters "mostly come at night. Mostly."
  • During one of their training sessions, Igor quips to Olga "I want to... believe!"
  • In the Pripyat Residential Area, you can find a dead soldier grown into the wall of an empty swimming pool.
  • Patrolling mercs may sometimes mutter "All work and no play makes Vladimir a dull boy".
  • The device you can use to alter your companions' opinion of you by breaking into their minds is called VR Inception.
• Show, Don't Tell: Learning new skills from companions in games usually happens offscreen. In Chernobylite you're actually required to participate in the training by performing some simple task, like practicing with specific guns to increase their damage or picking herbs to improve your scavenging skills. These lessons never take long and are virtually impossible to fail, but they're a nice touch regardless.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Mikhail can barely manage two sentences without using a hard swear word. He also has No Indoor Voice and a severely strained relationship with Igor no matter what you do, which makes almost any conversation with him very confrontational.
• The Smurfette Principle: Olga seems to be the only (still human) female you meet in the Zone, as well as the only female member of your team.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: When Igor has to escape from prison later in the story, he breaks free from the chair he's bound to within seconds of his captors leaving the room. They're also curteous enough to leave his cell door wide open and put the few guards inside the facility on one-man patrol routes that rarely overlap, making it very easy to stealthily take them down one by one. And then he gets all his guns back...
• Take Your Time:
  • Played with in normal gameplay. You generally don't need to rush through missions and can take your time enjoying the scenery, but if you dawdle for too long, the Black Stalker tracks you down and forces you into a Boss Battle. A reasonable amount of hustle is therefore recommended to avoid wasting resources battling an otherwise avoidable, very dangerous enemy.
  • Discouraged in terms of mission selection. Nothing outright forces you to tackle main missions or companion quests, but you're given at least one of each every day. If you let them pile up for too long, they might well block all the region slots on the mission selection screen, making it near impossible to acquire resources from sending companions out into the Zone. This is especially dangerous if you aren't self-sufficient in terms of food and your reserves are running low.
• Techno Babble: Igor drops a bunch of references to "Calabi-Yau" and "Hawking bridges" when explaining how his time machine works. Olivier responds that it makes him sound like a supervillain from a bad movie.
• Tomato in the Mirror: 'Igor' is actually a clone, created by the Chernobylite and infused with the real Igor's memories to become its unwitting champion. His surrogate mother? Tatyana.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: All of the NAR soldier guns are biometrically locked to their owners, so you are unable to use them. You can very rarely receive a rifle from searching a soldier's dropped gun, likely reflecting a rare case of the lock being broken.
• Video Game Caring Potential: Several side events involve Igor happening across NAR mercs caught in a bind, like being stuck under rubble, bleeding out after a Shadow attack, or being seconds away from execution for desertion at the hands of their former comrades. Helping them out usually doesn't get you anything in return other than their heartfelt thanks and the warm fuzzy feeling of acting like a decent human being. However, some of them turn into vendors if you save them.
• Villain Teleportation: Igor can use his portal gun to go into a wormhole that takes him back to base but doesn't seem to have much "fine" control over it otherwise, so you only use it to end a mission and go back to base. Meanwhile, the Black Stalker can appear or disappear at will through a portal making evading him extremely difficult, and the final fight with him has him use straight-up Teleport Spam to confuse you.
• Walking Armory: The only limit on the number of weapons you can carry is your inventory space. If you don't mind having no room to spare for loot, you can venture out with a dozen or so guns on your back. You can even access most of them thanks to up to eight available quickslots. It's generally more practical to focus on two or three weapons, though.
  • One way to play this trope somewhat straight relies on the fact that each weapon in your inventory is loaded individually. Some players exploit this to circumvent the revolver's slow reload by carrying multiple loaded revolvers and quickly drawing another one instead of reloading the one in their hands. This also works with the other guns, shotguns in particular, but is most often used on revolvers due to their relative abundance in the Zone.
• We Used to Be Friends: If you decide to keep Olivier in your crew after finding out that he's been The Mole from the beginning, Igor makes it abundantly clear that their friendship is over and from here on out they're strictly business partners.

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