A new trailer for Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl (opens in new tab) has dropped, highlighting some of the details of the story and characters behind the highly anticipated new entry in the Stalker series. The trailer, titled Come to Me, surfaced at developer GSC Game World YouTube (opens in new tab) channel today. This article, understandably, contains spoilers for the original games and the trailer.
The trailer opens with a scene possibly set during the event that caused The Zone to come into being and found the mind-controlled Monolith faction. Other scenes show Zone exploration, including throwing bolts into anomalies and using anomaly detectors, overlaid with commentary from various characters. It closes with a speech from a blind man who appears to be some kind of religious fanatic.
“You can’t kill God, just as you can’t get rid of the sky above,” says one narrator.
However, the first real lines we get ride straight into the mysterious experiments that took place in The Zone where the original Stalker trilogy was set. “After years of work, a group of scientists managed to tap into the noosphere – the information field of the Earth,” it says. The fictional, pseudoscientific Noosphere is a concept that there is some kind of psychic field that contains the higher thoughts – the ability to reason – of people and beings on Earth. Reckless Experiments on the Noosphere caused the disaster that created the Second Exclusion Zone in Chornobyl, where the first games took place.
This is the first new trailer we’ve seen in a while, and it looks pretty far when it comes to showing bits of the story. We know quite a bit about Stalker 2—you can find everything we know about Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl here. (opens in new tab)
Anyway, the biggest news about Stalker 2 so far this year has been the delay of a 2023 release. Developer GSC Game World is based in Ukraine, a country currently under attack from Russia. It has since moved some operations to Prague, in the Czech Republic, the studio says no further delays are expected (opens in new tab).
Inevitably, however, the war will take a personal toll on GSC’s developers. Last week, former GSC developer Volodymyr Yezhov, who worked on Stalker: Clear Sky at GSC, died in combat, as acknowledged by the Stalker Twitter account (opens in new tab). He was buried on December 27, the newspaper reports sky news (opens in new tab).
You can find Stalker 2 on the official website (opens in new tab),