I love the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games! Especially the third one. It’s a game I always come back to over the years.

Reading through the original inspiration for the games was a real pleasure.

Over the many years since the game’s were abandoned, fans took up the mantle and continued developing the games, creating a new version of the engine, putting all of the series’s maps together and making everything moddable.

The GAMMA mod pack for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. which I’ve played recently is fantastic and the best realization of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fantasy that the original games promised but couldn’t ever truly deliver on.

Thoughts after reading the whole thing:

• Fantastic!

• The book, the movie and the video game series are all doing different things but the book is where it all began — Capturing the imagination of many people and eventually leading to the movie and the games.

• It’s short but manages to present a large span of time from a few different perspectives: mainly Red’s, who’s compelled to keep returning to the Zone over and over again despite the gigantic risk involved.

I loved it, I’m very glad it caught me by surprise at the book store. I just turned around and it was right there in front of me. Like an artifact from the Zone, maybe it had a mind of its own.