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S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl is a Wide-Open Sandbox First-Person Shooter by Ukrainian video game studio GSC Game World. It is loosely based on the Russian novel Roadside Picnic, as well as the visually stunning Soviet Russian film Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky, which was based on the novel. The game is somewhat of a combination of the two, taking the novel's general premise and combining it with the atmosphere of the movie to create a truly haunting game experience.

The game takes place in the Zone of Exclusion (known simply as the Zone) around the infamous Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a bleak and terrifying "Man-Made Hell" following the nuclear accident that originally created the Zone in 1986, as well as a mysterious second explosion in 2006 which resulted in the creation of bizarre, seemingly impossible space-time anomalies and homicidal mutants. The Zone is full of dangers, from lethal pockets of radiation, to packs of dangerous mutants, and a wide assortment of violent, body-crushing anomalies. Nonetheless, fortune-hunting trespassers known as "Stalkers" make a living exploring the Zone and seeking out the miraculous "artifacts" created by the Zone's anomalies.

Tales among the Stalkers tell of a legendary artifact known as the "Wish Granter", located at the very center of the Zone inside the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself. The legend goes that the Wish Granter will grant a Stalker's heart's desire. However, no Stalker has managed to reach the center of the Zone, as the path is blocked by a powerful barrier known as the Brain Scorcher which melts the minds of any humans who attempt to penetrate into the Center.

In S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, players take the role of the Marked One, a mysterious amnesiac Stalker who awakens in the Zone with nothing except a strange "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." tattoo on his arm, and the knowledge that he has a mission... to kill someone or something known as "Strelok" (Marksman). The Marked One's search for Strelok, and his interaction with the various inhabitants of the Zone and conflicting Stalker factions, will eventually lead him on a path to the Center of the Zone, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and the legendary Wish Granter itself.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is a prequel to Shadow of Chernobyl, with the player taking the role of a veteran Stalker mercenary named Scar who is recruited by a secret faction known as Clear Sky to investigate the cause of mysterious emissions from the Center of the Zone that pose a threat to all of the Zone's Stalker inhabitants. Besides an assortment of graphics and gameplay tweaks and improvements, Clear Sky features a new Faction Wars system, where the various competing factions in the Zone struggle for power and control via assaulting and defending various capture points (sort of like a single-player version of the Battlefield series, with an RPG game world thrown in on top for good measure). Players can join a faction and help them fight their way to victory, or ignore the Faction Wars completely and progress through the game's main quest.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, the third game in the series, is a sequel to the original game. Unsurprisingly, the Russian-language version (which came out several months before the EU and US versions) was almost immediately translated by modders. It takes place a few days after Shadow of Chernobyl with the player taking the role of SBU (Служба Безпеки України/Security Service of Ukraine) Major Degtyarev who is charged with investigating the attempted military takeover of the Zone Gone Horribly Wrong. Call of Pripyat is notable for taking place in a completely different part of the Zone from the other games in the series - Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky take place fairly close to the Zone's southern edge, while Call of Pripyat takes place deep within the Zone's northern half.

All three S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are highly renowned for their incredibly atmospheric setting and realistic gameplay, but be warned; they're not for the faint of heart - all three games are brutally Nintendo Hard, and are also known for being extremely creepy at times. Other than that, the games are also known for being hilariously buggy, almost to memetic levels.

The first proper sequel, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl, was announced at GamesCom 2010. However, in December 2011, it was announced that GSC had been forced into closure, though the team promised that the development would continue. The game was indefinitely put on hold in January 2012. In its stead, a majority of the development team broke off to create a Spiritual Successor, called Survivarium, but the rights to the franchise remain with GSC. Another outfit, West Games, which also claims to employ some of the original team, announced their own follow-up called STALKER Apocalypse, but questions surrounding its legitimacy quickly came up, including some calling it an obvious scam. GSC, meanwhile, has reopened. Not much is known about the game, other than that the X-Ray engine used by previous installments in the series has been replaced with Unreal Engine 4, since most of the devs who had experience working with X-Ray had moved either to Vostok Games or 4A Games after the collapse of GSC. After a long period of silence, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 was finally announced as a temporary Xbox Series X|S exclusive in July 2020. Work on Heart of Chornobyl met a major hitch due to the mass scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in early 2022, and was temporarily put on hold. In June 2022, GSC announced that they would resume development on the project by means of relocating their main development studio to Prague, Czechia. Currently, the game is set to be released in September 2024.

Similar to Half-Life, a Fan Remake of Shadow of Chernobyl titled Lost Alpha has been released. Like Black Mesa, Lost Alpha is big enough in scope that it's a standalone game all on its own. It is available for free on ModDB here. See also Call of Chernobyl, a mod for Call of Pripyat that merges all of the games together into one large non-linear sandbox. It can be found here. Call of Chernobyl itself has gotten a re-release under the label ANOMALY. It is a complete, stand-alone version, unlike CoC which requires an install of Call of Pripyat to play, and it runs on an updated X-Ray Engine that has been brought into 64-bit for increased performance and stability. It can be found here, and it has quite a collection of mods itself. Due to licensing issues with the games, the original source code is freeware, so ANOMALY can be downloaded for free regardless of if you own any of the STALKER titles. As such, it can be a good, risk-free way of trying out the games, but bear in mind the plot is non-canon, and it is recommended you at least play Shadow of Chernobyl to understand the story.

The three original games were ported to Xbox Series consoles in March 2024, under the collection, "Legends of the Zone".

Not to be confused with the Maggie Q show of the same name.


The Examples Are In The Basement:

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  • Abnormal Ammo: The Gauss Gun uses Flash artifact fragments in its batteries to provide the vast amount of power to fire it.
  • Abandoned Hospital: One in Clear Sky and one in Call of Pripyat.
  • Abandoned Laboratory: A good number of them, in all games.
  • Abandoned Warehouse: More often than not serving as bases for various factions.
  • After the End: Played with as a localized version. The post-apocalyptic nature of the game world is restricted to the Zone itself, with life on the outside world proceeding better than normal: It's implied that artifacts taken from the zone, while rare, are being used to advance science and medicine - and attempts to militarize them (such as gauss gun usage) are roadblocked constantly due to ammunition rarity and expense. However, inside the Zone, the trope is played to the hilt.
  • A.K.A.-47: The game features several dozen real-world firearms, all of whom have had their names changed for copyright reasons. The game files still use the real names.
    • The punctuated title S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was chosen because there was already a video game called "Stalker".
    • Amusingly, the "correct" names in the files have typos, making it hell for the more grammar-sensitive modders. Notably the Winchester is w_wincheaster.ltx. Even worse—it's not even a Winchester, it's a Mossberg Maverick.
    • Likewise, some of the upgrades turn guns into a whole other gun, but it's ignored for the sake of gameplay. The AK-74 converted for 5.56mm is technically an AK-101 as the original AK-74 was only made for 5.45mm ammo.
  • Alcohol Hic: In the bar, you'll occasionally hear loud hiccups from the patrons among the drunken mumbling.
  • The All-Seeing A.I.: Enemies can see you and shoot you perfectly fine through bushes, while you can't see them when they're behind a bush.
  • All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Played straight both in Shadow of Chernobyl, with the mercenaries attacking the rookie village in Cordon and Monolith's constant attacks on the Barrier, and in Clear Sky where the implementation of the Faction Wars system makes it all but inevitable. The story also ties this in: for example, Bandits have had to switch locations several times and the Military abandons several bases when Shadow of Chernobyl comes around.
  • Alternate History: The secret C-Consciousness project, a Soviet attempt to try and manipulate mankind's consciousness to eliminate suffering and wars (given that it was a Soviet project, there was probably some "Take over the world for communism"-type motivation in there as well, at least at first), moved to Chernobyl to operate in secret after the disaster. In 2006, the experiment went off the rails, caused the first blowout, and eventually changed the area into a bizarre post-apocalyptic Dark World. Aside from some technological changes (gauss rifles and exoskeletons, albeit extremely unwieldy prototypes manufactured illegally), life goes on in the outside world.
    • Southern Hospitality, the first English Stalker novel, states a nuclear bomb was detonated in Afghanistan and spread the Zone to Kabul.
    • Clear Sky heavily implies the Soviets had managed to figure out a method of short-range mind control before the disaster, with Forester, a native of the area, talking about the town of Limansk-13, and how the people there always seemed to be either muttering to themselves or praising the Soviet government, even during food shortages, and were suspicious of outsiders, who got nasty headaches if they stayed there for too long. For some reason, it wasn't evacuated when the disaster happened.
  • Always Chaotic Evil:
    • Subverted (eventually) with the Bandits and Mercenaries, who seem this way unless you join the Bandit faction (Clear Sky only), at which point they become neutral to you and you find out that, like everyone else, they're just ordinary folks trying to make a living (although the way they choose to go about it is pretty socially unacceptable). In fact, in Call of Pripyat, both the Bandits and Mercenaries are neutral to you by default, and won't attack you unless there's a reason to do so (although what they consider a valid reason might not be what you would consider a valid reason).
    • Played straight with the Monolith faction, however. Monolith members are under psychic influence that strips them of their free will. In Call of Pripyat, the player character meets former Monolith stalkers, suffering from retrograde amnesia, who most probably 'awoke' after Strelok destroyed the C-Consciousness lab. They are pretty decent guys.
    • The leader of the Mercenaries in Shadow of Chernobyl, Wolfhound, is rather evil, however, indulging in activities like randomly murdering stalkers for fun. Even after Strelok eliminates him, the mercs camped at the construction site will remain hostile and will snipe any loners that come around.
    • Eventually subverted with the Military in Call of Pripyat - no longer corrupt grunts torturing and murdering stalkers for sport, they are now allies (what with Degtyarev being a Major and all), and while not actively friendly to Loners, they will, at least, leave them alone.
    • Call of Pripyat: Zaton's bandits have been formed into an organized crime group by Sultan, and will attack Stalkers/Loners (and you) without warning sometimes, maybe even perhaps only a dozen meters from the Skadovsk. They like to camp out near the big anomaly fields. You do the math. Jupiter's bandits are more the standard variant, though they gradually start to disappear from Jupiter if their leader there is killed.
    • Again subverted in Call of Pripyat. You run into a mercenary group camping out at a work station. They act (understandably) cautious if you approach, but you can work out a peaceful deal with them, allowing you into their camp if you give them some food. They can even be later recruited to guard an Ecologist outpost.
  • Amplifier Artifact / Upgrade Artifact:
    • Both played straight and subverted. Various artifacts provide a boost to your resistance to the various hazards of the Zone, whether it be electricity, fire, acid, or what have you. The drawback here is that most of these same artifacts are filled with radiation and can kill you if you don't have countermeasures, so it can be a double-edged sword if you're out trekking in the more dangerous areas of the Zone. On the other hand, there are artifacts that help protect you from radiation so that you won't be in danger of radiation poisoning from either the environment of the Zone or those other artifacts that you're carrying.
    • In Shadow of Chernobyl, the trade-offs are even more complicated, such as radiation dispersers reducing your Sprint Meter or making you more prone to bleeding if you get shot or slashed at, and regenerative ones wreaking havoc with your damage resistances. The rare ones with no drawbacks are pretty damn rare, generally don't do a good enough job to bother with even when equipped in bulk, and even if you don't mind those factors that much, they're still rather heavy at half a kilogram each.
  • Anachronic Order: In terms of plot, the order of the games is Clear Sky (2008), Shadow of Chernobyl (2007), and Call of Pripyat (2010).
  • Ancient Tradition: Clear Sky, a secret faction dedicated to studying and understanding the Zone. Conversely, the Monolith, a faction dedicated to protecting the center from everything and everyone that's not a Monolith member or zombie.
  • Anti-Frustration Features: In Call of Pripyat once you accept a randomly generated mission from Beard to bring him a specific type of artefact, one is guaranteed to appear in one of the anomalies on the map after the next blowout.
  • Anti-Hoarding: You have a weight limit that's not particularly generous, and everything you can carry has an assigned weight, even ammunition. Going one gram over the limit makes your Sprint Meter deplete insanely fast, and if you're 10kg or more over the limit, you can't move at all. The exosuit and a few weight-related artifacts can add to your max carry weight, though.
  • Anyone Can Die: And how! There are literally hundreds of friendly and hostile NPCs in the game world. Precisely two of them are unkillable. As for the rest, every single one can be killed off at any point in the game, including story-important and mission-important characters. It's not at all uncommon to be given an assignment to meet with a certain character to obtain information, only to find a pack of wild dogs picking over his corpse and being forced to scavenge the info from his PDA.
    • A few missions that threaten your relationship with different factions can be completed just by waiting for the environment to kill off the person you've been asked to assassinate
    • Some people can actually die twice. In Shadow of Chernobyl, the Loner Petruha is the guy who gives you the information on where Nimble is being held. Due to bandits constantly spawning nearby, it's highly likely that he'll get killed by the end of the game. He reappears in Call of Pripyat, having pooled his resources with a rookie stalker to get a protective suit. He then walks into a Boiler anomaly. He's rendered heavily wounded and can be saved or left to die, but even if you do save him (and you might not, he's easy to miss if you don't know what's going to happen) he and his rookie buddy are likely to end up killed because their equipment is so low-quality.
  • Apocalypse How: The Zone is a regional catastrophe and the Emissions wipe out anything awake/conscious or not in cover in their area. To make things worse in Call Of Pripyat, they happen once a day. Even worse, the Scientists and quite a few Loners are concerned the Zone will spread and spread until it swallows the Earth.
  • Arbitrary Gun Power: Game mechanics encourages you to use different weapons on different targets, by means of giving assault rifles extremely poor damage and armor-piercing ammo (so they work best against humans that have low HP pool but may be heavily armored), while shotguns, pistols and submachine guns have much higher damage and optional rounds that further increase it (and therefore good against mutants and animals). As result, even high-tier assault rifles are frustratingly ineffective against mutants. In addition, the base Shadow of Chernobyl game had a Morrowind-style random-miss chance.
    • Due to said mechanics, the unique Cutter .45 cal submachine gun from Call of Pripyat has actually better all-around effectiveness than any assault rifle, due to good accuracy, high rate of fire and very high damage.
    • 9x39mm, a relatively low-powered subsonic round in Real Life, hits like a train and penetrates the heaviest armor.
  • Arc Words: Find Strelok. Kill Strelok.
  • Armor Is Useless: Averted in that even the armors that provide little protection against bullets and blades usually make up for it by providing protection from hazardous environments. However, even with the best armor in the game you still won't survive more than four or five well-placed shots . Fortunately, neither will any of the NPC's. See Rocket-Tag Gameplay below.
  • Armor-Piercing Attack: The game has a very detailed ballistics system in which different ammo has different characteristics in regards to both damage and armor penetration, and each caliber has a few variations such as +P or armor-piercing for even more variety. A special forces Vintar BC sniper rifle loaded with SP-6 rounds can take down even a mighty Exosuit Stalker (who can normally soak 2-3 mags of assault rifle fire) with just 4 torso shots. Also, NATO weapons actually deal less raw damage than Warsaw Pact weapons, but are listed as having higher damage in the weapons stats because their 5.56mm ammo has significantly better armor penetration and thus are noticeably more effective against human enemies.
  • Arms Dealer: In Call of Pripyat, Nimble becomes this. In the previous games, he was a fresh blood who hardly was of use to the player (especially in the first game, where he could possibly die). Apparently, by the time CoP takes place, his incredible luck guided him towards near the center of the Zone and he took the profession as the go-to guy for rare equipment.
    • In the same game, a treacherous officer from the Duty faction arranges a deal with Sultan's bandits to give them an unspecified number of guns in exchange for artifacts in order for the latter faction to resolve their personal vendetta with the Loners. Which side you choose will affect the outcome of this deal and will also contribute to the game's Multiple Endings.
  • Artificial Brilliance: The game has a very well developed Artificial Life system, with an ecosystem that includes both packs of migrating, territorial monsters and wandering NPCs who travel from map to map scavenging, fighting with each other and the monsters, and resting at rest-stops and friendly camps in between journeys. All occurring independently while the player is off doing their thing. Tactically, the combat A.I. is pretty damn good too, being able to flank, use cover, circle around the player through buildings and behind obstacles, and even silently follow you from behind to shoot you in the head when they got close enough.
    • The camps themselves are pretty good looking too. Some NPCs patrol the border, while most sit around a campfire, drinking coke, eating sausages, or playing the occasional guitar tune. Some go to sleep when night appears, making the transition between day and night all the more realistic.
    • invoked Word of God states the A.I. actually had to be toned down because in early builds, it would regularly and consistently outsmart the player, to the point that the game became outright frustrating - and eventually completely unplayable. The original pre-release A.I. apparently would have been more than capable of beating the game entirely without player intervention if it hadn't been dialed back. Digging around in the game's files reveals that much of their behavior is strictly limited to keep the game playable - in Shadow of Chernobyl, for example, they are unable to heal each other, loot bodies, throw grenades, or intelligently avoid environmental hazards, not because the programming isn't there, but because the devs were worried that if the Artificial Brilliance got too brilliant it would stop being fun. These abilities, and others, were gradually reactivated in later games. If you play a mod or a later game where they can throw grenades it becomes obvious why that was removed, as they're pinpoint accurate with them and even in the best situations they can kill you in one shot.
  • Artificial Stupidity: As mentioned, the A.I. does not recognize environmental hazards, and as a result traveling NPCs will often walk right through Anomalies, leading to their death by crushing/eruption/electrocution/etc.
    • Fixed in Call of Pripyat, at least with NPCs who are part of your squad. They will deliberately and exactly follow the player's path through anomaly-filled areas in order to stay safe.
    • In Call of Pripyat, some NPCs will continue to enjoy a relaxing, slow-paced stroll, during an emission. Or inexplicably decide that the current safe building about five meters away isn't safe enough after just starting a patrol to have it interrupted by a storm, and run off in a random direction instead.
    • As discussed below, one of the biggest A.I. bugs in the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was the AI's tendency to end up mysteriously dead around fireplaces. Community research discovered that the AI kept spawning inside the fireplaces and burning to death; it wasn't uncommon to find entire camps bereft of life. Although later sequels avoided this issue, it was never fixed in the original and modders were forced to compensate by rendering the AI immune to fire damage, or force spawnpoints to keep them away from the firepits.
    • In Call of Pripyat, it's nearly impossible to get the best result for one mission due to the friendly NPCs throwing grenades while inside a building, completely ignoring the walls and the ceiling. Despite being outnumbered two to one, they'll likely kill themselves long before the enemies would have. There are some serious consequences if they get killed so your best bet is to save scum your way through.
    • The A.I. in general has real trouble dealing with large numbers of weak mutants. Even a mighty Master Stalker in exosuit armor can often fall to more than 3 or 4 dogs at once.
  • Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: Radiation is treated as evil mud that will kill you if you forget to wash it off, either with magical anti-radiation pills or drinking enough vodka. Obviously, gameplay-wise, this beats dying a slow, hideous death for going the wrong way.
  • Art Shift: The characters in the ending cutscene of Call of Pripyat are played by actual humans (the same people who their in-game faces are modeled on) instead of computer-drawn characters like in Shadow of Chernobyl. This is most glaring when comparing all the new characters to Strelok, who (being based on his Shadow of Chernobyl appearance) is computer-drawn instead of played by a live person.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Most of the artillery a player encounters is necessarily left right where it's found: The Chernobyl periphery is a big place, and though it's possible to take on an extra ten kilograms of equipment, it will diminish your capacity to travel at any rate faster than a hobble, and that way lies madness. The best armor in the game supports its own weight and lets you carry an extra five kilograms above even that, but it also prevents you from sprinting, so one may be left wondering why he bothered in the first place.
    • In Shadow of Chernobyl, there comes a time in the story where the player's quest becomes a linear and steady approach towards its conclusion, with a minimum of backtracking and plenty of formidable enemies in the way. It's not difficult to anticipate this section of the game, even on a first-time playthrough, so before embarking, a player may calculate that sprinting will be a negligible asset. If you make that decision, you're destined to be a tank: The Exoskeleton will give you another twenty kilos to fill with explosives, and since you won't be running anyway, it's literally no problem to overload yourself with an additional ten kilos of sniper equipment. It's a good way to keep the admittedly weak endgame feeling fresh with a little bit of destructive variety.
    • The rocket launcher comes with a severe deficiency of ammo and a weight that could singlehandedly push you from comfortable to immobile. It is, however, extremely useful for taking out the squad of mercenaries that attacks the rookie village - a single well-placed rocket will kill all six of them, which is good because that one rocket is pretty much all you're guaranteed.
    • In Clear Sky, you can upgrade the exoskeleton to make yourself nearly bulletproof, and the extra weight capacity makes it practical to use a light machine gun, turning you into a walking tank. This is a tremendous investment though, and requires you to play nice with Duty.
    • In Call of Pripyat, one of the final upgrade tiers for the exoskeleton removes the inability to sprint, making it essentially the best armor of the game. In the same game, it's possible to buy large quantities of grenades and rockets after completing the right sidequestsnote , which makes them a lot more useful.
    • First-generation night vision sounds useful, but all it really does is apply a green filter over everything - in some cases making it harder to see in the dark. Second-generation night vision averts this by applying a lot more contrast to the picture.
    • There is no reason anyone should need to use a Desert Eagle in the Zone, given how impractical it is compared to the other .45 pistols. This doesn't stop anyone. (At least the Big Ben has the excuse of shooting much, much bigger bullets.)
    • The RG-6 Grenade Launcher. It's a weapon powerful enough to take on most any enemy in the Zone, as it can shoot six grenades in quick succession. But there are several drawbacks: 1) very slow reloading, 2) the grenades have a rather steep arc, which forces you to aim carefully, 3) the splash damage can induce collateral damage, 4) rare and expensive ammunition, and 5) the weapon itself is extremely rare and expensive to maintain. You're probably better off using your under-barrel grenade launcher instead, if you can find it. Or better yet, the OTs-14 Groza's or FN F2000's integrated under-barrel grenade launchers. Or...
      • Underbarrel grenade launchers shows, that grenades actually aren't so powerful without the ability to fire away few at once, and very short range makes UBGLs nearly useless in many situations.
    • Most of the higher-level NATO weapons are highly accurate, fast-firing, and hit like a bus. However, they're also damned heavy, fragile, and incredibly expensive unless you know where to look.
    • Most of the available sniper rifles. They're extremely powerful, but with the exception of the Vintar BC, most of them are too heavy to be practical, difficult to use at close range, and you can't sprint with them out. The ammo is expensive and hard to find in the first two games, and it's rare that you have a clear shot at a distance that an assault rifle with a scope couldn't do just as well.
  • Back Stab: The knife's secondary attack insta-kills unaware or wounded enemies. In Shadow of Chernobyl, it insta-kills everything else, too - up to and including tanks. Even better, during Duty's attack on Freedom, you can start the battle early by knifing through a solid stone wall that you're supposed to use explosives for.
  • Badass Bookworm: Nearly all of Clear Sky and the Ecologists count. The "badass" part comes from living in the Zone, the "bookworm" as the former was founded by former Soviet/Russian scientists who worked in the secret Zone labs and left after the C-Consciousness failed attempt to modify the noosphere and their allied stalkers; the latter are scientists working for the Ukrainian government on a shoestring budget (albeit bringing them the Fruit of the Oasis in Call of Pripyat will give them enough leverage to petition the government for a massive grant).
  • Badass Longcoat: The Trenchcoat in Call of Pripyat. Of course, this tends to make the game even more difficult: it's even lampshaded in the item's description that it's useless in the Zone but many Bandits wear them anyway, just because they're cool.
    • Call of Pripyat allows you to upgrade the longcoat with chainmail lining. However, it is a Tier 3 upgrade, and you need a SEVA hazard suit just to provide traders with Tier 3 instruments.
  • Badass Normal: Every single person in the entire Zone to some extent. The ones who aren't generally don't last long - or are well-burrowed traders.
  • The Bartender: Several of them. In a shining display of creativity, the bartender at the 100 Rads Bar (the bar in Rostok, the main Stalker settlement in the Zone) is called 'Barkeep'.
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: In Shadow of Chernobyl, the player can reach the Wish Granter and make a wish. None of the "wishes" end well.
    • "I want the Zone to disappear." The PC goes blind.
    • "Mankind is corrupt, it must be controllednote ." Images of war and death flash by, and the PC is left standing in a lifeless void.
    • "I want to be rich." It begins to literally rain gold coins, which bring down the roof under their weight and the PC is crushed to death.
    • "I want to rule the world." The PC is absorbed into the C-Consciousness.
    • "I want to be immortal." The PC is turned into a still-living but immobile metal statue.
  • Bedouin Rescue Service: The first two games both begin with the player character left for dead out in the wilderness and then being rescued by passing stalkers. It can happen on very rare occasions in-game as well: if you're being chased by a pack of dogs and are low on ammo and bleeding to death, running into a couple of wandering Loners can be a godsend.
  • Big Labyrinthine Building: The Chernobyl NPP, and to a lesser extent, the X-labs. Bonus points to the NPP for featuring a labirynthine outside in form of several cut-off areas linked by portals.
  • Bilingual Bonus: In Shadow of Chernobyl, all of the game's non-story dialogue (including combat dialogue) is in Russian. Clear Sky has much of the relevant dialogue in English (enemies shouting out combat commands, stating that they're about to toss a grenade and so forth), but there's still a large amount of ambient Russian dialogue.
    • This evolves to multilingual bonus with a non-English version of the game. In the same city, one can hear Russian-speaking stalkers passing by, some others talking to you in English, while important Non Player Characters just have French dialogs. There is even some 'blatnoy jazyk' (Russian criminal cant) while listening to some bandits.
    • The name "Strelok" is both Russian and Ukrainian for "Gunslinger]]/Shooter". Although trope-wise this is ironically subverted with the former since there are no instances of The Gunslinger come into play in the games.
    • One of the NPC stock surnames is "Ironstone", which, when translated verbatim to German, means "Eisenstein", a reference to seminal Russian director Sergey M. Eisenstein.
  • Bizarrchitecture: A natural and unfortunate side effect of man-made structures existing in an area that has become a reality-warping, mind-bending Eldritch Location. You encounter an endlessly looping room at one point, and that's not even particularly out of the ordinary by Zone standards.
  • Black Comedy: In-universe example. Stalkers who are not busy exploring the Zone often tell a lot of macabre jokes to each other based on their expeditions. Ties in with Kafka Komedy as well since some of the jokes they tell to other stalkers involves misfortune in the Zone.
  • Black Market: The Zone has a few traders specializing in the sale and transportation of artifacts and illicit goods to generate profit. The Ukrainian Military frowns upon these activities, yet ironically, a few of their superiors have been known to be involved in the trade thanks to their willingness to accept bribes from other people, and, in accordance to one particular superior in Clear Sky, also because of the crappy payroll the Military makes in the Zone thanks to the country's shifty, uncaring government. You know all those weapons and hardware that normally can't be found and/or aren't native to the countries of Ukraine and Belarus? It's all thanks to these people; the economy in the Zone is thriving like a successful, if shaky, small city.
  • "Blind Idiot" Translation: The original game had some serious translation errors in mission descriptions; the most serious was all instances of "Attic" were translated as "Basement," leading to players scouring for non-existent basement entrances to stashes that were actually above them, and translating "shotgun" as "rifle" in quests. "Find the family rifle" was made particularly perplexing by the latter. Many bugfix-centered modpacks correct these to their true meanings.
  • Body Horror: A number of creatures within the Zone are twisted mockeries of what once were humans.
  • Boom, Headshot!: Unless a human is clad in an Exoskeleton or facing any mutant above Bloodsucker level, headshots are almost always lethal for most enemies, if they aren't moving fast enough. Also, the lethality of headshots depends upon the weapon you're using. This is also half-subverted in facing human enemies, in that shooting in the center of their mass can stun them for a couple of seconds, which gives you the opportunity to follow up for the obligatory headshot (AKA the Mozambique Drill tactic).
    • And again subverted with the rather realistically detailed ballistics system; bullets do not always travel in a straight trajectory like you'd expect in typical FPS games. If you really want to turn your weapon into an accurate headshot machine, you'll have to pay the resident mechanics in their respective maps for upgrades, and, depending on the weapon, it can cost you an arm and a leg for a full service. To make things more complicated, the upgrades are separated into tiers, and once a particular upgrade is chosen, the other gets locked out forever. This turns painful once you realize that a few certain weapons you might stumble upon can only be obtained once, and thus, you must choose your upgrades wisely. Only in Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, though; Shadow of Chernobyl has no such system to tinker with your weapons or armor outside of mods.
  • Boom Town: Even hardened artifact hunters need a safe place to sleep, eat, drink, trade, and the like, and as a result several well-fortified, well-defended permanent settlements spring up from the ruins over the course of the series to cater to the artifact-hunting trade, in a sort of inversion of Dying Town - rather than a thriving town becoming a ghost town, the ghost towns are resettled.
  • Booze-Based Buff: Vodka can cure radiation poisoning.
    • This was actually a popular folk medicine for preventing radiation poisoning in the Soviet bloc. And, yes there was a lot of drinking at Chernobyl.
    • It's vaguely plausible that it could work - Alcohol makes you pass urine more, which means at least some of the radioactive particles in your system will be flushed out faster than they would have otherwise. This wouldn't help against any radiation exposure you've already received though.
    • This is ironically subverted in Call of Pripyat, as although you still can rid yourself from any radiation you receive, for some reason drinking vodka can cause you to starve slowly. Down six bottles and you'll literally drown yourself of your life by alcohol poisoning.
      • Double subverted if you have a couple tins of food. Every few bottles, munch on a loaf of bread or a tin of beef and you can keep going indefinitely.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • One of the main tools for detecting anomalies is a simple bolt, which can be tossed into suspicious-looking areas to trigger any anomalies present.
    • This is also a major Shout-Out/Mythology Gag toward the original book and Tarkovsky's movie adaptation, where screws and bolts served the same "test-probe" function.
    • In the first two games, loadout is limited to a single "long arm" and a single pistol. So naturally in the former slot assault rifles are dominant, with their large magazines, high rate of fire and fair-to-good performance over all ranges. Call of Pripyat lifts the restriction to allow two slots for any weapon to be taken, but assault rifle/pistol or assault rifle/shotgun are still the most common choices. A fully-upgraded AK-74 and a pump shotgun can be picked up within the first hour of play and can see you through to the very end of the game.
    • Don't forget most of the early-mid game weapons, like the MP5, AK-74, AN-94, Walther P99, Browning HiPower, Colt 1911, and TOZ-34. None of them are flashy in any way, but all use common ammo types and perform well enough to get the job done. The second pistol you can find is a Makarov with a permanently attached Hollywood Silencer and (while seriously underpowered) is good for starting ambushes until you can find a silencer and a higher-powered weapon to attach it to.
    • Just about all the Warsaw Pact weapons, like the Makarov or AKS-74U. The vast majority of the firepower you come across will be Russian-made (as is only logical since you're near Chernobyl) and while they aren't very accurate, they also are very sturdy and cheap, and their late-game cousins like the Storm or the AS VAL hit like freight trains. They're also common, so if yours starts breaking down and jamming (as long as that takes to set in) you can pick up others easily.
    • In Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, the Jellyfish artifact. It's common, not very noteworthy and doesn't sell by much, but other than its weight it has no downsides to carry and equip, helps you save money on anti-radiation items, and can allow you to visit more places where radiation would be a concern.
  • Brain in a Jar: During the quest to disable the psi emitter in Lab X-16, you might be a little too busy fighting zombies to look at the device you're trying to disable - a giant computer-controlled brain.
  • Breakable Weapons: All guns degrade with use, becoming more prone to jamming and less accurate. Same goes with armor: it protects less and less the worse its condition gets. With very few exceptions, Warsaw Pact weapons lasts a good while longer before becoming reliably unreliable than NATO gear.
    • Annoyingly, in vanilla Shadow of Chernobyl, nobody knows how to repair anythingnote , so you have to throw your rifle away and get a new one after using it for firing a few dozen magazines.
    • In Call of Pripyat, this becomes a plot point for two sidequests: two mechanics (one in the Skadovsk and the other in the train station, respectively) ask you to fetch them three toolkits in order to provide the full service for upgrading both your armor and weaponry. The catch is that the toolkits tend to be in rather dangerous and sometimes anomaly-ridden areas, so you better have above adequate equipment to retrieve these kits. Not only that, but the most advanced toolkits won't be available until you venture your way into Pripyat via the underground tunnel.
  • By the Lights of Their Eyes: All mutants have glowing eyes, but it's most noticeable on bloodsuckers - because their eyes are the only thing you can see when they cloak.
  • Calling Your Attacks: Human combatants have a tendency of shouting "Catch this!" when throwing a grenade and loudly telling their friends to go attack the left or right flank. Appropriately, the more professional characters know to keep their mouths shut in combat (i.e. the military).
  • Charles Atlas Superpower: Story-wise, Scar is supposed to have enhanced physical abilities (i.e. endurance and strength) due to "being touched by the Zone". In-game this manifests as...slightly more health and stamina than the average NPC.
  • Chromosome Casting: There are female stalkers in the Zone. You just never see them, due to time constraints and developer laziness. PDAs often refer to girlfriends in the Zone.
  • Church Militant/Cargo Cult : The Monolith faction, who worship the Wish Granter and by extension the Zone itself, and are viewed as dangerous psychotic fanatics by everyone else. Call of Pripyat expands on this, introducing elite members called Preachers, who wield gauss rifles and give sermons before and during battles. It helps they're all Brainwashed and Crazy.
  • Civil War: If all the mutants and anomalies weren't enough to make your life a living hell, the Zone is trapped in a perpetual multi-sided conflict between opposing paramilitaries and other armed groups with their own territories, the presence of government troops and foreign mercenaries only worsening the situation from time to time.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The factions typically use various colors in their outfits to distinguish themselves from other stalkers. These can probably fit into Color-Coded Armies of the Type I variety.
    • Loners typically use olive green in their regular outfits, and dark gray in their Exosuits. They use a darker, more faded shade of green in their SEVA suits, while their novice rookie suits use light brown and (in Shadow of Chernobyl) silver-y white colors.
    • Bandits use black, brown, and (in their novice suits) white and/or gray.
    • Duty primarily uses black and red.
    • Freedom sports colors similar to Loners, except their greens are more vivid and they use orange and yellow in their more advanced suits.
    • The Monolith are clad in grey, yellow, and tan.
    • Mercenaries like to shade themselves in blue.
    • The Military uses green, grey, and olive camouflage.
    • Clear Sky typically uses light blue and brown.
    • And the Ecologists use orange and green in their suits. If they're not wearing their special environmental suits, then they're clad in teal scrubs.
  • Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: I said come in! Don't just stand there!
    • In Clear Sky if you're tasked to cover a group of friendly stalkers or take out a sniper or machine gunner, your allies will continue to bark the same orders at you if you bide your time.
      "Less time wasting, more Strelok shooting!"
  • Continuity Cameo: The guy who saves Marked One at the start of Shadow of Chernobyl fits the description of Redrick from Roadside Picnic.
  • Contrived Coincidence: The C-Consciousness acknowledges this in the finale of Shadow Of Chernobyl. They wanted to kill Strelok as he had become dangerously close to discovering them, so they assigned a stalker to kill him. Ironically, they picked the guy himself, Strelok, for this task, without knowing it at the time, as he was rendered amnesiac prior to being brainwashed during the finale of Clear Sky.
  • Convenient Questing: Especially obvious in Clear Sky. Largely avoided in Shadow of Chernobyl.
  • Cool, but Inefficient: Leather trenchcoats severely lack the protection needed for life in the Zone. Bandits use them just because they're cool.
  • Crapsack World: You bet. At least within the Zone itself. Outside the Zone the world is just fine as best as can be told.
  • Crate Expectations: Smashing open wooden crates sometimes gets you supplies, but it's a very minor source of supplies and hardly necessary to your progress (most supplies are found in footlockers or hidden stashes). They can however be a godsend if you spot one during a firefight and crack it open to find a bunch of medical supplies inside.
    • Metal crates and suitcases typically found inside larger buildings and the underground usually contain better supplies.
    • Annoyingly, stashes only contain loot if you previously discovered their existence on a dead stalker's PDA. If you didn't discover the stash before opening it, it will just be empty.
      • On the other hand, most bodies do linger, so going back to areas you've been through already and interacting with the corpses can get random stashes refilled, allowing you to farm items in a way.
    • Done away with entirely in Call of Pripyat, where crates and metal supply boxes no longer drop any items when smashed. To compensate, you get a decent amount of ammo and medical supplies from other stalkers each day as tribute for completing certain major quests. In addition, stashes can now be discovered by the player on their own, and anyone with a good eye for hiding spots will likely find a few on their first or second playthroughs. Some however, are so well-concealed that it is unlikely the player will ever find them without consulting an online walkthrough.
      • Also, corpses carry a lot more equipment.
  • Creepy Monotone: Monolith members. Also Strider/Rogue, the ex-Monolith trooper in Call of Pripyat.
  • Critical Encumbrance Failure: In Shadow of Chernobyl, you can carry up to 50kg before being weighed down. If you pass that weight limit, then your endurance starts to drain very fast while sprinting, but you can still move around up to 59.9kg. The instant you hit 60kg or more however, you won't be able to move until you drop some weight. Can be really bad if you're in the middle of a firefight, or trying to run away from an unexpected enemy that showed up just as you were looting that last body. Hilariously, you can work around this weight limit, provided you have a lot of patience and cleared most of the area of enemies. Most dead humans can be lifted and moved around, and while you have a weight limit, you can put as much loot as you want into the dead body, then drag it slowly back towards a merchant or NPC with a decent amount of money. Then once you're within speaking distance of said merchant/NPC, grab all the loot from the dead body, and sell it all in one fell swoop (provided they have enough money).
  • Cthulhumanoid: Bloodsuckers.
  • Cutscene Incompetence: A particularly egregious example in the side quest involving the special artifact in a wrecked ship east of the main camp in Call of Pripyat: this one ends in a Non-Standard Game Over in a situation that you could otherwise hulk out from. Namely, the event where Tuna stuns you with the butt end of his rifle and his two stalker goons shoot you dead regardless of whatever armor you're wearing, especially made all the more glaring if you are donning an Exoskeleton. You get this if you refuse to hand Tuna that particular artifact twice, with the first refusal allowing you to initiate combat against him and his buddies after they ambush you unless you allow Tuna to come up to you or taking the third option the first time he asks you by lying to him that you don't know what that artifact is (which in this case, Tuna automatically walks up to you after his buddies ambush you). It would be justifiable if you were playing on the harder difficulties (Veteran and especially Master), but on Novice and even Stalker, it's less believable and rather jarring. This event did not sit well with some fans.
  • Cutting Off the Branches: As mentioned above, Call of Pripyat takes the good ending of Shadow of Chernobyl as canon.
  • Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The grenades seem to follow much steeper arcs than in most FPS games, making it very easy to blow yourself up by mistake.
  • Dark World: What the Zone of the games is, especially when compared to the Real Life Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Essentially, the Zone is one giant safari of artifacts, deadly anomalies, dangerous mutants, and several inhospitable humans for a would-be glory hunter.
  • Death by Gluttony: Bizarrely inverted with drinking vodka in Call of Pripyat, as vodka cause starvation which can eventually lead to death. If you consume about six bottles of vodka, you get a Non-Standard Game Over. Yet it's averted with eating food; you can freely eat up at any amount you want to refill your starvation meter.
    • One of the major quests in the game has you drinking several bottles of vodka with a former Duty stalker in order to convince him to join your squad for the trek to Pripyat. After you've finished conversing with him, you pass out on the effects of vodka after downing that many bottles, and later awake with you dangerously close to dying from starvation. Hopefully you better have some spare food in your rucksack, otherwise you're screwed.
  • Death or Glory Attack: In-universe, going into the Zone at all is this. An aspiring artifact hunter will either end up rich beyond his wildest dreams, or killed horrifically. Or worse.
  • Decapitated Army: The Bandits in the Jupiter area of Call of Pripyat will scatter and become almost non-existent if their leader (Jack) is killed.
    • This was also the fate of the Clear Sky faction. In chronological terms, during Clear Sky, they were on the brink of collapse until Scar came around. Then they became a legitimately powerful group that rivaled even the Monolith faction. For a while, it looked like they would secure their hold in the Zone until a blowout appeared out of nowhere and ultimately neutralized the Clear Sky faction just after they managed to incapacitate Strelok. Then, during Shadow of Chernobyl, the faction is all but wiped out, with only two (one in this game (Nimble), actually, since the other, Novikov, went in hiding until he resurfaced in Call of Pripyat) left, and given the concrete evidence of the increasingly powerful Monolith faction, it's highly possible that the majority of these soldiers comprised of former Clear Sky members now brainwashed and serving the will of the C-Consciousness, especially with Charon (widely speculated as Scar) at the helm. By the time Call of Pripyat starts, the Clear Sky faction is nothing but a footnote of history.
  • Demonic Spiders: Invoked. The PDA explicitly lists blind dogs (and by extension, pseudodogs) as deadly to even the most experienced Stalkers, as they are fast, small (compared to humans), slightly stealthy, and most importantly, hunt in packs. Then there's the Controllers, which will, because of the interface screw that comes with their psychic attack, likely kill you if they manage to score a single hit, the Burers, who generally start their assault by telekinetically throwing your gun halfway across the map before pummeling you to death with heavy objects and telekinetic blasts, the Bloodsuckers, who'll turn invisible as soon as they spot you and perform hit and run attacks while circling your position or just tear you to shreds immediately in melee combat. Let's just say everything and everyone in the Zone is this to some degree.
  • Demoted to Extra: Downplayed for Strelok, the protagonist of Shadow of Chernobyl (the first in the series), he returns in the prequel as the antagonist and the sequel as a supporting NPC.
  • Deus ex machina: The intro of Shadow of Chernobyl features a lightning strike which totals a Death Truck that was on its way to some undisclosed location, and later features a passing stalker contracted by Sidorovich to look for live bodies from the truck. Once the unnamed stalker does indeed stumble upon one (i.e. you, the player character), both he and Sidorovich are astonished to see a stalker still alive among the corpses of the destroyed Death Truck. Even more surprising is the fact that he is the only stalker to ever come out alive from the Death Truck with the marked tattoo on his arm. He is then given the moniker "Marked One", who later becomes prophetically influential to the game's and its sequel's storylines. To elaborate, the Marked One is actually a veteran stalker named Strelok. In his backstory, he actually managed to reach the CNPP with a miniature band of other stalkers before thanks to finding a map which reveals a secret pathway that would bypass the Brain Scorcher and lead them to not only Pripyat itself but the power plant. They only failed to get to the main area of the CNPP because of a door that was code-locked by the C-Consciousness to prevent any stalkers from revealing the true secret of the Zone. Strelok and his group were forced to retreat from the power plant because of this impasse, but not before the C-Consciousness unleashed an emission in an attempt to assassinate them. Strelok and his group were somehow able to survive it, but he managed to get wounded in the process. They then dragged themselves to a secret bunker known only to them and managed to create two decoders (one which would be given to Strelok) in an attempt to unlock the door they couldn't open. However, once they attempted to go back to the CNPP, they found themselves being chased by the Clear Sky faction and Strelok's group disintegrated in order to save themselves from the new threat. Strelok continued on to the CNPP until he was incapacitated by Scar, and one of his comrades, Fang, hid in an abandoned hotel in Pripyat and stored his goods, including one of the decoders, in a safe before he got gunned down by a Monolith sniper. Then the gigantic emission at the end of Clear Sky came and wiped out the Clear Sky faction. Strelok happened to be caught in the blast and he was knocked unconscious. The C-Consciousness, finding a host for their ulterior motives, attempted to program the now unconscious stalker caught in the emission to kill the very stalker that had been trying to dig too deep into the secrets of the Zone, unaware that the stalker that they've brainwashed is the same stalker that they're trying to assassinate. The decoder that Strelok had in his possession was then taken by C-Consciousness and destroyed off-screen. This concludes the events of Clear Sky. And thus, the events of Shadow of Chernobyl began to unfold.
  • Developer's Foresight: In Call of Pripyat, if you buy and receive a weapon from Nimble, the resident special Arms Dealer in the main Saharan Shipwreck, a shady stalker will stop you from going out and claims that the recently purchased weapon of yours belongs to him, believing it to have been stolen from him. If you try entering or exiting out the main entrance, this scripted event will occur. However, if you choose the alternate entrance by getting aboard a wrecked tugboat conveniently moored next to the ship with a wooden plank and/or not have the supposedly stolen weapon in your inventory, he'll be unaware of it and act as any normal NPC would.
  • Dirty Coward:
    • Professor Semenov, who throws a hissy fit when he's asked to go get samples and refuses to go until Marked One comes along to change his mind. When a blowout knocks Marked One out, he argues with Sakharov over leaving him.
    • Magpie, a rookie in Call of Pripyat, chickened out during a Chimera hunting expedition and ran off with the supplies of the team he was with. Gonta, one of the expedition's members, has sworn bloody vengeance over him, and finding the chickenshit is an actual quest line.
  • Disc-One Nuke: All three games have their own.
    • Shadow of Chernobyl:
      • There's a Merc Suit hidden in the attic of one of the houses of the Rookie Village. Getting there requires some roof-jumping, but as the best Tier One armor, it'll go a long way until you can fork over the cash for a Stalker suit or get lucky with stashes.
      • The OTs-14 5.45mm is often sold by Sidorovich in the early game (before you speak to Wolf and after you've rescued Nimble) for 20,000 RU. Needless to say, it's highly unlikely you'll get this amount in time. You'd need to gather all of the loot in the first map and maybe some of the second to amass the amount needed. However, it's a very useful gun in the early game, as it is a high tier assault rifle chambered for an ammo type common throughout the entire game. The only other way to get it is to loot it off a dead Duty stalker, Barin, and that has the problems that either A) you have to kill him yourself and make an enemy out of the faction that controls the Bar area, or B) you have to wait until he's killed by bandits or mutants, a Luck-Based Mission at best.
      • A lesser (but still unusually overpowered) nuke is Strelok's fast-shooting AK-74. You can pick it up in the tunnels underneath Agroprom, where you need to go for one of the first big missions anyway; it's placed so close to the objective that it seems like it was meant to be found by starting players. It fires 50% faster than the standard AK with substantially reduced recoil when fired on auto (which makes it seem unnaturally accurate), uses common 5.45mm ammunition, and is just as supremely reliable as a regular Kalash. When loaded up with armor-piercing rounds, it's useful throughout the endgame.
      • Picking up a couple of Flash or even Moonlight artifacts is ridiculously easy if you know where to look in the Agroprom underground, and wearing two Flash artifacts or one Moonlight artifact makes your Sprint Meter recharge faster than it depletes, meaning infinite sprinting provided you aren't overburdened. With those equipped, the game world opens up dramatically and the fairly heavy energy drinks are irrelevant unless you go over the initial weight limit.
      • As soon as Sidorovich's mission in the Agroprom is done, the road north is open. From there, it's child's play to pick up a VSS in perfect condition, left abandoned on the floor of a dormitory in the Freedom base. A box on the roof immediately above it contains a lot of good ammunition for it. With it, you're free to pummel any group of stalkers out in the open even before you talk to the Barkeep. It makes the Dark Valley missions absurdly easy. For reference, the VSS is a silenced sniper rifle that fires as fast as a semi-auto pistol, and with the right ammo can kill even Exosuit Stalkers in just 4 torso shots or 1 headshot.
      • In the same vein as the Vintar above, a savvy player can net a whole lot of good gear by heading from the entrance of the Bar straight into the Army Warehouses. The initial Freedom squad killed by Skull's team yields a few decent NATO guns; if you tattle on Skull to Freedom and head with them to ambush the invading Dutyers, you can net yourself an AS Val for when the VSS scope is too unwieldy and lots of high-level guns and grenades (without pissing off Duty as long as you don't shoot at Skull's squad); the next mission from Freedom is an opportunity to nab yourself a SPAS-12 for a step up from the sawn-off; and finally, in the Barrier defense mission, at least one Freedomer is bound to be killed and leave a juicy G36 for you to swipe, along with all of the gear from the dead Monolithians.
      • One not-so-powerful nuke that depends heavily on luck but isn't exceptionally hard to get is a stash location at Agroprom that nets you a universal silencer. A rifle with it attached is way more flexible for stealth than the Noiseless PB1s pistol, and makes the military outpost in the same area a breeze to clear if you're the violent kind.
      • Between the Rookie Village and the crashed truck in the Cordon, there's a box that, when broken, yields 400 9x18mm rounds, way more than you need early on. At the entrance of the vehicle graveyard near where you enter the Garbage from the Cordon, a similar thing happens: two boxes on top of a tower with a broken ladder can be shot open, containing over a thousand high quality 9x19mm rounds, just in time for the player to score an MP5. Keeping this ammo equals never having a dry sidearm, and seeling it earns you a tidy little profit early on.
    • Clear Sky:
      • Scar's old VSS is up for grabs in the Great Swamp, near the train tracks. It's totally broken, but putting together the cash to repair it is not as difficult as it may seem at first, and ammo for it is not too hard to collect if you trade with the right stalkers. Given that the VSS is an endgame-level weapon, being able to acquire it on the first map if you know where to look is really something.
      • There's a hidden stash at the top of the Swamps that requires some exploration to reach as well as dodging a heavily irradiated spot. Reaching it rewards you with a well-hidden Veles detector, making artifact hunting a trivial affair.
    • Call Of Pripyat:
      • Inside the Skadovsk, the first real hub of the game, Nimble has set up shop. You can place special orders for high-quality weapons and armor, including the vaunted Exoskeleton, from him at any point in the game. The prices are somewhat steep early on and he demands an initial pay, but judicious artifact and gun trading with Beard and Owl quickly makes cash a non-issue.
      • Within the first hour, you can go to the sawmill and one of the zombies will always carry an AN-94. While in poor condition, it is easily repaired for cheap (very easy if you grab tools while at the sawmill), but is very accurate, reliable, and uses 5.45mm ammo that is extremely common early on. Plus, you can get a scope added to it for cheap if Owl stocks one. It will more than last you until you can pay for all it's upgrades or afford Nimble's prices for a Storm.
      • Call of Pripyat differs from past games in that all of it's stashes - caches of mint-condition gear - are pre-spawned rather than being generated inside a container when given as a reward for a quest. Meaning that if a player remembers where to look, or even just gets lucky, they can pick up good mid-game equiptment within minutes of starting a new game. Case in point: You can find a VSS in perfect condition right after the beginning of the game, provided you know where to look. It's on top of one of the burnt-out houses in the burnt farmstead. There's also an SVD up for grabs leaning against one of the trees on the northwest edge of the map.
  • Do Not Drop Your Weapon:
    • Averted in that severely wounded human NPC characters (the guys rolling around on the floor in need of medkits) will drop their weapons. Of course, if they're not wounded, then they'll hold onto their weapons until they die. However, grabbing their weapon and then healing them can doom them, because they'll pull out their pistol and continue fighting. Most likely they'll get killed, so watch it if you pick up any weapon you see to strip it of ammo.
    • Also averted by the player: heavy melee hits and some psychic attacks can send your weapon flying halfway across the room. Which is sort of a bad thing, considering whoever tossed your weapon is presumably still right in your face and busy clawing it off. Fortunately, the knife is impossible to pry away from your hands.
  • Do Not Run with a Gun: The default movement speed, contrary to most first-person shooters, is walking (or if you're packing light, jogging really slowly), and sprinting is the only time you actually run. Naturally, you can't shoot while running, and neither can the enemy. With the right artifacts, you can run indefinitely, as long as you don't carry too much.
  • Don't Go in the Woods: The Red Forest, named after the red coloration the trees took after the disaster, is one of the most dangerous places of the Zone, where even Duty and Freedom dread to go in anything less than platoon-strength groups and the only inhabitant is Forester. The mutant population (mostly large packs of Snorks and dogs, with a lone Pseudogiant near the local anomaly field) is thriving and there's radiation hotspots all over the place in Clear Sky. Monolith controls the area and set up several patrols and outposts, while assaulting on a regular basis the barricade Freedom set up to cordon off the area in Shadow of Chernobyl. On top of that, it's right into the range of the Brain Scorcher. It's also where it's control bunker's entrance is hidden.
  • Doomed by Canon / Dropped a Bridge on Him:
    • The player character of the prequel Clear Sky, Scar, is speculated by fans to become the brainwashed Monolith leader, Charon, that Strelok blows away in Pripyat during the first game, due to his use of a VSS Vintorez - Scar uses such a weapon in Clear Sky's opening, which can later be retrieved, and one log in SoC mentions a man with a Vintorez doing a deed that Scar does in CS, further associating Scar with the weapon, while Charon is the only NPC to use the weapon in Shadow of Chernobyl. It's speculation at best, however, as this was never confirmed.
    • Some other minor NPCs, such as Wolf, are mentioned in passing in Call of Pripyat as having died. One or two you might have killed, such as Wolfhound, whose custom .45 "March" can be bought from Nimble. Wolfhound was a mercenary leader who was chasing after Kruglov, and ordered his men to fire on the Marked One; chances are he shredded Wolfhound without a second thought. Then there's Max, whose custom sniper rifle is also available from Nimble. Nimble mentions having bought the rifle from Max, but depending on how you played SoC, you might have seen Max die at the hands of a Duty squad you were supposed to help take out, or you might have killed him yourself with the help of said Duty squad.
    • It's also inverted, in that some NPCs from earlier games who, owing to the nature of the game, might have ended up dead in your playthrough, will appear in Call of Pripyat alive and well. One in particular (Guide) actually plays a role in the plot (albeit a minor one), another (Nimble) is your main source of high-end weaponry in the game, and a third (Petruha) plays a momentary role that could go entirely unnoticed. In Shadow of Chernobyl, the first game in which these characters appear, it's entirely possible for both of them to die - in fact, it is actually fairly likely for all of them to die, as Guide sets up camp in a rather dangerous locale, Nimble stays at the rookie camp and will charge into battle against mercenaries and military with nothing but a leather jacket and a Makarov, and Petruha and his crew are at the auto park, where bandits constantly attack. Coming back to find Guide butchered by wildlife and Petruha being roasted over the fire at the bandit camp isn't uncommon.
  • Downer Ending:
    • Clear Sky ends like this, in order to set up the plot for Shadow of Chernobyl.
    • All but two (three if you're charitable) of the endings to Shadow of Chernobyl are like this.
    • Call of Pripyat has a modular ending similar to the one in Fallout 2 consisting of some 20 static scenes. Most of them have "good" and "bad" versions, depending on player's actions during the game. Bad endings for your companions, especially Strelok, definitely qualify.
  • Driven to Suicide: In Call of Pripyat, Tremor, The Medic in Zaton, offs himself when you find out he's the one behind the disappearances of stalkers attributed to bloodsuckers. You do, however, have a couple of seconds to shoot him yourself before he does this after hearing his little story, thereby averting this trope.
  • Driving Question:
    • For Shadow of Chernobyl: Who and where is Strelok?
    • And in Call of Pripyat: What happened to Operation Fairway?
  • Drone of Dread - Psy attacks come with this (most noticeably with Controllers), along with Blowouts.
    • Being nearby a Controller - even if it hasn't noticed you - can cause this as well, and may be your only warning if you don't know there's going to be one around, such as in the Army Warehouses in Shadow of Chernobyl.
  • Drowning My Sorrows: Cardan, a mechanic with a fondness for vodka in Call of Pripyat, muses about the fate of his two stalker buddies after giving him at least two bottles. Finding the PDAs of both Barge and Joker, tho two buddies that Cardan mentions about, reveal that Cardan originally was hired by them to go out on a special artifact hunting trip, but due to his chronic drunken behavior, he abandoned his acquaintances after a pretty ugly argument and stayed on the Skadovsk to relieve himself of his memories of that incident by drinking them off. They both met their untimely demise, unfortunately for him.
  • Drunken Master: Cardan, the mechanic at Skadovsk, is only competent when he's completely wasted - in fact, he can only perform high-level weapon modifications after downing at least two bottles of vodka. Showing him the Gauss Rifle, however, shocks him into sobriety.
  • Dueling Player Characters: The final battle of Clear Sky involves you fighting Strelok, the protagonist of the first game. You don't actually fight him directly (and he doesn't shoot at you), but rather snipe at him at long range as he makes his way across the superstructure of the Chernobyl Power Plant. You have to constantly chase him to get good angles, and Monolith goons will constantly be spawning in to fight both of you.
  • Dwindling Party:
    • In Call of Pripyat, once you finally reach Pripyat, you'll rendevous with a platoon-sized group of allied military Spetsnaz soldiers, who serve as your allies for the 3rd and final act. Over the course of the Pripyat missions, this force of a few dozen special forces soldiers will gradually be whittled down by Monolith ambushes and mutant attacks to just 3 to 6 soldiers, plus you, Strelok, and the last member of your 4-man party (the other 3 members having left on their own to pursue their own agendas).
    • Ironically enough, the Monolith faction becomes this in the same game. If you choose to stay in the Zone after completing the final mission, they're down to their Last Stand until you purge them of their existence. At that point, they effectively become a Decapitated Army (although without the objective of killing a specific leader).

    E-M 
  • Early Game Hell: In Shadow of Chernobyl especially, since unless you know where to look, all you'll have is a basic leather jacket and a Makarov to take on a fairly well-armed bandit camp on the mission to get the flash drive from Nimble, which is frustratingly hard unless you're very good at scoring headshots. Once a player gets their hands on a decent suit with Night-Vision Goggles and an automatic firearm, the game's difficulty drops dramatically. And then it goes up again when encountering better-armed enemies like the Military, the Mercs and Monolith or tougher mutants.
  • Eldritch Location: The laws of physics in the Zone are...different. It seems relatively normal at first glance, until you walk down a seemingly empty street and accidentally step in an area where gravity is about a hundred times Earth normal, and find yourself experiencing life as a pancake...very briefly. Or decide to stay outside and watch the sky turn red, which is really interesting right up until the hallucinations start and your head blows up. And that's just the start. Suffice it to say that overall, the Zone is both very weird and very dangerous.
    • A more mundane, but still notable, example is the lake in Zaton that is also a hill. No, that's not a typo - it's an otherwise normal body of water that has absolutely no problem at all flowing twenty feet uphill and staying there, completely covering the hill in a sort of sheet of water.
  • 11th-Hour Superpower: The Gauss Rifle in all three incarnations.
    • In Shadow of Chernobyl, this is subverted in that only a few Elite Mooks from the Monolith faction carry the weapon in the Pripyat map and ammo is restrictively scarce enough that it isn't worth taking it during the final levels.
    • Enforced in Clear Sky, where it is chronologically a prototype version of the original that shoots electromagnetic rounds, and is essential to defeating the Final Boss, Strelok.
    • In Call of Pripyat, this is played dead straight during the first mission of the Pripyat map where you must defeat a Monolith party and its commanding leader possessing the weapon in an abandoned hospital. Subverted in that after acquiring the rifle, it is in a broken state after you kill the leader, who is then sent plummeting to the second level, and that you must show it to the technician back in the first map, and then do a particular side quest for him (after he wakes up from his fainting spell for showing him the rifle) that involves retrieving documents about the weapon at an abandoned lab in the southwestern-most part of the first map so that he can get it back into working condition again and offer you homemade batteries at a hefty cost.
    • The final tier of upgrades in Call of Pripyat fall under this as well. Each tier of upgrades requires a higher-level set of tools, and the third set can only be found in Pripyat itself. By the time you get the opportunity to take the tools back to the mechanics, there's only a few story missions left to do, and players will most likely have done most of the side missions.
  • Elite Mooks:
    • The military Spetsnaz units, generally used for surgical strikes deep into the zone. Also, affiliated to them, the rarely encountered Military Stalkers, who are sort of the Elite of the Elites. These guys are equipped with the best non-exosuit armor in the game (Spetznaz can soak more than a full mag of AK-74 fire to the torso, and Military Stalkers are even tougher), and the Military Stalkers are armed with AS Val assault rifles - silenced, accurate, and powerful.
    • Anyone wearing a SEVA suit or Exoskeleton is this, coupled with high-end weaponry.
    • The Monolith faction is comprised almost entirely of these kind of mooks.
  • Embarrassing Nickname:
    • The games will sometimes dish out nicknames such as "Neudachnik" (unlucky guy), "Petukh" (Literally "rooster" but among criminals "prison sex slave") or "Pokoinik" (dead man). Or use regular English nouns like "Butt" (seriously), "Turd", "Simpleton", "Scab", "Crybaby", "Long John" (a euphemism for Gag Penis), etc.
    • One of the mercenary Non Player Characters you will eventually come across in Call of Pripyat is called Corpse. It later serves as an ironic foreshadowing of what will eventually become of him during a later quest in the game.
  • Emergency Weapon: The knife (although the alt-attack is hilariously powerful in the first game). Later in the games, pistols can become this, as you'll be engaging with a sniper rifle, assault rifle, or shotgun far more often than a pistol, if you even bother to bring one along.
  • Empowered Badass Normal: All three player characters can use artifacts that boost various abilities, such as sprinting or the ability to carry more, at the cost of getting irradiated or other drawbacks. Scar is supposedly stronger, healthier, and tougher than the average human, thanks to the blowouts of the Zone powering his unique nervous system instead of destroying it, but it has no effect in-game.
  • Enemy Chatter: Although not much use in Shadow of Chernobyl, as it's all in Russian. At least "granáta" isn't hard to figure out.
    • Unfortunately for those who don't speak Russian even that won't help much as often alternate phrasing would be used for a grenade toss, which don't actually contain the word. "A vot tebe limonchik!", translated as "Here, have some lemon!", is one example, stemming from Russian equivalent to "pineapple" bomb, "Limonka", the lemon bomb.
    • In the English speaking community, the highly idiomatic "chiki briki i v damke" or just "chiki briki" has become a miniature meme of sorts, precisely because no one can agree on what it means and the way the Bandit hunting you says it. (It's the equivalent of "checkmate" in checkers. Dissection/translation here.)
    • Some of it is translated in Clear Sky (e.g.: TAKE THIS, YOU FUCKING NAZI!).
    • Then there's "Suka!" shouted out by the Bandits, which literally means "Bitch!". Although this is a more or less ordinary Russian curse, it takes a much darker meaning when you consider the Bandits' origins.
  • Environmental Symbolism: Take your pick. From irradiated mounds of dirt, to trees and landscape twisted by anomalies, to long-abandoned farms, villages, factories and warehouses, to the horribly mutated fauna of the Zone. It's also stuck in eternal autumn and one will very often find themselves travelling through all of the above under heavy rain and thunderstorms, accompanied by the lone caws of crows (the only animals to not have been wiped out... or worse).
  • Escort Mission:
    • In Shadow of Chernobyl, you can choose to escort the scientist Professor Kruglov through the western half of the Wild Territory, while protecting him from Wolfhound's mercs (and perhaps random mutants). Made alright because he has surprisingly tough armor and can be equipped with an assault rifle, which he's a damn good shot with. He also has the common sense of staying behind you and refusing to rush into an area that you haven't already cleared of hostiles, instead giving you covering fire from the rear and likely bagging a few kills of his own. "Third-rate fighter" my nuts.
    • Call of Pripyat
      • The finale, where you have to escort the Military survivors through the city fighting through zombies, mutants, and finally several waves of Monolith fighters. On the plus side, the survivors are Spetsnaz Elite Mooks who can hold their own in the fight, especially if you have the maximum of 8 survivors helping you in the shootout by saving them all during earlier missions.
      • Also, an insanely annoying side quest (the most insanely annoying one in the game) where you have to protect a group of Ecologist stalkers studying an anomaly from waves of wild boars. The stalkers are Made of Plasticine and die after one hit from a boar, and won't defend themselves until one of them actually gets hit. Even if you have the maximum of 4 stalkers in the group by saving them all in an earlier quest, it's still an incredibly annoying mission, especially if you're trying to keep all 4 of them alive for the maximum reward. If you somehow end up with only one or two, get ready to huff in frustrated boredom, because the reduced manpower means they take even longer to finish.
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: Mutants - and the Zone itself - want every human in its boundaries dead. The military will shoot you on sight. Bandits will rob and kill you, not necessarily in that order. There are only a few places in the whole game where you won't be attacked, and that doesn't necessarily include the starting areas.
    "Such is life in the zone" - Popular maxim
  • The Evils of Free Will: The Zone came into existence as the direct result of a botched attempt by a team of ex-Soviet scientists to tap into humanity's collective unconscious and manually remove all thoughts and impulses they considered to be dangerous, such as violence and hatred. It failed, spectacularly. The fact that they've literally ripped a hole in reality caused them to give up in the attempt, and they switch over to trying to contain the Zone and conceal its secrets - along with turning all of humanity into a Hive Mind - until Strelok kills them in self-defense at the end of Shadow of Chernobyl.
  • Fackler Scale of FPS Realism: Heavily on the realistic side (unless you're wearing military-grade combat armor, expect to die after only a few assault rifle shots), with very tactical combat similar to the Ghost Recon series.
  • The Farmer and the Viper: After Strelok blows up the tunnel leading to the CNPP while Scar fights the Loner squad he hired to kill him in Clear Sky, the last one alive will surrender and, if asked, help you go through the Red Forest to reach Forester. Halfway through, he'll try to kill you.
  • Fat Bastard:
    • Borov in Shadow of Chernobyl. He was slimmer when working as a bartender in Clear Sky, though.
    • Yoga, though looking only half of it, is implied by Borov as one, reinforced by the fact that he has a large collection of food just behind him. Ironic, considering that Borov later became obese after Clear Sky.
    • Sidorovich, who is introduced to us as he is messily eating greasy chicken, and is derisively referred to as being fat.
    • While not evil, the Barkeep is more than a little grey, putting out hits on stalkers whose luck is so terrible, they're the only survivors of any mission they go on.
  • First Town: The rookie village serves this purpose both in game terms for the player in Shadow of Chernobyl, and in-universe for new arrivals to the Zone. It's located in the safest district in the Zone (relatively speaking), has a large number of intact buildings, underground cellars to guard against emissions, walls to keep out wandering mutants, patrolling guards, a well-stocked trader, and actual beds, so overall it's actually one of the most well-stocked settlements in the entire Zone.
  • The Fool: Nimble. His lucky nature didn't come in play originally in Clear Sky until the events of Shadow of Chernobyl when it started showing its true colors once the Marked One (AKA Strelok) intervened. When Call of Pripyat came around, it is revealed that his being an Arms Dealer is the result of lucky circumstances. Ironically, in Shadow of Chernobyl, despite his informed lucky attribute, he can quite possibly die in that game, whether by your hand, the environment or the bandits at the car park that he insists on going back to for no given reason.
  • Forbidden Zone: The Zone itself is naturally viewed as such by most people in the world; for stalkers actually living in it, the Brain Scorcher in Shadow of Chernobyl, Red Forest and Limansk in Clear Sky and Pripyat in Call of Pripyat are such.
  • Foreboding Fleeing Flock: Appears in the introductory cutscene in Clear Sky as an early sign of the incoming blowout. Another example featuring a flock of rats also appears in one of the dream cutscenes in Shadow of Chernobyl.
  • From Bad to Worse: Call Of Pripyat hints that Strelok's action of destroying the C-Consciousness has made the zone dangerously unstable, resulting in Emissions happening on a daily basis and a huge increase in zombified stalkers and Monolith personnel, among other nastiness which makes Strelok's accomplishment in Shadow of Chernobyl a Pyrrhic Victory.
    • It's heavily hinted at that the Zone is expanding. Growing and encompassing more land/space, in addition to reports of hordes of powerful mutants appearing at the zone border. It's a big probability that if the Zone isn't stopped somehow it could grow to encompass the entire planet.
    • The Zone was less wild under the control of C-Consciousness. The prequel Clear Sky added some more complex anomalies, even those that affect the ground. The sequel Call of Pripyat gives us Chimeras, Burers, and a lot more creative anomalies.
    • Clear Sky also has this as the premise of the plot — someone is making the Zone go crazy, spawning more blowouts that grow bigger and bigger and shutting off access to some well-travelled areas, and Clear Sky wants to find who's doing it, and end them.
  • Fun with Acronyms: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. stands for "Scavenger, Trespasser, Adventurer, Loner, Killer, Explorer, Robber" according to The Other Wiki.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: Enemy-thrown grenades in Clear Sky will quite literally home in on the player, actually changing direction in mid-air to ensure that they always land at the player's feet.
    • Also, Clear Sky applies the same firing randomisation rule to shots by the player that they do to shots from the enemy. That is, you have to actually hit your target, then the game essentially rolls a dice to check if you hit your target.
    • The infamous "permanent radiation sickness" in Shadow of Chernobyl: in places like the Garbage or Army Warehouses if one ventures too far up the hills or tries to leave the general "playing area" the radiation counter almost instantly jumps to eleven in order to provide "incentive" for the player to turn back. Now, there are a couple of places in the Zone where the engine detects you as being out of the intended playing area, even though you are not, and afflicts you with the aforementioned permanently increasing rad-sickness that never goes away. If you save the game after getting it you're pretty much screwed. The only known solution is to reload an earlier save. Take note, people who save each game on top of the last one. Also - be extremely paranoid about this when venturing into the train tunnel at the Garbage.
  • Game Mod: A lot of cut content can be restored by tweaking the configuration files, and many mods use this to rebalance the game and fix various issues.
    • The Zone Reclaimation Project (ZRP) is largely a bug fix mod designed to address the numerous issues not fixed by the final official patch. It also has a number of optional quality-of-life changes, including equipment repair, sleeping bags, improved NPC navigation, the ability to equip friendly NPCs with better weaponry, etc. Overall it's the best way to play a more polished version of the game without drastically changing the gameplay or plot. A similar bug fix mod, the Sky Reclaimation Project, exists for the infamously buggy Clear Sky, with additional quality of life changes such as the ability to tone down enemy grenades. No such mod was required for Call of Pripyat, as for once the base version of the game is reasonably polished.
    • Shaders MAX is a shaders pack designed to tweak the graphics without making any changes to gameplay. Some of the more noticeable features include bump mapping to textures, a more pronounced day/night cycle, and a Real Is Brown filter to make the in-game environments more closely match the pre-rendered cutscenes. Can be installed over ZRP or some other mods without issue.
    • Call of Chernobyl is a free-play sandbox mod created by TeamEPIC, with a focus on free-roaming rather than a linear plot (although you can still journey to the Wish Granter for an "ending"). It combines the maps from all 3 games into a full recreation of the Zone, and mostly uses the polished game systems from Call of Pripyat. Like Lost Alpha, it's a stand-alone game .exe. It features 32 explorable maps, reworked level design, A-Life Overhaul and much other changes upon the game. It had earned it's right place as Mod of the Year in 2015 & 2016.
      • A series of repacks and modifications built upon Call of Chernobyl have been released over the past few years, some of the most notable ones being Last Day and Anomaly. Of all these mods, Anomaly seems to be the most up-to-date and widely played, as it is the most recent in time and has most of the content from Last Day and Call of Chernobyl in a 64-bit .exe. One of the most recent releases is Demosfen, which brings in several new maps, changes to existing ones (to name one, the Bar is huge now, with a very detailed underground), tons upon tons of new artifacts, and a trove of quests and missions to pursue, but you'll need some knowledge of Russian to play it, as there is no proper English translation for it just yet.
    • S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Complete is a mod designed to massively overhaul and modernize the graphics and also make adjustments to the gameplay, without drastically altering the story or mission flow like other major mods such as Lost Alpha or Oblivion Lost. However, it hasn't been updated in a while and is built upon an outdated version of the Zone Reclaimation Project, leading to it having quite a few bugs of its own. It also makes the game much easier (weapons are more accurate and deal less damage, the player has a higher carry weight, and NPC's eyesight and hearing range have been reduced significantly).
    • Lost Alpha and Oblivion Lost are focused around creating an entirely new version of the game based on the original pre-release design documents, before GSC had to make major cuts to release the game on time and on budget. They feature significant gameplay, map, and graphics overhauls as well as a significantly expanded plot, and should be considered more of a dramatic remake rather than a remaster. Lost Alpha is a stand-alone .exe while Oblivion Lost is installed over the original game. Lost Alpha takes some liberties with the plot in order to "fill in the gaps", while Oblivion Lost is more true to the original GSC design documents, but is a native Russian release with a partial English fan translation.
    • Autumn Aurora and MISERY are focused on major graphics and gameplay overhauls to make the game significantly more atmospheric while also dramatically increasing the difficulty.
      • Special mention has to go to the MISERY mod, a partial conversion mod that drastically alters the gameplay and pacing of the game, besides the graphical makeovers of using Real Is Brown and introducing more weaponry as well as many other things. This mod is also crushingly difficult for the uninitiated (as if the vanilla version wasn't already hard enough): imagine Fallout: New Vegas in Hardcore Mode but dialing it up to eleven. Yeah, it's THAT difficult.
    • The Sigerous Mod 2.2 ("SGM 2.2" for short) for Call of Pripyat. While slightly unstable at times, it remains a VERY popular mod to the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fan community since not only does it have a different starting point (there's an addon SGM sub-mod that has it revert to the regular Zaton area if you're not up to starting at a different location) for when starting anew in the mod, it introduces a LOT of awesome, new content that, fortunately, doesn't bring in the dreaded "Misery-like" difficulty from said other mod along with it in its normal version, along with the option of toggling whether or not Alpha Squads appear from time to time, which can be killed (as they are an always-hostile faction) for their invaluable/rare weapons that are very effective when properly utilized/modded via mechanics. (be warned however, they have Monolith-like gear that can easily end an unprepared Stalker, and once activated, it CANNOT be deactivated unless you reload an earlier save made before activating it, so use the utmost caution in deciding whether or not to activate said option) Along with this, it also adds a plethora of new sidequests and new artifacts and even allows for various methods to be implemented upon unmodified artifacts, such as adding more weight capacity and lessened or even no radiation effects and can even absorb radiation gradually if it goes beyond the normal negative radiation effect. All-in-all, it's a very good mod, but unfortunately, when the main mission is finished and it triggers a shit ton of zombies and, most likely due to the unbelievable amount of zombies you're tasked to kill before they stop spawning in most of the maps, it unfortunately can have the tendency of triggering the very infamous "Save Corrupted" issue at the most unfortunate of times, so regular manual (non-quicksave) saving is a must to attempt to hopefully counter it.
  • Gameplay-Guided Amnesia:
    • Justified in Shadow of Chernobyl, as the player character has amnesia - amnesia given to him by the ultra-psychic Hive Mind of Soviet scientists, too. Also averted, in that you have the option of skipping the tutorial entirely by telling Sidorovich that you still remember how to survive in the Zone.
    • The Brain Scorcher is pretty much this, in-universe. Most of the psychic barriers around the CNPP such as the Brain Scorcher are basically Brain Bleach weaponized. You come within their range and start to forget who you are until you fall under the control of the Monolith.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • In Shadow of Chernobyl, one Duty sidequest requires to steal a grenade launcher in Freedom headquarters, but an alternate way of completing the quest can be learnt from the headquarters' cook by sharing drinks with him. While the Marked One's lines simulate sobriety during the dialog, you'll be completely sober when going back to the game.
    • The Combat Chaser is a unique shotgun found in Shadow of Chernobyl, and its flavour text says bullets' speed is increased by a fragment of a Gravi artifact embedded in the barrel. In proper gameplay, equipping a Gravi has no impact on your own speed (it adds resistance to Rupture damage while making you receive radiation over time).
    • Completing Trapper's mutant-hunting quests in Call Of Pripyat unlocks an ending describing how Yanov has become a safer place for Stalkers thanks to your efforts. In-game, however, Yanov ironically becomes even more dangerous as completing all the hunting missions causes Chimeras, Burers and Pseudogiants to spawn randomly throughout the area. Yay.
    • In the same game, according to Strelok after he worms his way into the military-fortified Laundromat in Pripyat by means of an underground passage, it is revealed that every time an emission occurs, anomalies change locations. It turns out that this is the primary reason why Operation Fairway failed spectacularly: the original anomaly maps issued to the USS forces were rendered useless after the Third Emission (which originated during the climax level of Shadow of Chernobyl - the first visit to the CNPP) occurred. The forces were caught completely unaware of the new anomalies that had occurred in the air, and all five of their helicopters crashed as a result. However, this is never manifested in actual gameplay. Every time an emission occurs, the landscape of all three playable maps remain the same.
  • Gas Mask Mooks: Most of the mid-to-high rank characters wear gas masks, although it's justified due to the many environmental hazards present in the Zone. Monolith members usually wear gas masks. And, of course, we have snorks, who are zombie versions of this: they're the zombified remains of the soldiers who were caught in the first blowout, and keep their gas masks on - just lifted so that they can bite pieces of you off.
  • Genius Loci: The Zone is revealed to be one of these controlled by C-Consciousness, and actively fights back against Stalkers that try to fight against it using mutants and emissions.
  • Ghibli Hills: The Oasis is the only spot in the Zone completely free of radiation, where vegetation grows lush and untainted by fallout and pollution and the only spot where you can find the Fruit of the Oasis, implied to be a fruit or plant turned into an artifact, the only one in the whole series to give several bonuses and no drawbacks. Good luck finding it, though. It's deep down in a buried factory accessible only in Call of Pripyat, hidden behind an endlessly looping room and guarded by a Psi Dog.
  • Ghost Town: Pripyat, naturally. Also Limansk-13 after Clear Sky destroys the Bandit-Monolith alliance occupying it.
  • Glass Cannon: Mercs wear light armor and are only slightly more durable than veteran Bandits, however they're equipped with good quality NATO assault rifles and can perforate you pretty quickly unless you have heavy armor equipped.
  • Give Me Your Inventory Item: Badly wounded NPCs will ask for medkits, giving you a choice between making a friend and having an extra medkit. In Clear Sky, various NPCs will also ask for various items (typically 5.45 ammo or grenades) in exchange for a cash reward.
  • Golden Ending
    • Shadow of Chernobyl's best ending has Strelok destroying the C-Consciousness. It is also the canon ending.
    • Call of Pripyat has you decide the fate of multiple characters, factions, and settlements based on your actions. However, there is no true Golden Ending because at least one person will get the short end of the stick no matter what you do. Arguably, the best possible ending has the Loners staying in Skadovsk and kicking out the Bandits, the Bloodsucker Lair destroyed, Duty and Freedom reaching an uneasy truce, the Ecologists getting all the data they need, solving the mystery of Cardan's friends, Owl becoming an information broker important enough to sell his info to the SBU and recruiting all optional members for the underground trip to Pripyat and keeping them, the Army survivors, and Strelok alive until the end of the evacuation.
  • Good Guns, Bad Guns: The game heavily features both NATO and Warsaw Pact firearms, and certain factions favor firearms from a specific side, although none of these factions are explicitly "good" or "evil". NATO weapons are used heavily by Freedom and the Mercs, while Warsaw Pact weapons are used heavily by Duty and the Military. Loners use whatever they can find, and Monolith has access to the best weapons from both sides.
    • This could be justified. Bandits and Loners have limited resources so cheap and reliable weapons like break-open shotguns and AKs are the order of the day. Freedom relies on guerilla attacks so the more accurate and powerful NATO guns are better for them, while Duty probably have a preference for Warsaw Pact weapons due to being mostly former Ukrainian army soldiers.
    • As of Call of Pripyat NATO guns are somewhat more accurate, pack more power per hit and tend to come with a wider range of accessories while Warsaw Pact weapons are more durable, less prone to jamming and easier to find ammo for.
  • Grey-and-Grey Morality:
    • The Duty and Freedom factions, neither of which are particularly good or particularly bad despite being diametrically opposed to each other. Duty firmly believes in getting rid of the Zone, a reasonable goal considering how utterly dangerous it is as well as how it’s slowly spreading, while Freedom believes in allowing others to access the Zone for the reality-bending artifacts that can be used to better humankind, which has been proven true for artifacts that successfully are smuggled out.
    • Soldiers versus Stalkers. On one hand, the Ukrainian Military has legal rights to the zone and how it handles trespassers, but they tend to be corrupt, trigger-happy, and abuse their legal rights to kill and torture Stalkers that it can border on sadism. On the other hand, many lone Stalkers tend to be reasonable or decent, as much as you can be in the Zone, but some do genuinely further provoke the military by breaking into their bases and stealing information usually via gunfights, some Stalker factions are more actively malicious than others (Mercenaries, Bandits, Monolith, etc.), and they all are illegally trespassing.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • The "Find the weapon of the Dutyer" sidequest in Shadow of Chernobyl consists in finding a specific unique weapon and bringing it back to its owner. The quest provides a marker which leads to the Bandit Base in Dark Valley, but the gun is carried by a unique bandit named Friar, who wanders through the game world and can also be found in several other levels. He seems to most often spawn in Agroprom Underground, in the other side of the map.
    • In Call of Pripyat, you need to find "tools" in order to be able to upgrade your weapons and armor. Gear has 3 tiers of unlockable upgrades, and there are 2 main technicians in the game who can upgrade your gear, which means that there are 6 of these tool sets available in the game. For each technician, you need to find tools for basic work, tools for fine work, and calibration tools. The game tells you at the start that these exist, but it doesn't tell you ANYTHING about their location. Even if you were to come across them, they don't look like anything out of the ordinary, and can EASILY be mistaken as just some random metallic rubbish lying around, like an old tin of tuna or similar. Seeing as COP takes place in 3 separate, large, open environments, which each have multiple well detailed areas and buildings to enter, many of which are filled with garbage due to being abandoned and rotting, finding these tools becomes highly unlikely without using a guide. Considering these tools are essential in upgrading your weapons and armor, which are extremely important in a game like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. where character upgrades exist in almost no other way, this can cause players a lot of grief, as they end up using under-powered equipment against difficult enemies.
  • Gun Accessories: Guns can be equipped with suppressors, grenade launchers and scopes; interestingly, Western guns aren't compatible with Eastern accessories and vice-versa, save suppressors.
  • Guns Do Not Work That Way:
    • The standard PM pistol wouldn't be able to use extra-powerful rounds designed for the improved PMM.
    • There is no version of the Desert Eagle in .45ACP. And it would be impossible to chamber one in 9x39mm.
    • The Cutter is a specially modified Viper 5 (MP5) chambered in .45 ACP. IRL, there is no version of the MP5 chambered in .45 ACP (its closest equivalents are two versions chambered in 10mm Auto {MP5/10} and .40 S&W {MP5/40}), though its successor, the UMP, has a version chambered in that specific caliber.
    • The SUSAT scope was designed to use in conjunction with L85 rifles, and is not supposed to be installed on weapons without proprietary mounts (like LR-300 and SG 550).
    • Some of the gun modifications in Call of Pripyat will not work IRL as described. For example: barrel modifications will affect accuracy, but will not increase rate of fire.
  • Gun Twirling: You actually do this when pulling out any pistol equipped in your weapon slot in Call of Pripyat, including the Black Kite. While it is uncommon, NPCs can be seen twirling their pistols when idle and provided that they do not have a rifle/shotgun/machine gun equipped. This most likely happens when they get severely wounded but not killed in a fight and their main weapon is taken away (either by you or another passing NPC), then get revived with a medkit.
  • Had to Be Sharp: It comes with living in the Zone. Either you're a total badass or you're dead. Sometimes even badasses bite it in the Zone – letting your guard down even for a second is a sure way to get killed quickly.
  • Hand Cannon: The Black Kite, based on the frame of an IMI Desert Eagle. It shoots .45 ACP rounds, which are also used by a bunch of other pistols, but it weighs almost twice as much as they do. The unique variant that can be found in Shadow of Chernobyl is Big Ben: it fires 9x39mm rifle rounds.
  • Hanlon's Razor: Just before the end of Call of Pripyat, Strelok informs you that the helicopters from Operation Fairway crashed simply because they didn't know emissions changed the locations of anomalies, making their maps of anomalies inaccurate and causing the copters to crash into them. Essentially the entire main plot of the game was based on accidents stemming from bad information, not some conspiracy or attempt by any faction in the Zone.
  • Happy Ending Override: The very best (and canonical) ending of Shadow of Chernobyl has Strelok (who formerly was the Marked One after picking up all pieces of his past) eliminating the C-Consciousness for good and escaping their lab via an off-screen portal. After that, he is seen in a meadow thinking to himself whether or not he did the right thing in killing the C-Consciousness. Unfortunately for him, by the time Call of Pripyat starts, he was horribly wrong.
  • Healing Factor: Although it takes a while, the player character will slowly heal when not taking damage (or bleeding). Artifacts can speed up this process, though not by much. Ironically, the artifacts that provide this - the Stone Blood, Meat Chunk, and Soul - increase your health regeneration, but decrease your overall hit protection, meaning you'll wind up being more fragile than you were to start with.
    • Getting 4 or more flame or electricity battery artifacts and jumping into a fire/electrical surge will restore your health and repair your armor.
  • Heal Thyself: Comes in three flavors: medkits, which heal injuries, bandages, which stop bleeding, and food, which restores tiny bits of health per item eaten. Interestingly, the enemy is capable of doing this too as long as they have medkits.
  • Heavily Armored Mook: Stalkers wearing exosuits are "walking dreadnoughts" capable of soaking 2 to 3 full mags worth of assault rifle fire before going down (compared to just a handful of shots to kill a basic Bandit and about half a mag or so to defeat most medium armor). Spetznaz Elite Mooks are no slouch either, capable of soaking more than a full mag of assault rifle fire before dropping. Military Stalkers fall between Spetznaz and Exosuit wearers. All 3 opponents are best dealt with using headshots from an accurate rifle. Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat have Monolith Elite Mooks wearing exosuit armor without the exoskeleton component. It's not as tough as full exosuit armor, being slightly weaker than Military Stalker armor in terms of durability, but it beats out any other armor in the games and Monolith are able to field it in much larger numbers compared to the rare full exosuits.
  • He Knows Too Much: Why Strelok must be killed.
  • Hell Is That Noise: Some of the ambient noises can be rattling. Chief ones include:
    • The ear-grating ringing when a Controller has the player in it's sights and charges a psi bolt.
    • The near-constant beeping when near an anomaly.
    • The screeching of the Geiger counter when walking into a radiation hotspot.
    • The faint static and heavily distorded voices during a psi emission.
    • The Wish Granter's voice. What makes it terrifying, aside the fact that every line audibly spoken by it is in Russian, is it that it's deep, loud and comes from nowhere while exploring the CNPP alongside the "psi emission" noise.
    • Random sounds in Call of Pripyat, such as faint radio conversations, screams and whispering. After getting the "Marked by the Zone" achievement (by using anabiotics to survive an emission without shelter three times), they stop, implying they are caused by the Zone itself.
    • The unmistakable spine-chilling, droning noise right before an Emission begins...
  • Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Averted in Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky, where Marked One and Scar wear whatever headgear comes with their current armor. Played straight in Call of Pripyat, where Major Degtyarev can equip helmets but is never actually seen wearing them during cutscenes, even when he's about to descend into a tunnel system filled with toxic gas (a quest where a big deal was made about actually finding a suit with a helmet that could allow you to survive in that gas). Major characters in Call of Pripyat also don't usually wear helmets with their armor, but (other than Degtyarev) they had the common sense to put some on during the "deadly gas tunnels" sequence.
  • The Hermit: Hermit from Clear Sky, who takes the definition of "Loner" to its most literal and logical conclusion.
  • Hero of Another Story: The series is positively loaded with these.
    • The biggest example is probably the Forester, though - he lives in what is unambiguously the most dangerous area in the entire Zone (Pripyat is safer) by himself, is actually doing rather well for himself, and has been living there since before the power plant even exploded, making him the single most experienced veteran in the Zone to boot.
    • Barkeep and Sidorovich often send you to kill these guys, and both will give you suits that used to belong to some odd individuals - for example, Sid will give you a stalker suit modified by a hiker who'd been all over the world and went through the Zone as a challenge.
    • Guide and Doctor. Doctor is a past-middle-aged man living on the swamps with a tamed Pseudodog. Guide is able to show the military Stingray team way to Pripyat way before anyone else (except Monolith) reached it in Call of Pripyat. In Extended Universe they are called Legendary or Touched by the Zone.
    • Gordon Freeman, natch.
  • Hired to Hunt Yourself: In Shadow of Chernobyl, you are only known as the Marked One who has a PDA telling you of an objective to "Find and kill Strelok". However, later in the game, it is revealed that you were Strelok all along. Even so, the objective itself does not disappear even after The Reveal.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard: The player. If he makes a wish to the wish granter. Asking for immortality turns him into a statue to stand for all eternity. Asking for wealth makes the ceiling crush him, Strelok believing it to be endless amounts of coins. Asking for power makes him powerful... over an endless void. Asking to make the Zone disappear makes it go away... but only to him.
  • Hollywood Silencer: Averted. Suppressors do make guns more quiet, but they're nowhere near inaudible, they only make your position harder to pinpoint. And unless it's an integrated suppressor like some unique guns, the Val and the Vintorez have, expect your shots to (realistically) pack less of a punch and (unrealistically) be less accurate.
  • Hunter of Monsters: Some characters are "professional" mutant hunters. In Call of Pripyat, the player is regarded as one after completing a quest to kill several dangerous groups of mutants.
    • Duty is known and respected for clearing out mutant lairs and such, when they are not busy fighting with Freedom.
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: In Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky, eating a food item instantly restores a small bit of health. Call of Pripyat does away with this - food only serves to combat hunger. Also, in Shadow of Chernobyl, bandages somehow instantly restore a small amount of health in addition to stopping blood loss. The later two games realistically nerfed the bandages to only prevent bleeding after getting hit.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal: Averted... yet, somehow, played straight. You can only equip one sidearm and one primary weapon. However, you're able to carry up to 59.9 kg of anything (including additional guns) in your backpack, however going above 50kg reduces your sprinting ability to next to zero. Break it with a piece of bread and you're totally immobile.
    • Also played straight with the various storage crates which can be used to stash extra inventory, all of which have a seemingly infinite amount of space, able to store dozens of guns and outfits, thousands of rounds of ammo, weeks worth of food, and artifacts galore with room to spare. Justified for gameplay reasons; you need somewhere to store all that stuff and it's more convenient than just dropping it on the ground. However, be aware that recklessly storing your equipment may come back to bite you in the ass. One quest in Call of Pripyat involves having ALL the equipment in one of your storage crates stolen. You can find and get it all back later on, but depending on how much you can carry and how many things you have, you're going to have to make multiple trips at full load or leave some behind.
    • Small supply kits, which are the main source of supplies in the dungeons, sometimes release an insane amount of items upon slashing them open. To the degree you can be killed or thrown high into the air by stuff flying out of it.
    • NPCs will sometimes play a tune on a guitar by a campfire to pass the time. However, they pull the guitar out of a backpack clearly too small for it when they begin, and stow it away likewise when finished.
    • A crafty player can start this in Call of Pripyat. With the right artifacts and a fully upgraded Exoskeleton, you can be carrying: an RPG launcher; a drum-fed grenade launcher; a unique assault rifle with a silencer, a scope, and an under-barrel grenade launcher; a drum-fed automatic shotgun; a unique, silenced sniper rifle that could one-shot enemies; a specialized plot-important sniper rifle; a light machine gun; a pistol modified for automatic fire; and hand grenades.
  • Hypocrite:
    • The Duty faction constantly preaches that they're striving to create a world free of the Zone's corruption, but in Call of Pripyat, you're able to find the corpse of their original founder. His PDA reveals that Duty's original purpose was literally no different from that of any other opportunistic Stalker hoping to make their fortune in the Zone. If you choose to send this PDA to the leader of Freedom in the train station, he'll gladly call Duty as nothing more than a bunch of frauds. Depending on your perspective, this may be a case of Motive Decay or Becoming the Mask, as current-day Duty does seem dedicated to what they claim their mission is. If you give the PDA to the Duty commander, though he's obviously going to make sure it never sees the light of day, he's also genuinely shocked and appalled at what it says.
    • In Shadow of Chernobyl, one side mission involves assassinating a minor NPC who preaches some religious dogma that concerns about how artifacts in the Zone are evil to the entire world and must be destroyed. In an ironic twist, however, he possesses a special combat shotgun whose properties are enhanced by a small fragment of the Gravi artifact in its barrel, thus legitimately making him a Straw Hypocrite.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: in Shadow of Chernobyl, A Freedom stalker in the Army Warehouses will hint at the Marked One that they have resorted to eating dead stalkers and ignorant travelers due to a food shortage and will then proceed to invite him for dinner. He gets a little frustrated after the Marked One tells him he's not that appetizing. Besides this one-off bit of dialogue, no other evidence has confirmed or denied Freedom members practicing cannibalism.
  • I Choose to Stay: You can choose to decline the offer of getting into the chopper during the final mission of Call Of Pripyat and stay around however long you want. Once you do so, you have to fend off the last remaining soldiers of the Monolith faction, and then you are able to traverse back into the Laundromat which now has Loners occupying the building thanks to Uncle Yar and Garik showing them a new route to Pripyat. Speaking of Garik, he reappears in the building for you to switch back to the two previous maps that you've explored. You can also at this point ask him (or Pilot if you're in the previous maps) that you want to leave the Zone for good, which effectively ends the game.
  • Impairment Shot: If you drink vodka, your screen will slowly sway side to side and become blurry for several seconds. Now if you drink as much as 15 or even more, you're going to experience a trip far worse than the 'Shrooms effect from Rise of the Triad; in other words, your camera will sway violently and the screen will frequently flash white every few seconds, and it's going to take a LONG while for the effects to dissipate. You'd better not do this while in the middle of combat, an impending emission, or an important mission, as you'll get SPECTACULARLY screwed.
    • Subverted in Call of Pripyat; while you still do suffer from the ill effects of vodka, it also causes you to slowly starve with each drink you take. See Death by Gluttony above.
  • Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: The AI's aim can get... weird. A Duty or Monolith trooper can empty an entire magazine of assault rifle ammo at you at point-blank range and miss completely, while bandits will wing you from a hundred meters off with wildly-fired buckshot. Played straight and justified with zombified stalkers: their lack of intelligence and judgment causes them to fire wildly and blindly towards their targets. Averted completely with grenades in Clear Sky, which will Robotech to land directly at your feet.
  • Infinite Flashlight: Applies to all games, to both the headlamp and the night vision goggles. They never go out or even dim - at most, a low-tier NVG set will sporadically flicker a little.
  • Infinity -1 Sword:
    • The RG-6 in Call of Pripyat. It's the third most powerful weapon in the game and lacks the accuracy of the Gauss rifle or the splash damage of the RPG-7, but you can buy it from traders relatively early in the game and ammunition is a lot more common. Besides, with 6 grenades loaded it doesn't really matter if something survives the first one. On the other hand, it takes about an entire year to reload from empty, grenades can be tricky to come by in significant numbers before hitting Pripyat and getting good rep with the Stalkers in Zaton/Duty in Jupiter... and of course, like the RPG-7, it cannot be upgraded at all and is still quite heavy.
    • The RPG-7 also in Call of Pripyat. It deals the most damage out of any weapon in the game, being able to kill any human and any mutant that isn't a Pseudogiant in one hit (the Pseudogiant takes two shots to kill it). The major drawbacks of this weapon are 1) the rockets and the weapon itself are restrictively heavy to carry, 2) you'll hardly be able to find them in all but two locations in the game, 3) you won't find them in traders' stock until you meet certain achievements.
    • The Lightened L85 in Shadow of Chernobyl is dropped by Master, the target of the assassination given by Snitch in the Bar. Master has an Exoskeleton, but is neutral by default and you have the One-Hit Kill attack of the knife. Kill him, grab the gun and run away before Master's unique shotgun and Exoskeleton-toting buddy reacts. This peculiar L85, in addition of being lighter (hence the name), deteriorates far less than the vanilla version and has an integrated suppressor, meaning it doesn't get damage and accuracy penalties for being silenced. If used with pragmatism, it will carry you almost to the end of the game if you don't feel like swapping to to the F2000 or a 9x39mm weapon.
    • The SSP-99 armor and L-R 300 rifle. The former, also known as the default Ecologist armor, has the best protection levels against anomalies (second behind it's armored variant) but piddly physical protection and can be obtained for free in stashes or, in Shadow of Chernobyl, if you save Kruglov and go to Yantar after. The latter is the default weapon of Mercenaries and, while having the lowest stats for a NATO rifle, is plenty common among Mercs and later Freedom and outperforms almost all non-upgraded or unique Warsaw Pact 5.45mm weapons.
    • The Eliminator in Call of Pripyat. While not the most powerful weapon, it is quite lightweight for a shotgun, and is the only weapon of its class to mount a scope. It can easily dispatch any mutant that isn't a Chimera or Pseudogiant and even Exoskeleton-clad mooks aren't immune to the sheer power of this shotgun. With the right upgrades (especially with the full auto mod), you'll become near unstoppable, and it only gets better when shotgun shells are easy to come by and are cheap as dirt. The only thing to consider is its strenuous reload time. Of course, it's unlikely there will be anything left alive after using up the full magazine, and you can feed in a shell or two during the firefights. There's also only three or four places where you can be certain to find it, only two of which will be available to you before the halfway point. Some artifact hunting will get you enough money to pick one up from Nimble within a couple hours.
    • Strelok's unique Sig 550. While somewhat heavy, by the time you pick it up, chances are you won't care as much about weight. When fully upgraded, it can match both top-tier NATO weapons for hitting power and while it is less accurate than the G36 and has a lower rate of fire than the F2000, it has better handling and unlike either of them can mount every NATO accessory, giving you a weapon that can act as a marksman rifle and an assault weapon, while still mounting a silencer, grenade launcher, and a variety of scopes. Finding it is relatively simple, once you know where to look.
    • Any of the guns that utilize 9x39mm ammo; they are more useful towards the later half of the three games due to their ammunition appearing more commonly at that time and they hit like a bus despite their subsonic velocity (which contributes to the bullets having a very notable arc after firing, thus lessening the chances of a headshot) and hefty weight per ammo carried.
  • Infinity +1 Sword:
    • The Gauss Rifle, a hilariously powerful experimental semi-automatic rifle that can One-Hit Kill literally any enemy in the game and can only be obtained from Monolith troopers at the very end of the main story. Balanced out slightly due to ammo being virtually impossible to find before the Point of No Return and very low rate of fire. It was changed to be only useful against humans and weaker mutants in Call of Pripyat. In that same game there's only one though and if you sell it, you are not getting it back. It doesn't fall under Too Awesome to Use territory in Call of Pripyat, however. Cardan will offer six homemade batteries for 2000 rubles each after you show him the rifle and complete the little miniquest in the lab located in the Iron Forest area in Zaton, which is located at the very southwest corner of the map, and you can repeat the process for as long as you have the dough.
    • The FN F2000 in all three games. A balance of above-average firepower, precision and reliability, comes out of the box with a grenade launcher and a scope integrated and uses the common 5.56x45mm ammo. You get it in Shadow of Chernobyl by looting the bodies of Monolith troops in the Sarcophagus (or, with a lot of luck, in a stash in the Red Forest) and in Clear Sky after crossing all of Limansk-13, right before reaching the Chernobyl NPP. It loses this status in Call of Pripyat, where you can get one at the beginning of the game if you can collect enough money to order an assault rifle from Nimble (not that hard if one takes the time to go artifact hunting) and some luck.
    • A bug in Shadow of Chernobyl means that the humble combat knife can kill every living thing and destroy every destroyable object - including armored personnel carriers - with just one strike. This is surprisingly useful against the psychic Controller mutant, who doesn't have a melee attack and is essentially defenceless at close range. Later games toned the combat knife down (and made the Controller much more dangerous).
  • Informed Ability: In Call of Pripyat you are told the locations of the anomalies change with each Emission. They never have this effect in the actual gameplay and it serves only as a plot point.
  • Informed Equipment:
    • For some odd reason, player characters ALWAYS wear fingerless gloves in the first person, regardless of armor equipped. This becomes quite noticeable because armor you pick up later in game shows you in third person that you're wearing a full-body radiation suit or gloves that aren't fingerless.
    • Fixed in Clear Sky (mostly) as the gloves/sleeves you see are dependent on the body armor you're wearing, and the fix was completed in Call of Pripyat.
  • Initialism Title
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: The 5-foot-tall barbed wire fence that prevents you from exiting each area of the game except via the few designated exit points.
  • Interface Screw: Controllers. Even if it's not attacking you directly, just being around one for long enough can cause your view to sway as if you've had half a dozen bottles of vodka, which can be annoying if you're in the middle of a firefight or trying to get the drop on it. Drinking too much can cause this too, but what do you expect when you kill an entire bottle of vodka in one swig.
  • In the Hood: The less advanced suits that stalkers outside of the military and Ecologist faction have typically has them wearing a hood (alongside a ski mask, a gas mask or a neck gaiter for NPCs) in their outfits. Bandits are always depicted wearing hoods in their outfits, either from a hoodie underneath a leather jacket or a hooded coat, as a consequence of their shady nature and to look cool.
  • Inventory Management Puzzle: A major part of all three games. You've got 50 kg of weight capacity, past which you're reduced to a hobble. At 60 kg, you can't move at all, unless you're wearing the Powered Armor Exoskeleton, which (except in the third game when properly modified) prevents you from sprinting. Between armor, medkits, anti-rads, a handful of artifacts, and ammo, you'll only have room left for two or three guns (which is all you should be carrying anyway) before breaking the weight limit, leaving little room for extra hardware. There are several ways around this: Ignore most of the artillery you come across and leave it right where it is; Make several trips back and forth between the trader and the corpses to offload the extra weapons and ammo; or go the way the developers probably intended, and cache the equipment in nearby stashes. Just like a real Stalker!
  • Ironic Nickname: There are some instances of certain stalkers having nicknames that don't fit in their reputation or are the exact opposite of what they are. Examples include "Lifesaver" for a zombified stalker, "Boss" for a Loner, "Legal" for a Bandit, "Tyrant" for a Freedom fighter, and so forth.
  • It Can Think: Bloodsuckers are smart. Dangerously so.
    • The other mutants, however, are noted to be stupid, as they suicidally charge at you head-on (what with being animals and all, since they rely purely on their instincts instead of intelligence), with the exception of the Burers and Snorks (since in the latter's case, they can actually make [rather] limited use of guerrilla tactics).
    • Controllers, obviously, being the most humanoid mutant. One has a lair in Call of Pripyat, and will actually warn you (via Mind Powers, of course) if you come too close to said lair. Most mindlessly attack, however.
  • It May Help You on Your Quest: The Doctor's stash key.
  • It's Up to You: Subverted in Clear Sky. On the first level, if you don't accomplish the mission objectives, your allies will eventually finish them for you. Also, in Yantar, Lefty's group is perfectly capable of assaulting the factory without your help.
    • Also mostly averted in Shadow of Chernobyl. The friendly AI is good enough that, depending on their equipment and experience level (and that of their enemies), they can win many firefights entirely without your assistance (though they'll usually take increased casualties). Occasionally, they'll even call you up to mock your uselessness if you can't or don't help them fight off an attack.
  • Jackass Genie: The fake endings.
  • Jerkass: You'll be guaranteed to come across more than a few people of any background who tend to be curt and pissy towards other characters in the Zone. Bandits and most Mercenaries in general tend to behave this way, while Monolith members aren't so much as Jerkasses as they are Brainwashed and Crazy. The Ecologists are perhaps the only faction who don't behave ill-mannered towards other people; justified, since they're mainly concerned about researching and studying the Zone and not about petty politicking. Even then, they do have one particular character who happens to be a Dirty Coward substitute of their primary field researcher if he happens to get killed.
  • Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: Shadow of Chernobyl starts out this way until you discover the true identity of your player character. The Marked One is Strelok all along.
  • Just Think of the Potential!: The Ecologists' attitude towards the Zone.
    • Freedom's as well, to a less scientific extent.
  • Kaizo Trap: Lab X-16 is not that dangerous in itself, being populated with one Burner anomaly, scattered Zombies, a few Snorks and a lone Controller who you bump into (unlike the first one you met in Agroprom, who comes from behind you as you reach the exit); the main danger comes form the powerful psi emitter in the middle of the lab. The sewer tunnels leading outside, however, contains more anomalies, much more Snorks with almost no room to dodge their powerful lunge attacks and, if you take a wrong turn, a Pseudogiant.
  • Karma Meter: The game tracks your reputation based on your actions. You get a positive reputation for completing quests or killing mutants, bandits, or members of the Always Chaotic Evil factions. You get a negative reputation for killing members of the neutral Stalker factions. However, the Karma Meter is severely bugged, so that once you reputation gets too high, it circles all the way back to the absolute lowest negative number.
    • Fridge Brilliance: Perhaps it's because nobody actually believes you can be that good.
  • Kleptomaniac Hero: Although most people keep their really valuable stuff either locked away or actually on their person (and thus inaccessible to the player), you can freely steal food and drink from peoples' tables. Interestingly, no one seems to care.
  • Knight Templar: The Duty faction are supposedly campaigning for the destruction of the Zone and will stop at nothing to prevent anybody and anything from spreading its horrific corruption outside its borders. In Call of Pripyat, however, they're not what they claim to be, once their history is dug up.
  • Knockout Ambush: In Clear Sky, Scar is knocked out by a tripmine set up by Bandits in the basement containing Fang's PDA, the Bandits also take all of the player's equipment and money, although it is possible to get all of the stolen equipment back shortly afterwards, the money cannot be retrieved.
  • Landmine Goes Click: Used in Call of Pripyat. Getting to a crashed helicopter requires passing over a minefield, the mine locations can only be spotted by (marginally) darker spots on the ground and verified with bolt tosses. Ground goes click when a bolt hits? Don't walk there. Really, don't. Even in an Exoskeleton, you'll lose half your health on the easiest difficulty. In the default stalker suit, you'll die no matter how many upgrades you've put in.
    • You get to see someone else on the end of this when you finally get to the helicopter...and then a stampede of boars, snorks, and fleshes come burning in, setting off most of the landmines and clearing a path out for you.
  • Large Ham: The Bandits in all three games while in combat.
    "CUT THE BULLSHIT YOU BOZOS! YOU'RE MAKING THE WHOLE BASE SOUND LIKE A USED CAR DEALERSHIP!"
    • Hawaiian, the merchant at the Yanov station in Call of Pripyat.
    "ALOOOOOOOOOOOOHAAAAAAAAAA!"
  • Le Parkour: A mutant example in the case of Snorks when in attack mode.
  • Lead the Target: Thanks to a detailed ballistic system, this is often a necessity. Have fun learning how to use that VSS Vintorez and the subsonic rounds it fires.
  • Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Some artifacts in the game are radioactive, and equipping them might kill you if you don't have any countermeasures, but are completely safe while they're in your bag. Game dialogue in SoC gives us this story:
    One more anecdote... A stalker walks in the bar and says:
    Stalker: Hey, can anyone sell me a Goldfish artifact? Heard it can protect you from bullets.
    Local: Got one, but it's unlikely you're gonna use one - it's very radioactive!
    Stalker: Like I'm going to put it in my pants? Nah, I will wear it on a chain!
  • Load-Bearing Boss: Kill the C-Consciousness? Congratulations, you've just destroyed the only thing keeping the Zone from going out of control.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading: The main problem of the first game. Other two games have long, but not so annoying loading screens.
  • Loan Shark: The bandit leader in the Jupiter area of Call of Pripyat, Jack, runs his business by pushing interest in his clients. One of his, Vano, is unable to pay off his debt to him and the player can assist Vano with his problem in either doing the peaceful way, using shotgun diplomacy, or the old-fashioned hard way of killing the leader and his thugs.
    • Taking the third option is honestly the best, because paying his debt legitimately will get you mugged on the way out. Wasting the group of them will net you a ton of high-end grenades and Jack's rare Armsel shotgun.
  • Lost in Translation: In Russian, "C-Consciousness" is "О-Сознание": either "O-Consciousness" or "R-Ealisation", depending on how you read it.
  • Made of Iron: In Clear Sky, NPCs can absorb far more damage than the player (and friendly NPCs wearing comparable armor). Even on the easiest difficulty, a low-ranking Ukrainian military trooper can easily survive a point-blank shotgun blast or two full magazines of MP-5 fire to the chest. Especially jarring since enemies in the first game were exactly as strong as friendly NPCs and the player, and even enemies wearing exceptionally tough armor could still be dropped by a few well-placed armor-piercing rounds. Headshots from anything will still kill anyone not wearing an Exoskeleton, and even those can be brought down with one armor-piercing assault rifle round to the head.
    • With late-game armour and health artifacts, the player is quite capable of shrugging off automatic gunfire, at least from a single enemy.
      • In SoC, if you're lucky, you can encounter a bandit with three Meat Chunk artifacts in the Junkyard. Put these on together with anti-bleed and you're a freaking walking tank, because the artifacts' effect multiplies instead of adding. High instant damage, however, will still kill you, and since each Meat Chunk makes you 10% more vulnerable to damage overall, so your increased metabolism comes at the price of taking significantly more damage.
    • Played straight in Call of Pripyat too. Only the most powerful sniper rifle in the game will bring down a Monolith trooper with a single headshot. Justified, since they're, well, brainwashed and ignoring damage.
      • Averted by a large number of enemies though, especially depending on difficulty and weapon used. Most bandits are poorly armoured thugs that go down with little trouble. Still played straight by zombies to a certain degree - they are much more resistant to torso/extremity shots (on account of being... well, mindless zombies) but still vulnerable to headshots.
    • Noah is outright Immune to Bullets, capable of surviving several hundred shots from a high-end assault rifle unscathed. The only way to kill him is with several headshots or a direct grenade hit. Made all the more glaring by the fact his only "armor" is a simple trenchcoat. It's suggested that he's got some insanely powerful artifacts in his possession, which may be how he's able to shrug off bullets to the torso.
    • Some mutants also can soak up a lot of damage before finally going down for good. The Pseudogiant, for example, while it was only fairly durable in Shadow of Chernobyl, takes ungodly amounts of punishment to take down in Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, and can take two shots from an RPG-7 in the face, while at the same time whittling away your health faster than the blink of an eye. If you don't have an RPG-7 or Gauss Rifle with you, you better hope you have enough ammo and medkits if you're going to kill this thing, otherwise you'll have to run away, hopefully avoiding its stomp attack which has a damaging area of effect and which can briefly stun you. This makes the Pseudogiant a Boss in Mook Clothing, barring the SoC variant.
    • The Marked One, obviously. When you go to meet Doctor in the Agroprom Underground, an explosive goes off in your face while you're climbing a ladder. You're knocked out and dazed a bit, but you don't take any damage.
  • The Mafiya / Gangbangers: Although Bandits come from loosely organized criminal gangs, they operate in a thoroughly gopnik manner. Their leaders act like avtoritets, however, with Sultan easily being the most notable example of a typical avtoritet.
  • Magnetic Weapons: The Gauss Rifle.
  • Majorly Awesome: The protagonist of Call of Pripyat, SBU Major Degtyarev. His epilogue reveals he goes from this to Colonel Badass, and turns down a desk job to return to the Zone.
  • Malevolent Masked Man: Balaclavas and face wraps are typically worn by bandits and other stalkers, if they're not wearing gas masks or more advanced suits.
  • Mascot Mook: Arguable, but Bloodsucker is one of the most recognizable monsters in the game.
  • The Medic: Camp Doctors who fix you up and sell medical supplies. One of them has a thing for blood, though.
  • Mêlée à Trois:
    • Every faction, be it military, Duty, Freedom, Monolith or Mercs want to kill someone else. There is balance, as the two main rival Stalker factions (Duty and Freedom), tend to occupy only the regions their bases are, only doing some raids on more neutral zones, and the military only patrolling the border, with the occasional raid on a strategically important location. Then there are Mercs and Bandits who attack almost everyone on sight (except Call of Pripyat but that won't last long). Monolith stick to their own zones (except in Shadow of Chernobyl, where they frequently go against Freedom) but are hostile to everyone who steps on their turf. The zombies are self-explanatory. The Loners are notoriously attacked by bandits, the military and some Merc squads, being a full turf war against the former two in Clear Sky. The only faction that doesn't have some sort of war going against someone are the Ecologists, who only have occasional tangles with the Mercenaries.
    • In the first game, Faction Wars was only available in left-behind code, and could only be restored and made into something functional by mods - for example, Military and Duty will raid Bandit and Merc bases on patrols, Freedom will ask for assistance when attacked by mutants, and so on. It made a return for real in Clear Sky, where devs implanted missions wherein you could try to help the faction grow in power. By the time Call of Pripyat rolls around, it manages to hold up a dose of realism.
  • Mexican Standoff: In one particular side quest in Call of Pripyat, the leader of an arms exchange in an abandoned warehouse of the first map turns on the mercenaries and bandits who accompany him during the stalker ambush, should you work for him.
  • Mildly Military: The Freedom faction, which has a command structure of sorts and functions as a paramilitary organization but has no real rank structure and very few rules or regulations. In spite of this they're still quite capable of kicking large amounts of ass.
  • Mind Manipulation: Monolith's soldiers suffer from several of the tropes on this list. They start out crazy with their religious beliefs about the center of the Zone, but once they hit the Zone and fall in with Monolith itself, they're little more than mindless tools with Laser-Guided Amnesia if they ever manage to escape.
  • Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode: There's nothing particularly wrong with the multiplayer, but it plays significantly different from the singleplayer game; rather than an open-world game, it's confined to small maps with old-school gamemodes (free for all, team deathmatch, and capture the flag). Combined with the game requiring nine ports to be forwarded to play and a dearth of American servers note  made many US players consider it to be an effectively "singleplayer" game. The Spiritual Successor - Survarium - on the other hand is exclusively multiplayer.
  • Modular Epilogue: In Call of Pripyat, you have slides based on what side missions you completed and how you completed them, as well as slides for the main story.
  • Money for Nothing: You don't really need to spend your money in Shadow of Chernobyl. Most of what the merchants can sell you, you can get just by doing sidequests for other factions.
  • Multiple Endings: The wish you make upon the Wish Granter varies depending on your actions throughout the game. Hoard money, and you'll wish to be rich. Kill all Faction leaders, and you'll wish to rule the world. Be an extremely evil character, and you'll wish for mankind to be destroyed (controlled in the English translation). Be an extremely good character, and you'll wish for the Zone to disappear. Of course, all these endings are in fact Bad Endings, because the Wish Granter is actually an evil Monkey's Paw that uses whatever wish you make against you to destroy you. The true ending involves discovering the secret behind the Wish Granter and the very existence of the Zone itself, and either choosing to join the Big Bad and help them maintain the Zone, or choosing to defeat the Big Bad and bring an end to the Zone once and for all.
    • Call of Pripyat has a Fallout style multi-part ending, telling the fate for each area and major character based on the player's actions throughout the game.
  • Mysterious Employer: Nobody knows exactly the entity for who the Mercs work, as their jobs range from "artifact hunting" to "wetwork". The Eastern versions of the games implies they're agents working for Western powers such as NATO or the European Union, as they speak Russian with heavy European accents.

    N-R 
  • Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: While you always have your knife with you, every faction likes using guns so much that it has become the standard rule of engagement, so trying to knife your way into a gunfight is downright suicidal. Even when you're stealthing, when you get within less than a meter of a stalker, he'll magically know you're there, turn around blindingly fast with his gun already raised, and pump you full of lead. On the other hand...
    • You can use your knife to slay certain mutants, especially Burers, as they obviously can't use guns. Really, the only mutants that are too impractical to use the knife on are Chimeras and Pseudogiants, since they deal too much damage to even try. In a subversion, the knife can be useful against zombified stalkers, provided that you don't get in their line of sight and you approach quietly. Their reflexes are far slower than those of a normal human, making them valid targets.
    • In Shadow of Chernobyl, one arena match in Rostok forces you to use the knife against a Stalker clad in an Exoskeleton and brandishing an F2000. However, you also receive about four grenades in the match to hopefully get the drop on that guy.
    • It's also the best weapon to keep equipped when going stealthy. Why? Because the games have this irritating habit of having you draw your weapon when you load a save file, and when you have a gun or the binoculars as the last wielded item, that action makes enough noise to alert hostiles that something's up. And if you have grenades or bolts equipped, when you load a game the player character always switches to the noisy-to-draw binoculars. The knife doesn't have that problem.
  • New-Age Retro Hippie: Ganja, Freedom's barman in Clear Sky. Comes complete with reggae music and a fondness for the 'erb. As an added bonus, his name literally means "marijuana" in Indian.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The "Good" and Canon Ending in Shadow of Chernobyl, as seen in Call of Pripyat. Turns out killing the only thing keeping the zone from expanding out of control wasn't such a good idea after all..
  • Night-Vision Goggles: Two kinds are present: the crappy one with low resolution that flickers every once in a while, and the good one that doesn't distort the image and is one hundred percent stable. The low-tier are most often green, while the decent kind is blue in vanilla (green as well in Call of Pripyat). In both cases, the batteries are eternal.
  • Nintendo Hard: A common reviewer complaint, as the game combines "survival horror"-style management of scarce resources with the unforgiving "tactical shooter"-style action of games like Ghost Recon. To quote Zero Punctuation, the average player will likely find themselves pressing quicksave and quickload more often than the Fire button.
  • No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted: all firearms have appropriate bullet drop. This is especially noticeable with the 9x39mm weapons, which use a heavy subsonic round with limited range due to bullet drop. Sniping with a Vintorez, for example, is an affair with a learning curve. There is but one exception, and that is the Gauss rifle.
  • No Canon for the Wicked: The best ending of Shadow of Chernobyl is made canon in Call of Pripyat, so any chance of Marked One making a selfish wish is denied.
  • Non-Indicative Difficulty:
    • The difficulty settings in Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky pretty much only influence what percentage of NPC shots will "glance" and not hit the player, and how much damage they do to both player and Non Player Characters when they hit. Due to a programming oversight, the player has the same resistance on all difficulties. Once you learn how to score headshots reliably, the enemies still have a harder time killing you than you killing them.
    • Call Of Pripyat averts this, removing the "glancing shot" system in favor of a linear damage scale to the player. This has the effect of making the game substantially easier than the other two installments due to the player's relative health being much higher on settings lower than Master difficulty.
  • No Hero Discount:
    • Mostly averted, as doing quests for factions causes respective traders to give you better prices (for gear bought and sold). Additionally, in Call of Pripyat, a fellow military technician (you play an undercover government agent) repairs your gear for free. If you elect to stay in the Zone after the evacuation, this technician is replaced by Uncle Yar, who performs the same service.
    • Also reversed... or something. Sidorovich pays you less for loot compared to Barkeep or Sakharov, mostly because he sells to newbies at lower prices and deals mostly in smuggling non-combat things out of the Zone.
  • Non-Standard Game Over: In Call of Pripyat, when Beard asks you to retrieve a strange glowing artifact in a wrecked ship east of Skadovsk, after retrieving said artifact from the ship, as you try to leave, a Stalker named Tuna stops you and asks for that artifact you have, claiming a friend of his is dying. If you refuse to hand it him, either by telling him that you indeed have it but keep it for yourself, or lie to him that you don't know what that artifact is (highly recommended that you don't take that option), his two buddies will stop you at gunpoint and warn you to not make any sudden moves. You have about five seconds of free movement to attempt an escape (unless you took the third option, which means you won't get any free movement). If you just stand still and let Tuna walk to you, he angrily demands that you hand over that special artifact. If you still refuse to hand it over, you get a bad cutscene where Tuna stuns you with his rifle butt and tells his buddies to shoot you dead. If you do this, there's no way to control your character, as it's a scripted event. The only way to avoid this is by either handing over the artifact to Tuna or shoot him and his buddies down when you refuse the first time. The latter option is better because an important achievement is unlocked after doing this quest, which also contributes to one of the game's many endings.
  • No Scope: It's not uncommon to see players laying in ambush with a sniper rifle at close range in multiplayer matches, as the sniper rifles are much better at piercing armor than the shotguns and the handling penalty doesn't factor in when you stand still for a couple of seconds. The VSS Vintorez in particular is used more often as an assault rifle than as a sniper rifle because of its great handling and full-auto mode with a high rate of fire.
  • Not the Intended Use:
    • Mutants have a limited MGS-style area they can move in. You can actually shoot from outside this area. This makes killing even the most dangerous mutants like the Chimera and Burer a sniper's cakewalk. However, if you don't manage to kill them, one hit will cause them to run away from whoever is shooting at them until either they encounter another opponent or go back to loafing off when no one else is around attacking them.
    • The knife is the weapon of choice for a stealthy player, but not because it's capable of silent kills, not really. Its main attractive point is that it makes zero noise when drawn or holstered. Upon loading a save, thanks to an irritating bug, the player character will pull out either the gun (or the binoculars if you had it or the equally silent bolts) last drawn or holstered, and that makes enough noise to alert enemy stalkers. This doesn't happen if you save with your knife drawn.
  • No Woman's Land: You will be very hard pressed to find a single female character in any of the games of any kind. Guaranteed. See Chromosome Casting above.
  • Oddly Small Organization: Strelok's Loner crew in the backstory was four people if you count Strelok himself, making it the smallest "faction" of the Zone. It didn't affect their effectiveness any, however.
  • One-Hit Kill: In Shadow of Chernobyl, the alt-fire stab attack of your knife kills everything in one hit. Stab a guy in Powered Armor? One-hit kill. Stab an armored personnel carrier? One-hit kill. It's actually rather funny. Hell, in one arena match, you're required to use this attack if you want to survive (you + knifenote  versus some guy with an F2000, the best CQC assault rifle, and an Exosuit). Of course, actually getting close enough to do so is so difficult that this is practically useless unless your target doesn't know you're there, and even then they will notice you if you're less than a meter away, so you have to rush and stab. It's also a surprisingly viable option when forced to engage a Controller or Burer up close - all weapons take too long to recock when pulling them back out after a psi attack or when you have to pick them back off the floor after a disarming psi-pull.
  • One-Man Army: Zigzagged. There are few places where you can go on alone and take out an entire base/lair full of heavily armed soldiers and/or mutants, and still come out alive. In other places you have to rely on numbers to complete your objectives.
    • In the first game, right at the beginning, you can tell a group of stalkers to sit out and let you do your thing Rambo-style on a car park full of bandits that are holding a semi-important NPC, Nimble, hostage. The leader, Petruha, will call you out on it if you do so, and if you come back to his group without completing your objective, he'll mock you for being a wussy and won't give you any support. Complete the objective by yourself and he will be astonished at your success.
    • Played straight in Shadow of Chernobyl, and, depending on the skill of the player, can be taken to ludicrous levels. It's not impossible to rack up kills into the four digits, and keep in mind, every man in the Zone is dangerous. Even the rookies are competent with firearms, to say nothing of the well trained and well equipped military, the experienced and deadly Duty & Freedom factions, and the other various Stalkers who come to the zone and face down terrifying monsters as part of their daily job. You can pick fights with all of these people. And win.
  • One-Time Dungeon: In Call of Pripyat, the Pripyat Underground becomes inaccessible once you (and your four-man party, if you manage to have any of them survive the grueling trip) have reached Pripyat itself. After completing the hospital ambush in the map, you can talk to the guide to have you travel back to the train station. Once there, you can ask the mechanic about trying to go back to the Underground, to which he will say that once the elevator was activated while you and your buddies were on it, the power to that particular shaft went out for good as soon as it reached the bottom. However, there is nothing of particular importance in the Underground to think of aside from a couple of artifacts that you likely had picked up in some empty containers next to the control room that led to the unlocking of the door in the middle section of the Underground, so it isn't worth a bother to stress on.
  • Optional Stealth: You can either play the games by focusing on firepower and noise be damned, or go for the stealthy route with night movements, silenced weapons and a total lack of detection. The latter tends to be the easier way around a heavily guarded area.
  • Order Versus Chaos: Duty vs Freedom. Partially subverted in that neither faction is explicitly 'good' or 'bad', Freedom isn't so much chaos as, well, freedom, and there's nothing stopping the player from allying with both of them.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Bloodsuckers, more like hideous Umbrella mutants than actual vampires. Then there's one STALKER in Call of Pripyat with some form of condition that causes him to crave blood.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: Zombified stalkers are not Romero-style undead cannibals, but rather men who've suffered irreversible brain damage from exposure to psi-emissions. They still retain enough intelligence to fire and reload guns (with reduced speed and accuracy compared to a normal stalker), but they are unable to heal themselves and still shamble about, mumbling incoherent fragments of sentences..
  • Permanently Missable Content: There's sidequests to find and kill unique stalkers. They actually spawn regardless the quests has been started or not, but killing them outside of the quests results in blocking said quests and making their rewards (including rare artifacts) unobtainable.
  • Personal Space Invader: The Controllers have a unique way of going about this. Every other mutant, on the other hand, is fond of getting in close to eat your face. Especially Bloodsuckers.
  • Player-Exclusive Mechanic: Only the player can use the knife. Using mods reveals that NPCs, when forced to fight with one, stand perfectly still while madly swiping with the knife. Some mods, like ''Return to the Zone'', give Knife Stalkers actual AI, which results in them becoming Demonic Spiders, as they are able to quickly approach you and rapidly drain your health with several swipes.
  • Plot Hole: The story of Clear Sky is... hard to follow. Somehow, every single thing that happens in Shadow of Chernobyl, most notably testing of a psi-protection helmet and someone actually making it past the Brain Scorcher and into the center of the Zone, already happened a full year beforehand in Clear Sky, and despite involving nearly all the same people both times not a single one of them comments on it. At times Clear Sky seems less a prequel and more an Alternate Continuity where Strelok is kind of a dick and you're trying to undo his progress.
  • Plot-Powered Stamina: Upon starting the game, the Marked One is never asleep or unconscious for more than a few minutes until the end of the game. Degtayrev at least has the choice to sleep (in order to advance the game clock) but staying up for in-game weeks at a time never has any detrimental effects.
  • Point of No Return:
    • Nasty variant in Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky: the Chernobyl NPP doesn't have a path back to the previous area, and neither do the tunnels under Limansk. Both times there's no warning given in advance. Shadow of Chernobyl makes it easier on you as the enemies are much more generous on terms of loot, allowing you to grind until the end by finding ammo, weapons and medical supplies on dead bodies. In Clear Sky? One stray bullet can doom you to a slow death by blood loss if you run out of medkits or bandages.
    • Polite variant in Call of Pripyat: Kovalsky will warn you that once the evacuation choppers are called, there's no turning back as you, the remnants of Operation Fairway and Strelok have no option but rush to the LZ to keep Monolith from shooting down the helicopters, so you better tie up any loose ends and pay the shopkeepers one last visit while you still can.
  • Post Apocalyptic Gasmask: Justified. Almost all of the human NPCs wear one due to the Zone being contaminated with varying levels of radiation and being infested with dangerous anomalies.
  • Powered Armor: The Exoskeleton suits (which have a rather semi-realistic Industrial-Punk design, with lots of external batteries and cables), which makes the wearer a walking tank, but is also too bulky to sprint in. For you, anyway. Nobody else seems to have any problem running around in them. In Call of Pripyat, you can upgrade past that sole limitation, which more or less makes you unstoppable.
  • Powers That Be: C-Consciousness, the entity that controls the Zone. By the time of Call of Pripyat, they're entirely gone thanks to Strelok eliminating them for good, but things are getting worse, due to their absence.
  • Previous Player-Character Cameo: The player character of Shadow of Chernobyl, the Marked One also known as Strelok, is an important character in the last act of Call of Pripyat.
  • Private Military Contractors: The Mercenaries.
  • Punch-Clock Villain:
    • Borov, a Bandit leader you have to kill in Shadow of Chernobyl, reveals in his journal that he really hates leading around a bunch of evil bastards who'd stab each other for fun and profit and will eventually get him killed, either by them, or by someone pissed off at the bandits enough. Guess what happens...
    • Major Khaletskiy from Clear Sky also qualifies. A high-ranking official from the Military who got captured by Loners for selling them out to the Bandits as well as stealing an important case that was on its way to the trader Sidorovich and is sitting in his cell; dialogues with him reveal that he is just another drone in the Ukrainian military machine who does what his superiors told him to do and the government couldn't care less about their measly payroll for their services in the Zone. This callousness left him bitter and moping about wanting a better cut of the action and he decided to turn to bribery and clandestine activity to relieve himself (as well as his fellow grunts) of the boredom of their routine chores.
    • Pretty much all of the military you'll face in the series (except Call of Pripyat, where you play as one.) counts as this: They will shoot stalkers on sight, but really, they're basically just doing their jobs.
  • Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: Quoth a Freedom stalker during a raid:
    Stalker: How... I... hate... to run!
  • Ragnarök Proofing: Almost completely averted. Buildings, vehicles, secret underground laboratories, and pretty much everything else in the Zone has deteriorated exactly as much as you would expect something that's been abandoned for two decades to have deteriorated. Paint is peeling or gone altogether, wood is beginning to rot, glass has mostly shattered, moss is growing, rust is spreading, and pretty much every vehicle is completely beyond all hope of repair.
    • However, the underground tunnels beneath the Agroprom Research Institute still somehow have enough emergency power left to keep a few lights on even though the Institute has been abandoned for at least six months. (Though, considering it was first a base of Duty and then taken over by military, it`s entirely possible they maintained the wiring and power for their own needs.)
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: In Call of Pripyat the people you can recruit to accompany you to Pripyat itself are a colorful bunch: Zulu, a former Duty member; Vano, a cheerful and friendly unaffiliated Stalker; Sokolov, a military pilot who survived crashing his helicopter in the Zone; and Strider, a former Monolith member.
  • Real Is Brown: Surprisingly subverted for the most part. While the Zone is a land full of Scenery Gorn, there are a few colorful, lush places that help minimize the use of brown backgrounds that usually equate to the despair and hopelessness in a mainly abandoned locale, mixing it with Scenery Porn.
  • Reality Is Out to Lunch: The Anomalies, as well as some of the monsters and nontraditionally anomalous locations. In few other games can you say that you just fought through swarms of mutant hamsters and traversed an endlessly looping room to find a magic oasis in the middle of a radioactive concrete bunker, only to be bitten to death by imaginary dogs.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic:
    • A mild example involving the weapons shooting the default 5.45x39 bullet (the AKs, the Abakan, what have you) and their bizarre inability to pierce armor. "They're FMJ rounds, right? They shouldn't have this much trouble downing a single mook!" Well, there's a funny story behind that...
    • Unlike RGD-5 grenades, F1 frags have absolutely devastating fragmentation, and you'll most likely get yourself killed if you think they're Concussion Frags and spam them willy-nilly like in a generic FPS game. At best, you'll have to waste a bandage. You always need to find solid cover if you're gonna use these, as their item description indicates.
    • The Walker P9M pistol (the S.T.AL.K.E.R. version of the German pistol Walther P99) is one of the sidearms which can be looted from the corpses of members of the Military faction. While encountering soldiers from a former Eastern bloc country wielding NATO guns looks like an example of Improperly Placed Firearms, this sidearm is really used by members of the Security Service of Ukraine, a real life Ukrainian security agency (the Call of Pripyat protagonist is an agent of said agency), though the Military from the series isn't part of it.
  • Red Sky, Take Warning: The anomalous blowouts in Clear Sky, that become more frequent in Call of Pripyat. The moment the sky turns red with white highlights, you better be already in proper cover, very close to it, or have Anabiotic medicine handy; otherwise, have fun reloading a save. They're a scripted event in Shadow of Chernobyl.
  • Reliably Unreliable Guns: NATO weapons are, for the most part, less reliable than their equivalents from the Warsaw Pact countries, in exchange for generally better stats. The L85/IL 86 is hilariously unreliable, starting to fall apart after only a few magazines - the L85 models seen in the zone are the discontinued, faulty A1 versions originally issued to the United Kingdom soldiers. Jams are easily cleared by simply re-chambering the weaponnote , but when you're being chased by a pack of bloodsuckers, jamming can be a death sentence.
  • The Remnant: Subverted in Call of Pripyat. Despite Strelok killing the C-Consciousness, the Monolith Cultists are not only still around, but stronger than ever. However, it's double subverted by the fact that by the time you reach Pripyat, their numbers are dwindling, and once you complete the final mission and choose to stay in the Zone, they're down to their Last Stand until you manage to kill every one of them, at which point they become effectively non-existent in the game.
  • Required Secondary Powers: All of the protagonists appear to have limited Super-Strength; fifty kilograms is well over a hundred pounds, and although it's definitely possible to carry that much nobody's going to be able to sprint for any significant distance while packing that much gear - especially not the Marked One, who judging from his appearance in cutscenes is absolutely rail-thin and poorly muscled. At the very least, Scar has the excuse of "blowouts empower him".
    • At least few of suits in Call of Pripyat can be upgraded with load distribution system to decrease encumbrance.
  • Respawning Enemies: Bandit and merc camps, Duty and Freedom squads, and mutant packs all spawn new members if they die, whether by your hand or not. Surprisingly averted completely in Call of Pripyat when you're taking missions to clean out Monolith bases - with no Monolith Device, Wish Granter, or C-Consciousness to finish their brainwashing, they can't replenish their numbers. If you choose to stay in the Zone after you evac the Hind helicopters in the final mission, you can attack their last, unmarked base in the gas station and remove them from the game entirely.
  • Right-Handed Left-Handed Guns: Every single rifle has its ejection port on the left side. Worse with the world models — they have ejection ports on left and right sides of the receiver.
  • Rocket Jump: Grenade jump to be exact, probably works with the RPG as well. All you need is good timing and a handful of grenades.
  • Rocket-Tag Gameplay: What with the series being on the grittier end of the Fackler Scale of FPS Realism, bullets hurt. Fights between two stalkers are decided in less than ten shots from each part, and none of the common mutants can tough out an entire MP5 magazine to the vital organs while their own attacks (save for the Rodent) kill humans in four or five hits. Often, the winner of a confrontation is decided on who spots who first.
  • Rogue Protagonist: The final boss of Clear Sky is the player character of Shadow of Chernobyl.
  • Ruins of the Modern Age/And Man Grew Proud: And how! Obviously, the area around the Chernobyl power plant is really Truth in Television. And it does have a greatly haunting vibe to it, even without the presence of bizarre mutated monsters and paranormal activity like in the game.

    S-Z 
  • Saharan Shipwreck: The barges and ships in the Zaton area.
    • The area was partially drained of water to help calm the fires at the NPP back in '86. Time finished the job, though not entirely, the place is still somewhat of a swamp.
  • Save Scumming: The Quick Save button is your saviour. It's not uncommon that by starting a fight, quicksaving, and quickloading again, they will completely forget that you just shot their buddy to steal his gun, and offer you a nice hot radioactive cup of tea. Due to the fact that it's entirely possible, in fact VERY probable, that mission-critical NPCs, friends, whole camps will rise and fall almost randomly, saving often is a must.
  • Say My Name: One of the cutscenes is of Strelok approaching the nuclear power plant... and him turning around when a voice screams "STRELOK!".
  • Scenery Gorn: The series does a fairly realistic portrayal of what the real life Exclusion Zone is note  while being mixed with the warped-out, scarred landscapes due to the C-Consciousness' work of tampering with the noosphere. The end result is a surprisingly good portrayal of Scenery Gorn.
  • Scenery Porn: Despite the Gorn-y landscape of the Zone, there are at least some authentic views of beautiful scenery in most of the maps that aren't underground or inside buildings. The Zone does a very good job of mixing the Scenery Gorn with the Porn.
  • Schrödinger's Gun/You Shouldn't Know This Already: You can check stashes at any time, but until you find a PDA saying a Stalker stashed something there the majority of them will be empty.
    • On the other hand, many bodies linger, so going to a previous area and interacting with the corpses can add a bunch of stashes to your PDA.
    • In Lab X-18 there are a couple of doors which can only be unlocked by inputting the correct code on a numeric keypad. These codes do not change, but until you've scavenged them, the number you memorized from a previous play through will not work.
  • See the Invisible: You've got trouble with bloodsuckers? Run into water and watch their trails appear on the surface. There's also the crosshair which turns red if you're looking at an enemy, invisible or not.
  • Sequence Breaking: Two storyline gates are supposed to block progress. The gate at the north of Garbage can be pushed open by moving at the right angle (although this causes one member of Duty to become hostile) or killing the guards, and the second is a brain scorcher that blocks the north exit of Red Forest. In the latter case, the game thinks you've already done what you needed to do in previous levels.
    • Because of the open world nature of the game, it's still possible to do things out of order. After the meeting at The Bar, it is still possible to go west to Rostov or north to the Army Warehouses, where you can get access to more powerful items before continuing on the main quest.
  • Sequel Hook: Call of Pripyat provides several new mysteries just itching to be answered in a sequel that probably will never happen:
    • Who is employing the mercenaries and towards what purpose? Why do some groups of mercenaries seem quite ambivalent towards others? Why was one group cut off from orders and abandoned? Why are they trying to bribe government scientists, and kill others?
    • Even though the C-Consciousness is gone and some of the Monolith forces are shaking off the psychic influence, it seems someone is sending messages to Monolith remnants, possibly giving them commands.
    • It seems the C-Consciousness was keeping the Zone contained, and now it is slowly expanding, possibly to cover the entire planet. What can be done to contain it again?
  • Serial Killer: One is active in the first region of Call Of Pripyat, disguising his kills as bloodsucker attacks. Discovering this and tracking down the killer becomes a major sidequest. At the end of this sidequest, it turns out that The Medic at the wrecked ship was responsible, due to his insatiable craving for blood.
  • Shiny New Ukraine: The people behind the C-Consciousness experiment chose the Chernobyl area for the experiment because it had recently been evacuated and abandoned, following the explosion of reactor 4. This allowed the researchers great freedom and easy secrecy. The Chernobyl region also had a number of large antennas, necessary for the experiment's goal: the controlled manipulation of the noosphere.
  • Shoot the Hostage Taker: One mission in the Jupiter area of Call of Pripyat involves rescuing a captive stalker from bandits in a holed up warehouse. If you choose to storm the place instead of doing the peaceful route, either with the help of the stalker's known allies or by yourself, once you've fought your way to the building, the bandit ringleader has a gun pointed behind the stalker. You have the opportunity to shoot the ringleader in his head, but you have three seconds to do it before he kills the stalker.
  • Shooting Gallery: In the novel Lead Sunset, a flashback of Major Kupriyanov is him and his military academy mates being taken for an exam that involved this. He got the lowest points, because he shot every target he saw with unerring accuracy. Including the kids. When the instructor asked him why, he said something on the lines of "The order was to shoot every target, not every enemy target. I see no difference between a cardboard hostile and a cardboard civilian". Then he was asked if he would still shoot if those were real people. He replied with a hearty "yes", because the command probably had a reason for him to kill these people. He was accepted.
    • Shows up in a way in Clear Sky, usually in the form of "shoot X number of crows in X number of seconds" for a tidy profit.
  • Short-Range Shotgun: Played straight AND averted. Sawed-off shotguns have a ridiculously short range, but regular shotguns have a more realistic range. You can extend the range by using slug and/or dart rounds. Moreso if you give the weapon a rifled barrel.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Gordon Freeman's corpse can be found as an Easter Egg in Shadow of Chernobyl, complete with PDA entry lamenting that he had to sell his crowbar.
    • The Gauss Gun looks like Fallout 2's M72 Gauss rifle exactly except that the Fallout one has a wooden stock and handle. This is reinforced by their ammo, which looks even more similar and is called 2mm caliber in the game files, same as Fallout.
      • Dummied Out content for Clear Sky shows that .223 Pistol and Bozar LMG were supposed to be implemented at some point. Both are fan favorites in Fallout 2.
    • The time machine from Guest from the Future can be found in one of the basements in Limansk in Clear Sky.
    • Last but not least, the Wish Granter at the heart of the Zone is a borderline Mythology Gag of the wish-granting artifact from Roadside Picnic.
  • Shown Their Work: Zigzagged. The parts of Pripyat (especially in the third game) and NPP are amazingly detailed, but most of the locations in first two games simply have no real equivalents in Zone (good luck to find sprawling abandoned factories or train depots). Call of Pripyat features many real life Zone locations placed very close together in completely random places. Developers also managed to create the ballistics models with the X-Ray engine, but bullet drop calcualtion is nowhere near correct (pistol bullets do not hit the ground in 20 meters and rifle ammo, when fired across the wide street from third floor, do not drop enough to hit the second floor on other side).
    • The British L85A1 rifle is realistically depicted as very unreliable.
    • 9x39mm rifles, while correctly depicted with much steeper bullet trajectory, got substantial power buff. In Real Life, SP-6 rounds were rated to penetrate light pistol-proof armor, while in the game they can perforate heaviest armor up to exoskeletons.
    • The drug "Vinca", which appears in Call of Pripyat. The in-game description lists it as "Ukrainian Vikasolum, the artificial equivalent of Vitamin K. The drug increases the blood's coagulation rate, causing small wounds and lacerations to close up faster." Guess what? Although the drug's in-game effects are (understandably) stronger than one would expect, the drug is real, and the effects and description are 100% accurate to its actual purpose.
  • Sinister Geometry: The Monolith.
  • Sniping Mission: At one point in Call of Pripyat you are charged with sniping the local Mercenary leader and their employer representative during the meeting.
    • Grab yourself a VSS Vintorez or slap a scope on a NATO rifle and every mission turns into this.
  • The Soulless: The Monolith faction.
  • Spiritual Successor:
    • Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light are considered by many to be the successors to this franchise. They are very similar in theme; the major difference in setting being Metro taking place mostly in the underground Metro in Moscow, and for the gameplay, that Metro is a traditionally linear FPS as opposed to the sandbox style of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. It helps that both games were developed by people who left during or after Shadow of Chernobyl's development.
    • There is a multiplayer successor to the series by a good chunk of GSC survivors, called Survivarium.
    • Chernobylite, by TheFarm51 (makers of Necro Vision and Painkiller HD), is a single player game which wears its heavy S.T.A.L.K.E.R. influence on its sleeve, though with somewhat more Environmental Narrative Game elements.
  • Sprint Meter: You'll be blessing it and cursing it when you're trying to sprint the last few dozen meters to shelter seconds before a blowout whilst carrying ~57kg of gear, hardly any of which you can afford to drop because it's either 1) mission important, or 2) your weapons and ammo, and thus liable to get stolen if you just leave it there.
  • The Starscream: A minor one, but Borov in Clear Sky greatly dislikes the loose nature of Yoga's leadership of the Bandits and wishes to wrest control from him someday. In Shadow of Chernobyl, Borov indeed becomes the new leader of the Bandits (although a rather ineffectual one at that, who really hates his life of crime), and it's implied in Call of Pripyat that he slaughtered Yoga when he had the opportunity to do so.
  • Storming the Castle: The climactic assault against the Center of the Zone in Shadow of Chernobyl, with all Stalker factions (as well as a Military assault force) making their way to Pripyat and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, battling the forces of Monolith (as well as each other). You'll most likely have go through all of them to get there.
  • Suddenly Sober: Drink a bottle of vodka and you'll be drunk as your screen will sway and, in heavier periods, flash white for several seconds. After a while, you'll be sober and regain your senses.
    • In Call of Pripyat, the resident mechanic in the wrecked Skadovsk ship, Cardan, is resigned to hard drinking after a falling out with two fellow stalkers during a trip to hunt down a special artifact, who later passed away in two separate occasions. When you show him the Gauss Rifle after the Monolith ambush in the Pripyat hospital, however, he gets shocked back into sobriety and swears never to drink again.
  • Super Window Jump: Sure, there's no glass, but after raiding the military encampment at the Agroprom in Shadow of Chernobyl you're probably low on ammo, medkits, and patience, and making a hasty exit jumping out the third-story window and leaving through the nearby gap in the fence rather than fighting your way down through any military guys that are left is a perfectly viable method of leaving, especially with as weird as the fall damage detection system is.
  • Survival Horror: or Survival Shooter as the developers say.
  • Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: When this series starts doing it, you know you're well and truly screwed. In Shadow of Chernobyl, you can raid a minor Monolith armory while in Pripyat, minutes before the final assault on the CNPP. In Call of Pripyat, you can acquire an armored suit from the military tech in Pripyat, and before each military-assigned mission can requisition a goodly amount of meds, ammo, food, and grenades (basically every kind of expendable that a stalker needs) from the tech and medic at the laundromat. Chances are you brought just about everything you could carry with you, though.
    • Averted in other cases, however. It's entirely possible to miss the Bandit's armory in their Dark Valley hideout (and its thirty-plus bottles of vodka) while you were busy killing everyone inside, and you'll only have time to safely root around in Freedom's armory if you chose to side with Duty and eliminate them after the battle. On the other hand, both of them are filled less with medkits or food and more with loads and loads of guns and ammo that you may not have use for. Freedom's armory does have quite a few rifle-launched grenades in it, however, which are almost impossible to find otherwise.
  • Take Your Time: For the main quest. Side quests WILL fail if you take too long (which includes not returning quickly enough to collect your reward). With early missions, Non Player Characters might go do it themselves if you hang around.
  • Talking Is a Free Action: Averted. Talking to characters does NOT pause the game, so while you're busy reading dialogue, Stalkers and mutants are running around killing each other.
    • Same for using your PDA and fiddling with your inventory. Find somewhere nice and quiet to do it first, lest you end up getting your face bitten off whilst you try to pull out your shotgun.
  • Technically-Living Zombie: The zombie stalkers are not dead, they just got most of their higher brain functions fritzed out. They move like zombies, but still have enough brains to use and reload guns - but being as deficient as they are with their brains half-shut down, they're hideously inaccurate. They're not a huge threat due to their poor accuracy. They're still tough, but they go down easy enough if you hit them in the head. Oddly, they're smart enough to scavenge better weapons and more ammo off their zombified compatriots, but they're completely incapable of climbing ladders. They're also largely deaf and rather lacking in the eyesight department, to the point where you can get right up behind them simply by walking even whilst wearing the Exosuits, which are about as stealthy as a clown at a mime convention. Then you can Backstab them with the knife (or a shotgun) for tons of damage. This is mentioned during Uncle Yar's mission in Call of Pripyat, where Uncle Yar and you are strolling through a village infested with zombies, and he comments on how peaceful it is as you walk right past a shambling zombie.
    Uncle Yar: Peaceful like a resort!
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Stalkers in Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat are capable of throwing grenades with inhuman accuracy, tossing them so they land right at your feet. And they do it in unison with their squad.
  • The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Averted. Bandits are seen raiding camps, extorting merchants, shaking down passing stalkers and taking their valuables, taking and holding hostages, etc. They CAN be found sitting around... until they spot you.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
  • Thriving Ghost Town: The largest settlement to appear in the series thus far has a permanent population of less than two dozen, although depending on how many traveling stalkers are passing through at the time that number can swell to as much as fifty.
  • 20 Minutes into the Future - The games take place in 2012, with the first known instances of Stalking happening in 2009.
  • Tomato in the Mirror: YOU are Strelok... which is OK, because Strelok is actually the good guy.
  • Too Awesome to Use: The RPG-7, which has the most rare ammo type in the entire game. One hit will kill literally anything... which is almost completely offset by the fact that you're only guaranteed to find ONE rocket outside of Pripyat and the NPP.
    • It subverts this in Call of Pripyat, where it becomes an Infinity -1 Sword instead, once you've attained certain achievements with traders.
    • To a marginally lesser extent, the PKM light machine gun. It weighs almost as much as the RPG, cannot be properly aimed with, is highly inaccurate, mostly due to the "no aiming" thing, and upgrading just one tier is likely to set you back 20,000 rubles. Add on to that the fact that it fires the 7.62 PP rounds, which can only be found in one faction-neutral location in Clear Sky, and only from the military quartermaster (limited supply) or looting the corpses of zombies which have it in Call of Pripyat, and the thing is the definition of Cool, but Inefficient. To put the icing on the cake, it's a light machine gun, and chews through the ammo that you worked so hard to get like a starved dog. But man does it lay down the hurt!
      • Patches seem to have made the Call of Pripyat version more practical. You still can't run with it and it's still inaccurate, damned heavy, and expensive to use, but you can get a (heavier but allowing for even More Dakka) version for free from Zulu in Pripyat. Ammo can be bought from the trader at Yanov if one gets the Friend of Duty achievement (though there are other ways of getting it and thus preventing making one an enemy to both Duty and Freedom), and aside from maybe a sniper rifle to pick off enemies at a distance or a shotgun for varmint duty the PKM will carry you through the endgame, because nothing that can be killed survives an entire belt.
    • The Gauss Rifle in both Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky, in which it appears as a late-game weapon with pitifully scarce ammo, and the latter version is only useful for the endgame. Averted in Call of Pripyat, where it instead becomes an Infinity +1 Sword.
  • Too Dumb to Live / Miles Gloriosus: Magpie/Flint in Call of Pripyat for some reason thinks taking credit for the player's quest completion is a good idea when people in the same building (one who is within 30 feet) can confirm he is lying through his teeth. He also has a habit of bragging about his double crosses including the one where the crossed people didn't die. When the player finishes up the quest chain, he predictably gets killed. THREE factions line up to do it for you: Freedom for robbing their customers, Duty for backstabbing artifact-hunters, and the mutant-hunting loners for leaving Crab to die in the mutant lair.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Nimble, the weedy guy your first real mission focused on saving from some poorly armed bandits from in the very beginning of Shadow of Chernobyl, and originally a recently fresh neophyte of the Clear Sky faction in Clear Sky, becomes a master arms dealer, and one of the few ways to get an Exosuit, in Call of Pripyat.
    • There's also Petruha, who was a rookie doing scouting duty for Wolf in the Cordon in the first game. In Call of Pripyat, he's an experienced artifact hunter who's made his way to the center of the Zone and has taken a rookie under his wing. Although, unfortunately for Petruha, since he's sporting rather mediocre equipment (yet, it's much better than what he had in Shadow of Chernobyl), it's more than likely he'll die after you meet him.
      • On the other hand, with a little bit of work you can trade him and his rookie buddy Awl some real equipment, resulting in two pretty badass fighters. The only thing you can't do is have them change outfits (applies to every NPC in all three games), unfortunately.
    • Also, in Call of Pripyat, if you manage to save the entire squad of Ecologists during their volunteer job of helping out the scientists in the second map, including the notoriously difficult Escort Mission, later on, they'll go from being clad in mediocre stalker suits and brandishing average Warsaw Pact weaponry to wearing snappy SEVA suits and badass-looking Exoskeletons and sporting powerful NATO weaponry. They'll even reward you with some nice equipment if you visit them once more. However, they'll remain outside the scientist bunker for the rest of the game unless an emission occurs.
  • Took a Level in Kindness: Mitay in Clear Sky was a member of Duty who served as their trader and had a reputation for being a Jerkass to anyone he comes across, even to his fellow Duty members. In Call of Pripyat, he officially left the faction because of his tactlessness and became a regular loner who eventually got captured by bandits during a trek. If you manage to rescue him from his captors, he becomes far more civil to you than he was in Clear Sky, speculating that his jadedness caught up to him and decided he wanted to change for the better.
  • Town with a Dark Secret: Limansk-13 was this before the Chernobyl disaster. On top of being so remote and secretive many people doubted it's existence, the population was extremely distrustful of non-residents, mumbling to themselves and constantly praising the Soviet regime even during food shortages. In addition, the inhabitants of the smaller villages nearby always had violent headaches when they stayed nearby, something Forester blames the radio research center the city housed and their massive antenna for. The research center studied possible applications of mind control via radiowaves, with the antenna being the first field test of their research.
  • Truce Zone:
    • The Yanov train station in Call of Pripyat, out of necessity. It's the only building in the area that is safe from emissions, free from anomalies, and large enough to house a sizable population of Stalkers, so the Duty and Freedom detachments sent to that area of the Zone have agreed to treat it as neutral ground, allow each other to operate freely within the immediate vicinity, and work together to defend it. Once you're out of sight of the train station, however, the two factions are still openly at war, and it's implied that the main Duty and Freedom commanders (who are on the other side of the Zone) are unaware of the train station arrangement.
    • The Skadovsk wrecked ship in the Zaton map also serves as one for both Loners and Bandits, despite their mutual hatred of each other. A prominent ensemble of significant ranking members belonging to both factions happen to take residence in the ship and offer jobs to would-be seekers of fortune.
  • 20 Bear Asses: The various "bring a monster part" optional side missions. Most provide shotgun ammunition, and the best way to do them is actually to get the various mutant bits (one of the two kinds of dog tail, Bloodsucker jaws, Flesh eyes, Boar feet, etcetera) and THEN take the mission. Of course, the "where the hell is the tail/eyes/jaw/feet/etc, I see them just fine" still applies, as it'll take you quite a while to start finding parts with regularity. Technically it's only one bear ass, since they only ask for one part at a time, but the principle's the same.
    • Lampshaded and justified - most of the mission givers acknowledge it's inane, time consuming, and stupid, but they get tidy profits off of superstituous idiots/newbies, scientists wishing to study how mutants behave and perceive the world, and black market dealers who sell usable creature parts for money (supposedly, a whole line of illegal fur coats made of psuedodog tails are popular in Russia, and so on.)
  • Uncertain Doom: Scar becomes an example of this at the end of Clear Sky. Considering he was right next to a deadly emission when it went out, it's not hard for one to come to the conclusion he met a dark fate, by either dying, becoming a zombie or becoming one of Monolith's soldiers.
  • Video Game Caring Potential:
    • The player may find badly-wounded NPCs curled up and crying out in pain. If the player goes up and interacts with them, they will have the option to give them a Medkit so that they can survive. The problem with that is that the people who shot them down in the first place may likely still be around, and so will only end up shooting them down again for good. So do you save the badly wounded individual crying out for help by killing his assailants (who may be nominally friend or foe) and healing him, or leave him to die? Ties in with Video Game Cruelty Potential. If you think there might be baddies about, healing him and having another gun in the fight or a distraction could be useful. On the other hand, finishing him off and looting his corpse for ammo and gear is also a viable option. Or both, healing him, using him in a gunfight, and then shooting him in the back.
    • Another jarring but subtle occurrence of this happens near the end of the Call of Pripyat main storyline. In one of the missions, you will be sent out with a couple of troopers to ambush and get ambushed by a Monolith patrol. If you lose a few or all of them, the atmosphere back at base goes from lively conversation to solemn silence.
    • Also, you can find a group of mercenaries camping in a substation in Zaton. They need a day's supply of food, badly. If you manage to give them what they need, not only do they welcome you to their camp (and allow you to grab one of three important toolkits for an important sidequest), but later on, when another group of mercenaries have left their duty of guarding a scientist bunker in Yanov, you can even recruit these Zaton mercenaries to guard that bunker. If you do, they'll gladly accept you into their new encampment.
  • Visible Invisibility: Poltergeists and Bloodsuckers fit the "Predator" version. Poltergeists appear as a distortion with embers or electric arcs around it, Bloodsuckers have Glowing Eyes and become slightly opaque when charging at you.
  • Vodka Drunkenski: See Booze-Based Buff above.
  • Vulnerable Civilians: Other than the two traders (who sit deep inside neutral bunkers that force you to holster your weapon when you enter), every character in the game world, including major characters, can be killed. Because mutants, bandits, mercenaries, and the military randomly attack Stalker settlements. Luckily for you, you can scavenge their PDA for quests and loot.
    • You can actually kill all but one of the traders, you just have to wait. True, code-wise that is not the true Sidorovich, since if you were to somehow go back to the first area, he would still be there, but the thought still counts.
    • Played straight in one case in Call of Pripyat: two NPCs waiting for you outside to storm a building are invincible until you talk to them and start the mission - not surprising when you found them being relentlessly attacked by pack of dogs and rats.
  • Warp Whistle: Both Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat have guides - stalkers that'll take you directly to specific areas, for a varying fee. They're more necessary in Call of Pripyat, however, considering that the guides in the mission hubs are the only way to get from one map to another.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Mutants... can't climb. And neither do humans (aside from both lifeforms using the stairs). Only you can, and this can be exploited to your advantage if you find a high enough ledge and/or find a usable ladder on a particular building. That said, you still have to watch out for Controllers and/or Burers, though; the former can interrupt your assault by telekinetically disorienting you from a distance if you don't have a solid barrier near you, while the latter can still snatch your weapon away despite your height advantage.
  • Weaponized Landmark: The Brain Scorcher is the Duga-1 radar, albeit much smaller (the real life Duga-1 has 25 antennas; the Brain Scorcher only 5). The devs used it as it was the source of several conspiracy theories that the radar was actually an emitter used for mind or weather control purposes, or that the Chernobyl Disaster happened to cover up the failure of said experiments.
  • Welcome to Corneria: In the bar area, one character in particular (Snitch) repeats the same two phrases. Also the current page quote and the last page quote.
    I said come in! Don't stand there.
    Get out of here stalker!
    • Most of the patrons at the bar will repeat the same few lines of dialogue to no one in particular, justified since it's all drunk-talk.
    • The scientist merchant at Yantar. "Hello? Hello!". Amusingly, due to a bug, he keeps saying it even when you leave. If your surroundings are quiet, you can hear him from several meters away. Even if you're out of the bunker.
    • A lesser-known one is if you try to go to the Bar without grabbing the military documents: the Warrant Officer from Duty will constantly repeat "Buzz off, stalker. We don't let every loser go through!" each time you approach. As with the "get out of here stalker" Stalker, he'll often say it twice.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: The unnamed stalker that rescues you in the intro of Shadow of Chernobyl is never mentioned again in either of the three games. It could be speculated that he probably went off on another quest and met an untimely demise off-screen or probably met a Fate Worse than Death.
  • What the Hell, Player?:
    • In Shadow of Chernobyl, shooting Arnie, the Arena organizer, pisses the Barkeep right off, who curses you while placing a bounty on your head. Shooting his replacements gets increasingly confused and even more enraged comments from the Barkeep.
    • In the same game, you can tell Petruha and the rookie stalker squad to not assist you on your assault on the makeshift bandit base. Petruha will tell you off for being a Rambo wannabe. If you manage to wipe the base out singlehandedly (which is quite a feat on harder difficulties), Petruha will be astonished. If you come back before killing all the bandits, Petruha will mock you and tell you to piss off.
  • "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Call of Pripyat ends this way.
  • Wide-Open Sandbox: For the most part. More restrictive than Fallout, but has more overall quests, an active ecosystem, and, occasionally, people fighting desperate battles against each other/mutants. That said, in the first game up until you reach the CNPP itself there's literally nothing stopping you from turning around and walking all the way back to the starting village if you want to. The third lets you turn around and head back to the beginning area at pretty much any time.
  • With This Herring: Averted. In the first and second installments, you start as an accident victim theoretically indebted to your helpers. In the third, you are equipped with average gear quite well suited for your default task.
    • Justified in all cases, since as mentioned you're benefitting from a Bedouin Rescue Service in the first two games. In the third, you're undercover since being dropped in the starting area with top-of-the-line gear would be too conspicuous.
    • Played straight in the penultimate round of the Arena in Shadow of Chernobyl, in which you fight a Master Stalker in full Powered Armor armed with the 11th-Hour Superpower assault rifle... while you're armed with only a knife and no armor of your own. It's not as hopeless a fight as you might think, though, since the alt-fire of the knife in Shadow of Chernobyl is a one-hit kill and you have four F1 grenades (much more powerful and with a wider radius than regular ones).
  • Wizard Needs Food Badly: It may not be obvious at first, but hunger is a real meter in all three games. If you're running low, an icon of a spoon and a fork appears on the HUD, and the longer you ignore it the worse it gets until you eat. Go hungry for too long and you'll lose out on stamina and suffer Damage Over Time just like being heavily irradiated. In Call of Pripyat, drinking vodka increases hunger, and you can starve to death if you hit the bottle too hard.
  • World of Badass: The Zone is basically the animate personification of natural selection; anyone who isn't cut out to survive there will die, usually very quickly and very horribly. As such, anyone who survives in the Zone for any length of time is going to be pretty hardcore. Stalkers are people who venture out into a chaotic reality-warping hellhole of an Eldritch Location, which is infested with dangerous mutants, deadly anomalies, instantly-fatal pockets of radiation, and heavily-armed hostile humans who want nothing more than to kill you and take everything of value you carry. They do this for a living. Getting into a massive firefight with a gang of bandits, running in terror from a pack of hideously mutated wild dogs, walking through a tear in the fabric of reality itself in order to unearth a mysterious glowing trinket, hiding in a grate to escape a head-exploding psionic storm, and running back to town with monsters hot on your heels are all in a day's work for the average stalker. And once they've sold the booty, patched up their wounds, and taken some time to rest, eat, and relax, they head back out and do it all over again.
  • The World Is Not Ready: C-Consciousness's reason for hiding the true origin and nature of the Zone.
  • You Wake Up in a Room: The beginning of Shadow of Chernobyl has you wake up in Sidorovich's bunker after the unknown stalker under his payroll manages to rescue you from the destroyed Death Truck in the intro.
  • Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The Freedom faction has one defined goal: they want to open the Zone to the world because of its many wonders that could benefit humanity. Duty, the rival faction, however, sees this as spreading the Zone's corruption to the entire world and calls them anarchistic terrorists who have no idea the dangers they're dealing with and letting out. The two factions are constantly at each others' throats for these conflicting interests.
  • Zombie Gait:
    • Zombified stalkers shuffle slowly while moaning out Russian phrases yet are still quite capable of firing and reloading automatic weapons (though they're hilariously incapable of aiming those weapons}. When they die, they do cry for their mothers, and in fact, most of their phrases are actually fragments of the stuff stalkers talk about:
      ...it's so cold here...
      ...just one more artifact, aarrrgh, then I would...
    • Snorks count a bit, but run on all fours, since their bodies cannot support a straight posture.

...I said come in, don't stand there!


Alternative Title(s): STALKER Shadow Of Chernobyl

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