YMMV / S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

• Adaptation Displacement:
  • Most players are unaware of the novel and the film. Most of the ones that are aware have looked up the novel and film because of the game.
  • And even fewer people know that the game is also partially based on another short story of the Strugatsky Brothers, The Forgotten Experiment, which features concepts of quasi-natural yet explained origin of the Zone and scientists working in the Zone. Most of those that know this learned it because of an Easter Egg in Metro 2033, a Spiritual Sequel to S.T.A.L.K.E.R..
• Broken Base: The MISERY mod. Is it a realistic representation of the brutality of the Zone and the logical conclusion to the survival aspects and Nintendo Hard difficulty of the original trilogy, or is it an ugly, artificially difficult timesink bloated with unnecessary mechanics?
• Captain Obvious Reveal: If the player is even remotely familiar with the Zone, their first guess in investigating the cause of Operation Fairway's failure in Call of Pripyat is likely going to be airborne anomalies — especially if one remembers their actual appearance in the penultimate level of Shadow of Chernobyl — making the supposedly important late game revelation by Strelok potentially come off as this trope.
• Common Knowledge: A common belief in the community is that higher difficulties make enemies less bullet-spongey due to both the player and NPCs having increased damage, most notably on the Master difficulty which results in people recommending said difficulty to make the game "easier". This isn't actually the case, as not only do NPCs' damage resistance and damage output stay the same, but in Shadow of Chernobyl, the player does less damage the higher the difficulty.
• Complete Monster: Even in this Eldritch Location filled with mutants and anomalies, these two prove that Humans Are the Real Monsters:
  • Shadow of Chernobyl & Call of Prypiat: Colonel Skull is the leader of Silence, a squad of Duty extremists who deserted and rebelled against General Voronin's ceasefire pact with Freedom. A bloodthirsty warmonger himself, Skull launched his own crusade to exterminate Freedom from the face of the Zone by going after their "breeding ground", cowardly executing any patrol that they come across and also witnesses who refuse to keep quiet about the war crimes. If the Marked One decides to help Silence invade the Freedom base, Skull will attempt to massacre everyone inside. Returning months later, Skull has joined a group of mercenaries stationed at the bunker near Yanov Station, leaving the entire laboratory and its staff defenseless when participating in an ambush to steal documents about the Gauss rifle for his client.
  • Clear Sky prequel: Yoga, the original head of the Bandits, is a sociopathic and tyrannical crime lord known for his needlessly cruel way of handling problems, which he sees as implementing his own brand of "order" in the Zone—as seen when he murders his own spy and wipes out La Résistance. Yoga slaughters innocent Loners during the Faction Wars to expand his empire until the neutral community is left devastated, even running a POW Camp where people are forced to search for treasures near areas of radiation and anomalies.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The wild dogs. You could be a top-level Stalker outfitted with exoskeleton armor and the finest of guns, but you'd still have to make a frenzied dash past the pack of wild dogs in front of the Duty compound to get in. The dogs don't hit quite as hard as about anything else in the Zone, but their biggest threat comes from the damage they do to your armor, which in Shadow of Chernobyl can't be fixed, meaning your expensive suit can get shredded in seconds. Alternately, you could just shoot one or two. If you get lucky and kill the pack alpha, the rest of them run away.
  • The Poltergeists in the Red Forest mine in Clear Sky are a subject of many angry message board rants. They toss metallic water heaters at you which can kill you in one hit and are almost undodgeable. Going up against them can also result in being killed by a weapon without said weapon being fired — nothing like being telekinetically bludgeoned to death with a dropped assault rifle.
  • The Poltergeists in Shadow of Chernobyl aren't a bowl of cherries either. Sure, they can't one-hit-kill you, but you can't get rid of most of the stuff they throw, the damned things move FAST, and there are up to eight in X18, the first time you'll run into them. Aim for the center of the flying ball of sparks and be ready to heal. It also doesn't help that they can see through walls. Fortunately, they were nerfed for Call of Pripyat. Except for one poltergeist towards the end (that has ShoC's poltergeists see through walls abilities,) CoP poltergeists can only see you if you're moving, so all you have to do is stand still and they will lose sight of you. This also works for pyrogeists.
  • Call of Pripyat makes up for this by adding psychic dwarves who can telekinetically steal your weapon and then throw it halfway across the map. When they're not throwing gas tanks at you, that is. The burers are easy to deal with when you learn how they act: Just use a knife. They can't pull the knife out the player's hands and the knife inflicts enough damage to kill it in 6-7 stabs. Just don't try it if there's a second burer nearby. Alternatively, use the RPG.
  • Any enemy packing an RPG in Shadow of Chernobyl. The blast radius is big enough that you will hardly have a chance to dodge, unless you know where they are and start moving the instant they fire. Even if you dodge, you'll still get knocked around by the blast, so good luck seeing clearly enough to return fire. And of course, the RPG is heavy enough and there's little enough ammo that you can't reasonably carry it with you. Your best bet is to quicksave and try to snipe them before they see you.
  • Bloodsuckers. The Invisibility Cloak is one thing, but they're surprisingly resilient, hit hard, and often come in packs.
• Difficulty Spike: The Garbage in the first two games. In addition to being home to packs of blind dogs and the occasional pseudodog, large anomaly fields and radiation hotspots:
  • In Shadow Of Chernobyl, this is where you'll meet the Bandits in numbers for the first time, who'll constantly harass you during your time there, as well as guarding the access to Agroprom. Luckily, they're not very numerous or well-equipped and are in a turf war with the Loners, meaning you will rarely encounter them without some backup nearby.
  • In Clear Sky, while you're better equipped than in Shadow of Chernobyl thanks to Clear Sky and your tangles with the Military in the Cordon, the Bandits control the Garbage and will rob you of all your money the first time you enter it. Refusing to hand over your cash makes them permanently hostile (making the Bandit technician, the only one able to fully upgrade the SEVA suit, locked out) and what they lack in equipment, they more than make up for it in numbers, as well as being all over the place. The only safe spot on the map, at first, is a tiny half-collapsed building occupied by Loners, which is not emission-proof and frequently harassed by blind dogs. If you take the time to help the local Loners as well as Duty and Freedom in their respective areas nearby, the difficulty drops as they send teams to slowly chip away at the Bandits' numbers and take control of the entrances. By the time the battle ends, the Bandits are down to a few resistance pockets and their main base, which you can wipe out by joining the Loners. Once you're done, the Garbage rivals Cordon in terms of safety.
• Fan Nickname: "Vova Vist" for the infamous machinegunner at the Military Outpost in Clear Sky. The name comes from a live-streamed playthrough of a well-known Russian video game blogger Maddyson, where he spent two real life hours trying to clear out the outpost, culminating with him dramatically assaulting the machine gun nest, dragging the soldier's corpse out on the road, emptying a pistol magazine into the head and proclaiming his mastery over the game. Vova Vist also has a parody song dedicated to him.
• Fountain of Memes: The Bandits. One of their battle cries "a nu cheeki breeki iv damke" has become a memetic Catchphrase for them, their theme in Clear Sky has become a Leitmotif for slav memes, and have become the unofficial face of the series.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Most fans of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are also fans of Metro 2033.
  • Half-Life fans tend to get along with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fandom as well, given the second game taking place in a similarly Eastern-European environment, and fans of the initial story concept for Half-Life 2 have noted S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has a very similar feel and aesthetic to What Could Have Been for that game. It's not uncommon to see S.T.A.L.K.E.R. assets show up in Half-Life 2 Beta restoration mods.
  • There is a decent amount of shared fans with Pathologic, due to the game's setting and bleak atmosphere being similar.
• Game-Breaker:
  • When you do get one, usually mid-to-late game, the Vintar BC (VSS Vintorez) Sniper Rifle is one of the best guns for any situation in all three games. Its scope lacks nothing compared to that of the two Dragunov variants, its ammo is really cheap by comparison to sniper ammo, it's light (more than 1.5 kg lighter than an unloaded SVD) and compact enough that you have no penalties in turning speed and can even sprint with it on hand, and as long as you can reliably compensate for the bullet drop, it's deadly accurate. It helps that General Voronin showers you with high-quality armor-piercing SP-6 rounds for it in exchange for trivial missions in Shadow of Chernobyl, and there are a lot of stashes and stalkers using 9x39mm guns in Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat, so ammo is never at a premium if you know how and where to get it. In fact, with a little bit of exploring in Clear Sky, you can pick up Scar's Vintar within twenty minutes of starting a new game (it's broken though and needs to be repaired).
  • The Gauss Rifle in Call of Pripyat. It can kill every human enemy in the game and can take down any mutant that is not a Pseudogiant (though it itself can be killed in 2-3 shots from the weapon.) After you show Cardan the weapon and retrieve the documents concerning about the experimentation of the gun, he will offer you homemade batteries for 2000 RU each, essentially farming unlimited ammunition for your Infinity +1 Sword.
  • Certain artifacts fall into this as well. Most artifacts give increased protection against certain types of damage, but often release radiation, making it necessary to either pair them with an artifact that absorbs radiation (most of which have their own side effects) or pop an antirad or bottle of vodka every couple minutes. In Shadow of Chernobyl, certain ones don't. The Flash and Moonlight artifacts all give large-scale benefits to your Sprint Meter (wearing one Moonlight or two Flash artifacts can let you sprint indefinitely so long as you aren't above the first weight limit), and their only negative effect is an increased vulnerability to electricity. Electrical anomalies are encountered maybe three times, and actually spawn more of these artifacts. Picking up a handful of Flashes, or if you're incredibly lucky, a pair of Moonlights at the Agroprom Underground is incredibly easy and makes it simple to outrun the wildlife and hostile stalkers when engagement isn't an option, and makes shuttling tons of gear back and forth between maps a cakewalk.
    • Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat also added and changed some artifacts, creating a category of them that absorb radiation, essentially allowing you to permanently offset the radiation generation of other artifacts. A couple of these combined with armour upgraded for extra artifact capacity and whichever artifact you happen to want or need to use can make your life a lot easier, whether it's by upping your carry capacity, giving you constant health regen/wound healing, or making you more resistant to the elemental effects of certain anomalies.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Blind Dogs and Pseudodogs. Ridiculously hard to get a headshot on, drop near-worthless parts only one trader (Professor Sakharov) wants, and TRAVEL IN PACKS. Pack a shotgun or submachine gun and a bunch of medkits, or suffer a Death of a Thousand Cuts. Or cull their numbers from a good distance, that works too.
  • The same goes for the rats, although they're called Hamsters or Rodents. They lie somewhere between this trope and Demonic Spiders, since even a single one of them can tear your armor surprisingly quickly.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • When Pseudodogs charge towards you and attack, there is a very small chance that the physics engine will glitch and you will be propelled several hundred meters straight up at high speed. This has never been fixed despite having been present since the game was released.
  • There's also the knife's secondary attack, which is able to One-Hit Kill everything. Including armored personnel carriers. Sadly fixed in Call of Pripyat.
  • If you die just as you are transitioning from one area to the next, you will spawn in dead, unable to use your weapon or access your inventory or talk to people, but mobile and completely immortal.
  • The armour repairing trick with four battery artifacts. Collecting at least 4 artifacts of the flame/electricity battery type, wearing them, then jumping into a fire/electrical surge will restore your HP, and more importantly and absolutely a bug and not a feature, repair your armor (something otherwise impossible in the vanilla Shadow of Chernobyl).
  • In Clear Sky, the Exoskeleton's upgraded night vision can see through the Invisibility Cloak of a bloodsucker. They're still damn fast and tough, but suddenly you'll be hoping for them to attack you at night.
  • The "You see Ivan" meme is based on characters holding weapons using the animations for completely different ones. The meme is based on one image in particular where a bandit with a pistol holds his off hand in front of the pistol like he's holding a rifle.
• It Was His Sled: Marked One is brainwashed Strelok.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Get out of here, Stalker."
  • "I said come in, don't stand there!" "I said come in, don't stand there!" "I said come in, don't stand there!" "I said come in, don't stand there!" "I said come in, don't stand there!" "I said come in, don't stand there!" "I said—"
    • From the guard's brother who's blocking the bar's backroom, we also have "You can't go there!"
  • "Blowout soon fellow stalker!" "Oh really? when?"◊ "NOW."
  • "Buzz off, Stalker. We don't let every loser go through." Less known than DON'T STAND THERE, though.
  • "A NU CHEEKI BREEKI IV DAMKE!"
  • "AYY MLYAAA!" ^Explanation  One of the Bandit NPC's quotes upon dying.
  • "HOWDY HO!"
  • "He was a good stalker!"
  • "You see Ivan◊, when you hold peestol like me, you shall never shoot the inaccurate because of fear of shooting fingers."
  • "Such is life in the zone."
  • "Shouldn't have come here, stalker. Now you will be WORM FOOD."
  • "IN A PERFECT WORLD, MEN LIKE ME WOULD NOT EXIST." ^Explanation  Based on a clip from SsethTzeentach's review of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series, which itself had a clip from the eponymous Justin Kuritzkes (of Potion Seller fame) video; where he splices snippets of the video during a Controller's psionic-blast attacks. It has since become parroted amongst videos and posts involving the Controller.
  • "Game over." ^Explanation  Due to the franchise's Nintendo Hard difficulty, the "Game over" text has become a recurring joke for players who had unfortunate or downright outlandish deaths due to bugs, especially if their save data has been corrupted (as the said text shows up when loading them) upon playing with mods.
  • "Degtyarev was offered a promotion to colonel." ^Explanation  A meme from the Russian-speaking community of the game, coming from a video where Degtyarev gets promoted despite killing the entire evacuating squad. It gets applied to everything (even the Zone itself) getting promoted to colonel for little rhyme or reason, though overuse has made it a Discredited Meme.
  • "You may as well have brought tin cans." ^Explanation  Another meme from the Russian-speaking community, coming from Sidorovich's line when a trade is rejected. The memorability of the line has resulted in images of the Marked One actually bringing tin cans, and Tourist's Delight being interpreted as Sidorovich's Trademark Favorite Food.
• Mexicans Love Speedy Gonzales: The games are rather understandably extremely popular in Russia.
• Narm: The English voice acting can get rather... enthusiastic. Fortunately, it's fairly easy to change all the non-essential spoken dialogue back to the Russian originals.
  • The aforementioned worm food line.
  • You can listen to the wonderful voice acting from Call of Pripyat here!
  • Some of the Player Character's responses to dialogue can seem bizarrely nonchalant, with responses like "Cool", or "'Aight" as your only option after fairly in-depth, complicated, or sometimes sad monologues. This is part of the Narm Charm.
  • Narm Charm: For what it's worth, the ridiculous English dub provides some much-needed comic relief in an otherwise bleak and frightening setting. It's also worth noting if you want to hear some of the memetic dialogue in game you'll want to keep the English voices.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page, which it earned.
• Obvious Beta: Both Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky were this at release, though they were both eventually patched to full playability - sort of. Call of Pripyat was playable straight out of the box, because the non-English versions were the Obvious Beta. In any case, for all three games, there are still a few Game Breaking Bugs that fans have created "unofficial patches" for.
• Scrappy Mechanic
  • Faction Wars are utterly broken and annoying in Clear Sky. Aside from the numerous Game Breaking Bugs associated with them, once you join a faction you will get numerous messages from them asking for your help fending off mutants or enemy factions, even if you're in a location where you are unable to help them like Limansk. This goes double for the poorly-equipped Bandits as you make enemies with not only the Loners but Duty as well.
  • Emissions are much more annoying in Clear Sky than they are in Call of Pripyat. Instead of a set chance of them happening every couple of in-game hours, there's a chance they'll happen very soon after you arrive in another area. This chance increases for every time you don't get an emission until it becomes high enough that you will get an emission, whether you like it or not. And oftentimes, you will find yourself far away from the nearest safe zone that may or may not be guarded by mutants or hostile Stalkers depending on how you play the Faction Wars.
• Sequel Displacement: If you consider Shadow Of Chernobyl as a Spiritual Successor to the MS-DOS STALKER game that was released 14 years earlier in 1994.
• Sequelitis: Clear Sky, when compared to Shadow of Chernobyl, was criticized by players for being incredibly buggy to the point of breaking the game by mistake and for having a few Fake Difficulty moments such as homing grenades thrown by NPCs and the main entrance to the Cordon being guarded by an inhumanly accurate MG nest. The only way to fix most of these player nuisances is through extensive modding.
• Special Effects Failure: For some reason the sound of choppers overhead can be interrupted by breaking crates. Also the glowing eyes of the mutants can look a bit weird up close; for some reason the same effect is used for actual lights.
• Speedy Techno Remake: The "Bandit Radio Song" from Clear Sky had the infamous "Cheeki Breeki Hardbass Anthem" as one. Doubles into Parody Displacement territory as well, since a whole lot of people (even those who have never played the game) recognize the latter song more, due to being heavily associated with the Gopnik culture.
• Spiritual Licensee: There's no official connection to either Roadside Picnic or Stalker (1979), but so much is clearly lifted from them it's often assumed (by those who are even aware of their existence) the game is licensed.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Call of Pripyat is noticeably more polished than the previous two games, adding multiple UI improvements, removing Clear Sky's infamous homing grenades and bug-ridden Faction Wars, giving the player decent equipment from the beginning and (most importantly) making the game playable out of the box without the need for multiple patches and bug-fixing mods.
• Tear Jerker
  • Remember all those zombies you'd sometimes see wandering aimlessly around the Zone? If so, you might've frequently heard them moaning and grunting what to the average listener should be complete gibberish. Well, someone posted a compilation of all their voiced lines with added translation, and a lot of the stuff they're saying is downright heartwrenching. Have a look.
  • Dives straight into Fridge Horror once you remember that zombies in the Zone are not actually reanimated corpses but still-living human beings whose brains had been completely fried, so most of the stuff they're saying is very likely the last shred of their humanity trapped within a body they no longer have any control over. Before this you might've just been casually picking them off for fun and thought of them as nothing more than a mild nuisance. After this, you'll start going out of your way to pick them off just to put them out of their misery. STALKER is no stranger to horror, but this is a horror of another kind.
  • The fate of the Monolith in Call of Pripyat isn't anything better. Without the C-Consciousness guiding them (due to their destruction in hands of Strelok), they're left scathered alone, frightened with all of their memories and identity completely gone while being unable to remember who they are.
• That One Level
  • Shadow of Chernobyl has the Red Forest where nearly everything is radioactive, making it much harder to take cover properly. The vast majority of the trouble in that level can be bypassed if you don't follow the road and cut through the forest instead, because ninety percent of the Monolith or zombie enemies on that level are waiting for you on the road, and with the way it curves it's nearly impossible to get a shot off without taking loads of return fire. Cutting through the forest makes the level far easier, especially if you've packed a sniper rifle. Plus, once you've gotten to the other side, you can cut back and take all the Monolith troops from behind, netting yourself loads of equipment.
  • Clear Sky early in the game quickly takes you to Cordon, with the only available route having you come out behind a boulder on the other side of which is a mounted machine gun in the possession of the military. "Well, at least they don't know I'm here" — wrong; they know you're there and tell you so. "Well, I'll be safe behind this rock" — wrong again; after a few quick bursts, they send a number of better-armed and better-armoured soldiers after you. If you manage to dispatch them, you then have to figure out which way you can safely leg it. Once you realize that this is essentially a death-trap unless you've got at least a dozen spare medkits in your inventory (even after knocking off the squad of heavily-armored soldiers, that MG still has a ridiculous field of fire,) your best bet is to just turn around, go back to the Swamps, and enter the Cordon from the northern entrance. Sure, you wind up next to a group of Loners that get pissy if you get too close, but it's the easier way in.
  • Call of Pripyat has you stealing a Gauss Rifle from a Monolith base with a group of fellow soldiers. This wouldn't be so bad in of itself, but getting the Golden Ending requires three specific teammates of yours to be alive, which is harder than it should be thanks to Artificial Stupidity. It turns out NPCs suck at throwing grenades through windows and just bounce them off the walls back at them, blowing themselves up in the process. Playing the mission as intended will have you and your teammates holed up in a building opposite the Monolith base, which is not helped by the multiple snipers eager to take you and your entire team out.
• That One Sidequest: In Call of Pripyat, babysitting a group of scientists as they take readings of anomalies. A teeth-gnashingly difficult mission that comes out of nowhere in an otherwise well-balanced game. It takes the eggheads the better part of 5 minutes to do their science and throughout that time you are attacked by hordes of monsters coming in from all directions. The scientists are armed but tend to die pretty easily. And you have to do it twice. It's a case of Unstable Equilibrium in that the stalkers escorting you the first time come back for the second if they're still alive by the end of it. The only thing that makes it even vaguely easier is if you know the locations ahead of time and go there to clean out the mutants that are already there, leaving you to deal with the (relatively) smaller amount that spawn in while they're taking the measurements.
• Unintentional Period Piece: As stated in two videos by Warlockcracy, Stalker became a reflection of post-Cold War Ukraine during 1990's and 2000's (namely negative portrayal of Ukraine's military sharing Ukrainians' general disdain towards them until the sudden popularity after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and invasion of Ukraine in 2022).

---