Can games be more than just a game?

To put it bluntly, games are often just an entertainment product created to entertain. And a product that is created so that a company can make money. It starts to get interesting when games become more than just a game. For example, when games have a message and when games try to shed light on a real-life situation or issue. Then it suddenly makes more sense. The best example I can think of is Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, where the focus was on mental illness and it portrayed a person with mental illness really convincingly.

But games can be much more than that. Just look at S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl - this is a game that is much more than a game - or at least it ended up being. Yes, there's a rich man behind it all who needs to recoup his investment, but for those who created it, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl ended up being much more than a game.

As most people know, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series is created by GSC Game World from Ukraine. The first game was released in 2007 and it was a massive success for the developers, but also for Ukraine - for various reasons. It was the product that really put Ukraine on the map in many parts of the West, which is important because at the time many people didn't really distinguish between Ukraine and Russia. A bit like if Hitman helped put Denmark on the map, because the outside world thought that Denmark and Sweden were a bit the same. Ukraine already had a strained relationship with Russia at the time, so the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game was an important product for them.

That's why S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl was an important project for GSC Game World right from the start, because they simply could not make a product that did not live up to the first game and the high expectations that were placed on it. Especially in Ukraine.

The game got off to a bad start. It was stopped and restarted several times, but in 2018 production started in earnest and they aimed for a release 4 years later, in 2022.

But as we all know, something happened in February 2022. Already during 2021, the threat from Russia began to affect the team in Kiev. GSC Game World had a Crisis Manager at the time, a woman named Mariia. In autumn 2021, she began making plans for what would happen to the many employees if the unthinkable happened. If Russia attacked their country.

With Mariia in charge, they decided to prepare an evacuation plan that would move the team to the far west of Ukraine, to the city of Uzhhorod, right on the border with Slovakia, if the unthinkable happened. In January 2022, shortly before the Russian invasion, a large number of buses were hired to be parked outside their offices, filled with extra fuel and manned with drivers 24 hours a day, ready to head west immediately should Putin's forces enter their country.

The buses turned out to be a great idea.

Management had planned an evacuation of 183 employees, their families and also former employees. 139 did not want to be evacuated. Four days before the invasion, Mariia decided that the team would be moved to Western Ukraine for a short period of time, and if it proved unnecessary, it could be seen as a small excursion with the team. However, on an early Sunday morning, computers, servers and a lot of other equipment were packed and loaded onto the buses - and the long journey to western Ukraine began.

The temporary premises in Uzhhorod turned out not to be as temporary as they had hoped. Shortly after arriving, it happened - Russian troops poured across the border in the eastern part of the country. As a testament to how important S.T.A.L.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl was to the team, one of the remaining developers in Ukraine, who incidentally joined the military shortly after the Russian invasion, said that 'at least S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was safe' in the western part of the country.

Meanwhile, work on the game continued. Imagine the pressure to work under. You're working on the biggest and most ambitious project you've ever been a part of. It's simultaneously a product that means something to many other Ukrainians and to your country, and at the same time your hometown is under bombardment by an aggressive enemy. Someone has left family back home in Kiev. Several of your colleagues and friends have joined the army to fight against the occupying forces. And as time goes by, many have been unable to contact their families, especially in the eastern part of the country, for example in cities such as Mariupol, which has been virtually levelled by Russian bombardments.

The developers have worked under inhumane conditions that we are unable to imagine. For many of the employees, the game became a safe haven - the only constant they had in a very uncertain and rootless life. They just wanted to work on the game, and they found peace from the terrible reality when they dove into the game and worked on it. It became their only constant for them, and in the documentary War Game: The Making of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Mariia puts it aptly: 'Work is one of the most important means of keeping you from going crazy. All of us wanted to work on the game.'

This is a game that is much more than just a game, it's a 'thing' that helps people who have escaped from their lives and everyday life to focus on something else. A fixed point of reference. Some even sat and made character designs on paper when the power went out due to the Russian bombardments - as one of the designers says: "I switched to drawing on paper, so I didn't stop developing. I was only interested in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. It was my goal in life to do this project." These people really needed this project.

In the peaceful part of the world, here in the West, gamers and the press only see the game being delayed again and again and again - and then finally released in November 2024. Two years late and six years after it went into production. Because now the team simply can't take it anymore. They are exhausted. But how do you receive a game like this? How do you review such a game? Suddenly, framerate, gameplay and graphics are completely irrelevant. This game has probably saved lives. Real human lives. But on the other hand, it's still a product that we pay money for, so we can make demands on it - but can we make the same demands on it as any other game? I don't know, I don't have the answer.

It was announced in mid-December this year that after the first month on the market, the game had recouped its costs and was now profitable. This is really great for the team, also because it indicates that they have made a product that can compete with the 2007 original, which was so important to them from the start. But at the end of the day, I think the majority of the team don't really care about the financial side of the project. For them, this game is much more than a game. It's the project of a lifetime, which they completed and which has probably helped them through almost 3 years of war.

So what awaits them now?