Unlike the phenomenal HBO miniseries that recreated the horrific events of 1986 with gripping realism, Chernobylite uses one of humankind’s greatest catastrophes as a stepping off point for a survival horror experience with a distinctly supernatural slant. After having around an hour of hands-on time with a pre-alpha build of the game, I’m certainly intrigued to see more of this stealth-driven shooter that derives just as much dread from the nervous crackling of its Geiger counter as it does from its HR Giger-esque enemies.
Set 30 years after the disaster, Chernobylite puts you in the shoes of Igor,a physicist formerly employed at the Chernobyl nuclear plant who returns to the disaster zone in search of his missing wife, Tatyana. The opening of my hands-on demo had Igor infiltrating the bowels of the facility in order to extract a piece of chernobylite, a product of the nuclear accident that in the words of Igor, “creates transcendental bijection of the spacetime continuum”. For those of us who aren’t Stephen Hawking, that means the chernobylite is able to power Igor’s portal gun in order to teleport between areas via a singularity bubble. In my demo the use of this portal gun seemed to be restricted to returning Igor back to his base after completing a mission, but theoretically it could have time travel or transdimensional uses later on in the game.
Source: IGN.com Chernobylite Hands-On: Inside the Exclusion Zone… and Beyond