GOG Patron
This is the best of the three remasters, simply because the original Clear Sky is the most broken Stalker game to this day, and is not easy to get to work on modern machines. This one? Didn't crash on me once in a little under 3 hours, which is pretty much flawless as far as Stalker games are concerned. It just works and it is still the most technologically advanced game in the original trilogy (one of the reasons it is so broken). However, it still has the same issues as all the other remasters - it's blurry (you can minimize it by using FSR Native at max sharpness), it has some issues with wide FOV camera positioning, and there is some cut content/censorship such as the removal of Russian voice-overs and censoring some in-game textures and objects that refer to the Soviet Union. Normally not a big thing, but in this it is jarring for two reasons: the Ukrainian voice over is not as good as Russian in my opinion, which is weird because it is better in both the original and CoP. Secondly, it's kind of weird that the devs chose to leave the faction names unchanged, in Russian, with Russian spellings of all the names (in the English version). Like, when you first enter Cordon (the second location in the game) you walk up to a UKRAINIAN military security checkpoint but the warning message that plays over the loudspeaker is still in Russian for some reason. Stuff like that makes the whole thing feel disjointed and it makes the removal of the Russian dub feel jarring. Anyway, if you feel strongly about Russian dubbing it can be modded back in. For me it's not a dealbreaker. Other than that, this is solid and is probably THE best way to play Clear Sky today.
A pretty by-the-book remaster. It does run better without any kind of tweaking than the vanilla version (which struggles to maintain a stable FPS >60 on new machines). Water is re-done and looks much better, the lighting is... different, noticeably darker, more contrast-y. The vibe of some scenes is different as a result. Not better or worse, but different. It is noticeably blurry - I mostly fixed it by turning on FSR Native and cranking up sharpness to maximum. Ultrawide resolution works out of the box, but is wonky - feels like the camera is moved back as you increase the FOV so you end up bumping into things more. Controller support works too, but the aiming sensitivity feels off but it is more playable than the originals ever were. A lot of mods don't work out of the box now, you will need to go and do some tweaking. If you want to mod, you should use the original releases or just get Anomaly. This is to give you an opportunity to play the original games as they were meant to appear on release. However, I do want to point out that there is some censorship and cut content. Firstly, the Russian dub is entirely absent. I am sure it can be re-introduced by mods, but the devs did make the decision to remove it for obvious war-related reasons. Ukrainian dub is very similar (same actors), and if you can't speak Russian or Ukrainian and just want the atmosphere then it will do the job just as well. It might be a problem if you can only speak Russian because there are no subtitles for some in-game dialogues. I am fine with playing in either Ukrainian or English, so not a dealbreaker. Some references to the Soviet Union have been removed too - very subtle, you would probably not notice. Stuff like Lenin's picture on posters, etc. Again, not a dealbreaker, but something to note. All in all, I think the originals can be made to play and look better with mods, but out of the box this is the easiest way to enjoy Stalker. Decent + free for existing owners, so 3.5/5 from me
Great remake, really well done, surprisingly so, given Blooper Team's somewhat average previous games. But if you played them, you could kinda tell that they were really big fans of Silent Hill, you could easily see stylistic, narrative, musical and gameplay cues that they took more or less directly from older Silent Hill titles, so it was a rare good decision by KONAMI to let them handle the remake. And, again, I think they did a great job, and to have it here, DRM free, is really good, great job GOG. I only ever cleared the original Silent Hill 2 once, but I appreciated the changes made here, and I really thought that they managed to transfer the atmosphere of the original game nearly flawlessly. I enjoyed the updated designs of characters, especially Maria, and I really like the audio - it features music by Akira Yamaoka, the series' stalwart composer, but reworked. Also, the voice acting - a contentious thing in the original, is, I think, vastly better here, if only because the audio quality itself is much clearer. The performance is.... a mixed bag. I am using an AMD 7900XT , and I do not use frame-gen, running it at native 3440*1440, and it struggles to maintain 60fps on medium-high. With tweaks I am sure you can get stable 60fps especially with frame gen (credit where it's due, it supports FSR 3.1), but I feel like there are stutters that have to do with the CPU side that are still going to be there. I will dock point/half a point for performance, considering the game looks really very very good. Also, the game sticks quite close to the original, with all its limitations - e.g. repetitive combat and exploration, imaginative but very few enemy types, awkward camera. For some it's good that these things are as they were, for some it will be a problem. Also, the Deluxe only comes with a "sample" version of the OST - just 10 tracks (the full version has 90). I am not expecting to get 90 for the price, but having more than 1/9th of would have been nice.
Of all the games ever this is certainly one of them, that's for sure. Specifically a slightly modernized, shinier and wetter, version of a PS2 game. And that's fine, but it's nothing more than that. It was notoriously broken at launch, and while this version seems to be largely fixed (no crashes in the roughly 4 hours I've played it), it doesn't really make this a notable or particularly remarkable game. It's a totally radical grungy third person shooter where you play as a moody mysterious antihero gunslinger with a massive casket strapped to his back (other skins are available) and two large guns (other weapons are available), let loose in a moody dark city overrun with crime (other locations are available). It is, mechanically, pretty much a mid-2000s Japanese PS2 AA shooter. The not-quite-Devil May Cry, that tries hard (too hard) to be cool and fun, and succeeds at first, but fails to freshen up the experience in any meaningful way. While the game is relatively lengthy - around 10 hours if you're reasonably competent, it starts to overstay its welcome by about the third hour. The fighting system is not too deep but the fights themselves are spectacular enough to keep it from becoming a slog, and you can definitely derive ironic fun from the incredibly cheesy plot and cutscenes to the point where it's kinda hard to tell if the game tries to be taken seriously or just makes fun of the genre tropes. In terms of art direction actually prefer the PS2 original It is, at the end of the day, a PS2 game with somewhat modern graphics (sparks! reflections! shiny things!), but it is very very simple at its core - you are one cool dude, and you kill lots of mooks. You do that in various locations but in mostly the same ways for about 10 hours. It can be enjoyable, but this review only really applies at it's current heavily discounted price (-84%). You'd be monumentally dumb to pay more than 15 USD for this game, but at just under $5 it is fun for a couple of evenings.
I am approaching this from the perspective of videogame restoration and enhancement. The attention to detail is simply mindboggling. If you already played the originals, like me, this offers the same welcome selection of graphical and QoL improvements as the first remaster. You get the option to unlock FPS and switch between original and enhanced graphics on the fly. Much the same as the first game. There are some glitches at launch, the game crashed once in the 2 hours I played so far, but I am confident this will be fixed, same as it was with the first game. But, for me, what is most incredible is the amount of detail that the developers have put into finding, digging up, polishing, and adding content that was either cut, or is in too low a quality to the extent that they sometimes physically went to museums to take photos of the objects that are in the game or tracking down photos that were only visible in the game for a couple of seconds. For example this version includes Korean release staff credits, for which the developers had to track down a physical copy of the manual. This is a real example of game preservation.
This is basically an alternative to the fan-made Rebirth mod project, which patches the game for the modern systems. The benefits of using this over ReBirth is a slightly better renderer with more options, out of the box support for modern controllers, and the fact that you don't have to track down the Japanese port of the original DC2 to run it, it works right out of the box. Based on the ease of use, I would pick this one over Rebirth, even though it lacks certain sound improvements, as well as the options to fully remap controls from the game itself, as well as the option to make the game portable that the mod provides. It is also more stable. You can't go wrong with either though, but the ability to just purchase it here is invaluable. When compared to emulating the PlayStation version it's not as clear cut because this is one of those games that uses pre-rendered backgrounds, and those do NOT scale up, they stay the same grainy resolution as in the year 2000 even if the character models do. While emulators like Duckstation allow for various downsampling and CRT filter option that makes them blend in with the foregrounds like they were meant to, no such luck here, unfortunately. PS1 version also has the option to rebind controls (via emulator of course) and slightly better sound quality. However, there's currently a fan made project to upscale the backgrounds which would in all likelihood be compatible with this version, giving it a DIFFERENT look that could be preferable to the PS1 original. But, again, as long as you are aware of this (same story as Resident Evil re-releases), it is still a very very good way to play an excellent classic game.
A review from someone who actually played the game with the DLC It's an unapologeticly political game, which I like. It's a leftist game, which I like. It's alternative history cell shaded stylized single player narrative driven Telltale/Heavy Rain/Life is Strange kind of game, which I like. But in typical Telltale fashion only a handful of your choices actually meaningfully influence the story, even though the sheer number of small choices that you can make (and that the game remembers and in some way reflects) is huge. By the game's final chapters it's storyline starts to become positively overloaded with all the strands trying to somehow tie themselves into a coherent whole but the end result being, on the whole, more unsatisfying than satisfying. It touches upon dozens of real-world political issues, but it pulls its punches and shies away from actually meaningfully exploring many of them (for example the issue of disinformation and racism essentially get hand waived away through the use of a supernatural McGuffin and almost entirely ignored respectively). If you set out to make a political game you should keep it focused. While the writing is good, the characters generally interesting, the story needs more focus. Gameplay is similar to the aforementioned games with the addition of a third person combat system, which feels a bit clunky. I originally bought it on the PS4 and the camera system and repetitiveness of the fights, which happen a bit often in the second half of the game, make it feel spurious. The game is really at its best when you're interacting with characters, which is thankfully most of the time. There's also a small rhythm musical mini game which you'll probably enjoy if you like punk rock. It's nice to have, and it tends to add some variety. I didn't encounter any technical issues but graphically the game is really not a tour de force - exactly like a Telltale or QD game, with clunky animations, but interesting stylized visuals.
A surprisingly thoughtful (and surreal) narrative-focused adventure that tackles the issues of faith (and crisis thereof), temptation, goodness, conformity, humility, shame, redemption, and all that jazz set in a semi-fictional 19th(ish) century Russia. A very NARRATIVE focused game, and gameplay is almost exclusively used to move the story. There are stretches where it is essentially a walking sim, where you move through set pieces, taking in the narrative. The same applies to puzzles, a lot of which are very simple, and involve nothing more than putting certain objects in certain places, but some are more engaging. Storytelling is VERY visual, and it does look great. The framing, the angles, the blocking, of the scenes works really well. It is by no means a full-on horror, but the combination of the dream-like visuals and audio cues is unsettling, where you can tell that SOMETHING is just ever so slightly off in, but can't always tell WHAT. The superb voice acting, ESPECIALLY by Silas Carson, also helps, although the subtitles could have been better. One thing that I am slightly sad about is that ultra-widescreen is supported during gameplay but the cutscenes are letterboxes, even if they are in-engine, though I kinda see why, given the extra deliberate camera placement. Other than that the game is surprisingly stable. I didn't encounter any crashes or major glitches, apart from animation hiccups, and had no problem hitting 60+ fps. It is also not a very long game. Without dawdling you can finish it in about 4.5 hours. But if you pause to take in the visuals, immerse yourself in the setting, and not rush, it can be anything from 6 to 10 hours. Although I might replay some sequences for certain "blink-and-you-miss-it" moments, it isn't a game that holds a huge amount of replay value. As a bonus a part of the sales revenue is donated to help children in Ukraine, if you had concerns over that (though I haven't seen any notice of that in the game itself).
It is expensive, but don't listen to people who claim that this is at level of (or inferior to) fan made mods. It's not, it's a very impressive reworking of the game on a new engine using the original source code, as you'd expect from Nightdive. I originally bought it on Steam because I wasn't sure it'll be released on GoG and also wanted to easily play it on my Steam deck. All the sprites, textures, assets, models, artwork are revamped in high resolution without ruining the original art direction. The cutscenes are smooth now and re-rendered in HD, with the use of new assets, not simply through AI upscaling. It's native widescreen, and you can switch to the original look with the press of a button. Gamepads are supported natively, ultra high frame rates work (mostly, with some mild judder because of refresh rate mismatch) out of the box. Nightdive are very responsive and prompt with fixes. It simulates the sound systems that would've been available at the time better than the mods can. It's just a great experience overall if you loved the original game. It's good, and better than any other available option for playing this game (and on consoles it is the only option since the original PlayStation release), including the fan made conversions. As a bonus it also has some nifty bonus content like The Avenger map and behind the scenes development content. It's overpriced yes, which is why I won't give it 5 stars, but it's far from a cynical cash grab that some make it out to be. Is it worth the full price? Probably not to most, but in my opinion Nightdive is to videogames what Criterion is to physical movie releases. It's niche, but it's almost always a labour of love that clearly shows a lot of appreciation for the source content, and providing the best experience possible without straying from the original vision.