Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access. This week he’s succumbed to radiation sickness, so we sent Matt to Chernobylite instead.
Developer: The Farm 51
Publisher: The Farm 51
Release: Out now (early access)
On: Windows
From: Steam
For: 24, $30, 25
Chernobylite, right, is what’s known as a technogenic compound. We found bits of the “lava-like glassy material” in the ruins of the Chernobyl powerplant after it exploded, slopped into a continually melting, still hot structure called the Elephant’s Foot. Wikipedia informs me it is a “crystalline zirconium silicate with a high (up to 10%) content of uranium as a solid solution”. What horrors man hath wrought.
Chernobylite is also a videogame about slinking through segmented recreations of the real world’s exclusion zone, completing missions while being harangued by the ghost of your dead wife and avoiding monsters that are clawing their way out of spacetime. I wish I found all this half as interesting as it sounds. Or as tenth as interesting as accidental radioactive lava glass.