Everybody is aware of the most effective a part of Stalker is the groceries. Certain, I vaguely recall one thing about keeping off armies of mutated horrors with clanky outdated Warsaw Pact rifles, however I believe most of my time in these video games was spent frantically scarfing down doktorskaya sausage whereas bullets whistled overhead and hungry beasts tracked my scent.
It is for that reason, I’ve to imagine, that the most recent step in GSC Recreation World’s advertising and marketing marketing campaign for Stalker 2 is a Stalker-themed grocery store in japanese Kyiv (opens in new tab). Crammed with produce themed after the video games (alongside fully commonplace fruit, veg, and meat, which is presumably even weirder than the Stalker brownies) and adorned all through in post-apocalyptic rust-chic, the brand new retailer guarantees to allow you to do your weekly store whereas reminiscing about all of the occasions you hunkered down in a drainage pipe and cured bullet wounds with bread. You’ll be able to see a number of photographs of the shop under.
The grocery store is the product of a partnership between GSC and Silpo, a sequence of Ukrainian shops that specialises in themed experiences like this one. Up to now, Silpo has constructed cyberpunk supermarkets, anime supermarkets, in a single occasion (which I am not satisfied is not a fevered invention of my very own dying mind) even a retailer themed round GTA: San Andreas (opens in new tab). It is everlasting, too; GSC’s Zakhar Bocharov tells PCG that the grocery store is not any fleeting pop-up: “It is going to be round for, like, perpetually. So long as the store is there, it will likely be a Stalker-style store”.
Like a lot else, the shop’s opening was disrupted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February this yr. Actually, though the grocery store already appears lots Stalker-ish to me, there are nonetheless components of it that have not been put in but due to wartime disruption. Plans for installations that mimic Zone-style anomalies and statues of Stalker’s slavering monsters have needed to be postponed due to the continued battle. They’re going to hopefully come as a part of a deliberate “visible improve” scheduled for some level sooner or later, says Bocharov.
I needed to re-read plenty of issues about this challenge after I first got here throughout it simply to persuade myself it was actual. I are likely to affiliate the suburban tedium of a grocery store extra with Fallout’s post-apocalyptic setting than with Stalker’s, so the sight of a espresso counter modelled after Sidorovich’s bunker from the primary recreation had me briefly involved I would developed videogame information cabin fever. It is lots actual, although, and I suppose the subsequent time I am in Kyiv I’ll make dutiful pilgrimage to Berezneva Road to top off on kolbasa. Then I am going to search for a drainage pipe to take a seat in whereas I eat it.