Within days, GSC Game World’s Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl sold a million copies. As a revival of their trilogy from the 2000s, many found the reboot perfectly captured the original series’ difficulty and grim atmosphere. Its huge maps are naturally littered with obscure secrets to keep players busy. Fans following the series since its beginning immediately recognized an unassuming locale that paid homage to a classic piece of the first game’s iconography. Here is a breakdown of this early discovery within Stalker 2’s massive, dangerous world.
Stalker 2’s Easter Egg
According to Polygon, the early players for GSC Game World’s Stalker 2 have already found an Easter Egg at an early level. Finding the location itself is easy enough. Shortly after the prologue, players must travel to the nearby town of Zalissya. Just outside its bounds to the west, players find a wooden gate adorned with a religious icon, a nuclear sign, wind chimes, and an abandoned gas mask. While the vista may appear to be a simple decoration, longtime fans will remember it as one of the earliest pieces of concept art GSC Game World released for the first game. The image was also used as the game’s cover art in some instances. From the right angle, the two are downright identical.
This image captures the essence of the Stalker franchise: a nuclear wasteland with themes deeply rooted in Ukraine’s culture and history after the Cold War. As such, it made for the perfect promotional poster to sell the game. Including this at the game’s beginning signaled to longtime fans skeptical of the reboot that the team had not forgotten what made the original series work.
The Series’ Fandom
While Stalker began as a modest trilogy of horror open-world titles, the games attracted a cult following during its fifteen-year hiatus. Made by GSC Game World, the games told the story of a scavenger delving into the irradiated wastes of Chornobyl and its surrounding areas while battling bandits and mutants.
While Heart of Chornobyl had a troubled production due to the studios’ temporary shutdown in 2011 and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the game was eventually finished. Furthermore, within the first few days, it achieved a million sales and 100,000 concurrent players on Steam. This franchise reboot remembers the series’ roots and why it worked by including this homage to the original game. Furthermore, the fact that independent fans found it as quickly as they did shows how well the series stayed alive online.
Easter Eggs in Gaming
While video games have always had secrets within them, Easter Eggs have always been one of the biggest draws of players’ curiosity. Ever since Warren Robinett hid his name in the 1979 Atari game Adventure, developers have littered their games with secret areas and treasures. This is especially true for open-world games, whose massive maps allow them to hide many unassuming secrets.
Nowadays, Easter eggs aren’t just fun little game secrets but can become world-building tools and provide hints to larger mysteries. The best example in recent memory is the Dark Souls series, which slowly unravels the mystery of its past through hundreds of brief item descriptions. Given that Stalker 2 is a game set in a derelict world with mysterious lore, there is a strong possibility that this minor visual callback was only the tip of the iceberg. There are likely many more within the game’s vast map.
Conclusion
Stalker 2 has demonstrated how well it understands the original trilogy’s story, and this homage to such a classic image from the first serves as a microcosm of this. As players have just started digging into the game and its world, fans can expect to find and share more secrets within the coming weeks. While Easter Eggs are usually minor pieces of a game, they are an extra layer of detail that rewards knowledgeable fans and shows the creators’ dedication to their project.
