After a brief break, I figured it was time to work on the main story path in STALKER a bit more (hey, it’s the weekend), and the first stop was to deactivate the brain scorcher in Red Forest. The trip to get to it was pretty uneventful, really — there was a long road to it and a base that had to be fought through, protected by members of the Monolith cult, but it was all fairly straightforward firefights. The only unusual bit was that ‘ghosts’ of mutated animals would appear and slowly run towards me, but they did no damage and disappeared upon reaching me.

After entering the base, things were rather quiet. I had to work my way down a rather twisty set of hallways to reach the brain scorcher, but there wasn’t much resistance along the way other than a few blood suckers. Even after reaching the brain scorcher, all I had to do was walk up to it and pull a lever, which was a bit anti-climactic. A cutscene followed, and a voice in my head told me to go visit the wish granter in the Chernobyl plant.

Getting out of the brain scorcher base was much tougher than getting in since now the halls were crawling with Monolith members, so it was a slow process working my way through them. But, on the plus side, I got a replacement and an extra for my heavily-worn GP 37 rifle, and most of them were dropping the right kind of ammo. After exiting the base, the fuzziness and ‘ghosts’ had gone, but apparently all hell had broken loose and various factions were now fighting each other on the road, trying to get to the core of the zone first.

I was rather heavily encumbered, so I had to walk all the way back to the Bar to sell and drop off some of my equipment. The Monolith suit of armour I was wearing was in near tatters, but now that the end of the game seems to be near, I can pull some of my better armours out of storage and start using them…