And what the hell, I may as well finish it off tonight. Endgame spoilers!

I headed off to Pripyat after making sure I had plenty of ammo, anti-rads, and a fresh new armour suit. There wasn’t really a lot to it though, as I got led through most of it by a squad of other stalkers, the stash with the decoder I needed to find was right along the way, and there wasn’t really much opposition. I tried to explore a bit, but there wasn’t much of interest and just a bunch of other Monolith soldiers.

So, I arrived at the Chernobyl plant, and was treated to a helicopter attack in which one of the copters got caught in an anomaly and crashed. Pressing forward, there was some resistance from more Monolith soldiers and military, including a small tank, but suddenly a five-minute ‘blowout’ countdown started. Unsure of where I could hide, I just sprinted past all of the soldiers and along the edge of the plant until I finally found an entrance door, taking me inside the plant.

Once inside, a creepy, deep voice kept repeating phrases in Russian the entire time, while I fought through yet more Monolith soldiers as I worked my way through it. There was a lot of radiation, so I put on my best anti-rad artifacts, but there were no anomalies or mutants.

I started finding a couple more new weapons on the soldiers, like an FT 200M rifle with good damage and a very high rate of fire, and I started using it instead of the GP 37 since it used the same ammo. Shortly thereafter I started finding Gauss rifles, with an extremely high damage rating. Their rate of fire is extremely slow though, so I mostly stuck with the FT 200M for the rest of the game and just used the Gauss rifle for some sniping. Regardless of which one the enemies used, they often killed me fairly quickly with them as my armour was getting pretty worn by this point, but I soon found an exoskeleton suit that had much better stats.

I eventually found the locked door I needed to use the decoder on, and as it worked I was attacked by another wave of Monolith soldiers, but I only had to hold them off for 30 seconds before the door opened and I could move on to the next inner area. This area didn’t even have any radiation, just a huge number of Monolith troops and it took a while to gradually whittle them down and creep my way through it.

It was a very linear area that soon took me to a room with some floating, shimmering thing surrounded by some sparkling crystal-like orbs. I couldn’t seem to trigger anything the usual ways, so I started shooting the orbs, and after smashing one, fire-spewing anomalies started spawning. I quickly shot out the rest of them, and the shimmering thing then resolved itself into the image of a person.

This person turned out to be the representative of the “C-Consciousness”, and finally provided all the answers about exactly what the Zone is, what created it, what the C-Consciousness is doing, and what Strelok’s role in it all is. After that, they gave me the option to join them or not. Joining them led to a brief cutscene where a previously-seen old man (his father?) wonders whatever became of Strelok, and then the credits roll.

If you don’t join, then you get dumped back outside the power plant, but in a different spot. Apparently there’s another ‘good’ ending you can get if you continue fighting on from there, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. There’s also another set of endings you can get if I had taken a different path in the plant and found the wish granter, but they’re considered ‘bad’ endings since they’re the ones you get stuck with if you don’t find the decoder. I might check those out as well, later on.

Overall, the ending is a bit disappointing. Although it answers a lot of questions, everything from Pripyat on is very linear compared to the open world you’d been exploring up to that point, and it gets rather repetitive with almost nothing but Monolith soldiers to fight along the way. Still, in the end it’s a very good game overall, and I’ll be looking forward to the Clear Sky prequel/’expansion’.