“The Zone is agitated… Energy seething…” intones Bolshakov solemnly. “The anomalies are extremely active and the landscape is vastly different to what you’ve seen before. Instead of the serene-looking way it looked before - green grass, trees, ruins of buildings and so forth - there will be simply horrifying anomalous phenomena. The ground distorted outwards or inwards by concentrated pockets of gravity, greenery defaced by strokes of what we call ‘electra.’ Even the air isn’t as pure as in the original STALKER - with these ‘spatial bubbles’ which are like confusing Möbius rings that whole expeditions of Stalkers simply can’t find a way out of.”

Imagine if you will that the Chernobyl exclusion zone is a very big pie with the power plant at its center. It’s not a particularly nice pie - the folks at Fray Bentos shouldn’t be unduly concerned - but the original game covers what’s essentially a southerly slice of it. The prequel, meanwhile, gives you an extra slice of this metaphorical pie at the same time as covering some noteworthy changes within what we’ve played through already - to the extent that the game is 50% completely new areas, and 50% twisted renditions of what you’ve played before. You won’t be revisiting the doleful Big Wheel of Pripyat, for example, but you will be scuttling beneath the town through its increasingly janky underground system, while new highways and byways will be opened up into the Red Forest and a lost city known as Limansk.

Once again, it’s all down to the wanderings of Strelok. On one of his pre-amnesia jaunts up to the power plant, the resultant nuclear blowout, put simply, redrew the map of the Zone. Anomalies blocked existing paths, new areas suddenly became less toxic to human presence - and the territorial balance between the major groups of stalkers such as Duty and Freedom was thrown completely out of whack.

“In the STALKER you’ve played, it was beneficial for different groupings to coexist rather than live in conflict,” explains Bolshakov. “But now, in a blink of an eye, everything’s changed, and fights have flared up for new territory. The biggest-scale battle is for the lost city of Limansk - which opens a new path towards the Zone center.”

At this point things get really rather exciting for armchair Stalkers such as us: there’s an entirely AI-driven Stalker war for you to participate in. While we may not be talking Call of Duty here (we’re looking at scuffles with numbers of perhaps ten against ten), but upgrading the vanilla game’s A-Life system to deal with guerrilla warfare is quite ingenious. You can join any of eight factions, each with its own base, leader, guards, bar, mechanic and full complement of characters.