Your Stalker 2 flashlight is the best tool to help combat the darkness of the Zone, but even then you may find that the game is too dark and you need an extra helping hand from the display settings to make things more visible. While you do get a prompt telling you to turn on your flashlight during the tutorial of Stalker 2, its appearance is all too brief and if you overlook it then you'll be left scrabbling around in the darkness. To bring you back to the light, I’ve detailed how to turn on your flashlight in Stalker 2 and which settings you may want to adjust to make the game easier to see.
How to turn on your flashlight in Stalker 2 and stop the game being too dark
To turn on your Stalker 2 flashlight, press RB on Xbox, R1 on PS5, or Tab on PC and press the same button again to turn it off – that’s it! Thankfully, you don’t even have to worry about batteries, so you can leave your flashlight on all the time. The game has some incredibly dark areas, particularly at night as in the Stalker 2 There and Back Again prologue.
The flashlight is admittedly not very powerful, so if things are still too dark in Stalker 2 you might want to adjust some in-game display settings. To do that, pause the game, open the “Options” menu, then switch over to the “Display” tab. Here you can adjust brightness and gamma settings, as well as HDR if you’ve got that running.
Obviously turning up brightness and gamma will improve visibility, though this might also make the game look a bit more washed out. Turning off HDR will make your game less vivid, but should also push shadows and darkness a little further from true black. Although, if you’re wondering why the Stalker 2 compiling shaders message pops up every time, that’s its own separate issue.
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