The Beastmaster of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, part four: the last biteThe life and death of Bohdan Beastmaster
The life and death of Bohdan Beastmaster
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
A cold, steel, very literal door to boot. It turns out that the scientist’s laboratory is locked up tight, and will remain so until I delve about twenty hours deeper into the faction war that’s bubbled up while I’ve been running around throwing irradiated rats at people in tracksuits. Fine. Fine! But I’m keeping the collar.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Still, I’m unhappy. I’m supposed to be Bohdan Beastmaster, subjugator of the abominable, and yet I’m only progressing in the most passive, least mutant-reliant manner possible. Upon returning to the ex-cultist base, I’m rewarded with a fancy camouflaged sniper rifle, as if the universe itself were telling me “Come on, man, do this properly.” No – I must persist. I accept the gun with the same smile I gave my nan when she gifted me a Pixar’s Cars alarm clock at age 17, and continue on to my next goal: a military base in which I can install the recovered tech.
Yet again failing to pick up any monster pals along the way, I arrive at the base moments after its guards are gunned down, then bump into the assailants in the tunnels below. It’s some turncoat members of the cult, who are either combing the base for their own nefarious purposes or just really, really want their sniper rifle back. The corridors are tight and they’d outnumber me even with beast backup, but as ever, their fully automatic firearms are no match for my running-away-jutsu. I scramble up a ladder and back onto the surface, where a man I don’t recognise bellows from atop a control tower that he should have killed me when he had the chance.
That doesn’t narrow it down much – I’ve been bumbling around the Zone without a gun out for hours, buddy, there have been chances aplenty. Regardless, he’s blocking my route to the gizmo installer, so ascending the tower and neutralising him is going to be one battle I can’t just book it from.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Casing his perch reveals bad news. Plan A is a bust: he’s up a ladder, so even if I go off, find a mutant, and bring it back here, it won’t be able to follow me up and kill him for me. Plan B, ignoring him and just hoping I can install the machinery before he shoots me dead, won’t work either, as I physically can’t interact when the receptacle while in combat. Miraculously, it looks as if I can try an unexpected Plan C, as an Emission – a lethal, Zone-wide psychic storm blowout – starts to roll in. As the winds pick up and the sky turns red, I abandon the base of the ladder and take cover in the lab downstairs, knowing the far more exposed tower should leave my attacker open for a charring.
But no – as the sky clears and I climb back up, I’m met with more gunfire. In my eagerness for this man to die through non-bullet means, I’d forgotten that members of his sect are immune to Emissions, and all my cowering had achieved was grant him a mid-fight tea break.
It’s no good. I’m out of options. He, apparently, will never run out of bullets. I’ve travelled half the Zone, have wielded the power of its mutants to wipe out experienced soldiers, and even turned the tables on my own personal manhunter, but this dweeb up a ladder is going to render all of it pointless. And he’sstillshooting me.
You know what? You can have the sniper rifle back. Here you go:
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
And with that, I’ve failed. My vow, my promise, never to kill with a weapon now lies shattered into as many pieces as this guy’s ribcage. Or is it? He’s still breathing. He’s still gasping out threats. And I have the dialogue option to simply walk away and leave him be. I think I can get away with this, as long as he doesn’t die.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Bollocks.
I should have known, really, that I’d be doomed from the start, and for reasons that expand well beyond one dude up a ladder. The Zone, after all, is near enough a living thing itself. It’s mercurial enough to both kill and reward those who brave it. Yet while we can build sensors that let us scrabble around in the dirt for artifacts, or scanners that can replenish their anomalous energy, the Zone itself breaks so many laws of physics and mathematics that’s essentially unknowable – never mind understandable. And how can you tame something, even an extension of it, that you don’t understand?
Nevertheless, if my road is going to end, I can’t let it end with such a desperate abandoning of my principles. I’d say I’ve got one last good bit of monster-wrangling left in me, and vengeance on one of the tower shooter’s cultist co-conspirators sounds like the perfect way to exhaust it. I find him hiding out a few kilometers south, then immediately leave to go find something with big teeth to introduce him to.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
In a supply shack down near the southern swamps, I find just the thing: a Bloodsucker, who (unlike that no-life Buren) is all too happy to chase me the hundreds of yards back where I came. Sure enough, the cultist is still there. Shocked and probably quite confused, he blasts me his with AK, but I’ve got ample medkits and nothing else left to lose. In his focus, he completely ignores the beclawed glimmer that followed me in, and within seconds, the Bloodsucker bursts from his cloak to slash the traitor down in two swings.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/GSC Game World
