It's just that it never, ever pulls punches on you. Or is it just a horribly hard, lethal game where I should get used to seeing 'Press the Space Bar to quit'?Д¬lick to expand.It's not really a that difficult game even if it get's considerably easier once you get your first gun with a scope. I'm trying to correct my tendency to just stand out in the open and shoot, but any more general advice ('don't get into fights - ever') would be very welcome. How do people play this game? Are there any obvious things to do at the start that don't lead to instant death? I'm only playing on 'Stalker' difficulty and am generally fairly decent at FPS games for a 36-year old. I took a mission to retrieve some stuff from a car at the bottom of a hole, started climbing out of the hole via tunnels, was attacked by odd, loping men in gasmasks and bled to death. I took a mission to help some bandits who were meeting with a trader, we were followed, a firefight broke out and I died. I offered to investigate a glowing light at a dredger, found that there was no way in and died shortly thereafter to something under the water, possibly an anomaly.

all of which seem to lead pretty quickly to my death. I've collected my reward, sold some gear, upgraded a couple of guns and taken some more missions. I've gone to the first big boat, taken a mission from a bandit to sneak-attack some stalkers and kill them, warned said stalkers, got involved in a huge firefight that I think the stalkers sort of won, though I'm not entirely sure which side I was helping. I started playing around with Stalker: Call of Pripyat (henceforth SCoP) during the evening. It all went sort of wrong from there and I found myself buying the sequel and something entirely unrelated. There was an article on Rock Paper Shotgun about the architecture in Stalker, which made me remember how much I'd liked the first game and how I'd given up on it when walking three steps in any direction seemed to lead to my getting jumped by various gangs and eaten. In a moment of horrific weakness yesterday, I bought Stalker: Call of Pripyat (and pre-ordered Alpha Protocol) on Steam.

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