Once the trio has escaped the city and entered the zone, Tarkovsky’s film sheds its forbidding sepia tones for the vibrant green of nature reclaiming a place abandoned by humanity. The trio are nevertheless irresistibly drawn to the zone, and that pull – as well as what they find inside – is at the core of zone games.

Entry into the zone is forbidden, and the imposing militarised fenceline surrounding it, as well as the Stalker’s deformed child, suggest that it’s full of sinister environmental hazards – radiation, pollution, or something worse. The film follows three men – a writer, a scientist, and their guide the Stalker – as they venture into a heavily fortified zone in search of a mysterious room that’s said to hold whatever one most deeply desires. But STALKER the game owes much to Stalker, the hauntingly beautiful 1979 existentialist sci-fi film by legendary Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. And you’d be partially right – STALKER and its sequels established many of the game elements, as well as the atmosphere, that you’ll find in Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown. So why zone games? You might imagine that it’s a callback to STALKER, GSC Game World’s beloved 2007 shooter-RPG about exploring an irradiated zone full of alien artefacts and hostile factions. And as in Tarkov, in Hunt you’re risking something meaningful just by setting foot in its poisoned swamp – if you die, your hunter is gone, along with all their precious gear. As in Escape from Tarkov, Hunt: Showdown sends you into a large, cursed area full of hazards that come in the forms of both other human players and AI-controlled enemies. The biggest other entry in this nascent genre I’ve just named is Crytek’s Hunt: Showdown. But I’ve been watching Tarkov streams and playing Tarkov for well over a year, and while developer Battlestate Games has taken a rather lousy view on the notion of adding playable female characters to Tarkov, the game it’s built is perhaps a peek at an emergent genre – one that I propose we call ‘zone games’. Escape from Tarkov has seen a recent surge in popularity, thanks largely to big-name streamers with huge audiences who tuned in over the first week of the year, incentivised by the promise of valuable in-game loot drops.

Escape from tarkov mod