The prettiest videogame rendition of Chernobyl just got prettier.
When I reviewed Chernobylite, I found it to be a pretty enjoyable wander through the irradiated woodlands and dilapidated townscapes of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It had an interesting approach to player choice and branching narratives, and the design and atmosphere of its relatively small but dense zones was spot-on.
The latest update to the game turns it into the 'Enhanced Edition,' bringing it in line with the newly released PS5 and Xbox Series versions. The Enhanced Edition adds ray tracing and tessellation options, making those reflections more reflective and trees more realistic. When I used DLSS in the base game back in July last year, I found I got a good 30% boost to my frame rate, so that should work very nicely in offsetting the extra strain put on your GPU by the new graphics enhancements.
The update also marks the start of 'Season 1' in Chernobylite, which adds new events and activities to the world and unlocks a new weapon. This will be followed by three more seasons throughout the rest of 2022, each of which will add a bunch of free content, missions, game modes and so on.
For a relatively low-key single-player game, developer The Farm 51 has put a lot of work into fleshing out the game since it left early access last July. Prior to this big update, they'd already added a new map, new side-missions and even a few new monsters to the game.
It's clearly been a monumental effort that almost almost (but not quite) compels me to give it another go. Perhaps once all the new content's been released by the year's end I'll strap on the gas mask and return to this exceptionally atmospheric iteration of the Exclusion Zone.
