Palpable atmosphere, but with a story and characters that aren't really that interesting. I love the zone and it's gameplay, but the star of the show are the sidequests. Truly amazing material is found in them when they aren't fetch quests, and makes it feel like other stalkers have real motivations and goals besides you. The game has a very good way of telling you that you simply don't matter in the zone, and it's not that it wants you dead or hates you; it simply just doesn't care about you.
If you're fine with some obtuse mechanics and dated gameplay, there is a very interesting experience and world in STALKER that makes playing the games worth it.

I love this game, and was my first foray into the souls series, so I may be a little biased. It's areas are compelling, but bosses struggle and miss the mark at times [there are 3 copy paste bosses, and bed of chaos exists]. Game would honestly be better without lost izalith, but the atmosphere and storytelling, with challenging gameplay and [mostly] interesting bosses make it worth it.
PC Release is notoriously bad, even though as I'm writing this, the remaster has already been released and PTDE has been de-listed off of steam, if you ever play it with PTDE, just make sure to install DSFix.

A dissapointing, unoptimized mess of a videogame. I played this around 2 years after its original release, hoping for something better, but all I got was boring RPG elements, a bullet spongy, okay FPS game, and a story that quite honestly doesn't provide enough. There are just way too many things that don't add up or make any sense whatsoever in this game's story and the only reason it gets 2 stars is because it's world is just amazing. The technical performance on PC is absolute shit. I'm running a Ryzen 5 4500h, with 16gbs of ram, on an ssd, and a GTX 1650 and still struggled to pull anywhere near 60fps. That and the blurry forced TAA anti aliasing was made even worse by the AMD FSR that I needed to use to be able to get a stable framerate out of the thing. The games world is very pretty, but it's so hard to see through the foggy, blurry lens that you are forced to view the world in. For context, I am able to run most triple AAA games with good performance despite my dated hardware, but I struggled to get any good performance with this game ON THE LOW SETTINGS. I made nearly every visual compromise imaginable to play this game and it doesn't deliver on any single one of the promises stated in the marketing even after years of 'patching' the game to fix the broken mess they threw out. Some people will really enjoy this game, but I am simply not one of those people.