Remember Areal, that suspicious Kickstarter project made by a studio claiming to be in an "information war" with Russia after receiving a signed letter from Vladimir Putin? It disappeared after its Kickstarter campaign was suspended. Areal is still gone, but its creator is back with something even more strange.

With barely two days left in its controversial Kickstarter campaign to bring "a definitive spiritual successor to the cult hit S.T.A.L.K.E.R." into the world, Areal developer West Games had the rug pulled out from underneath it yesterday when its project was suddenly suspended. But that hasn't stopped the Ukrainian…

UPDATE (12:45 pm): Shortly after we published this story, Areal's Kickstarter campaign was suspended. A representative from Kickstarter wouldn't go into detail about the project or its suspension, and referred Kotaku to this relevant section of its FAQ.

Chernobyl, the infamous Ukrainian site of a horrific nuclear disaster in the '80s, has appeared in FPSes like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and STALKER to powerful effect, but what happens when a gamer steps into the real life Zone? Things get downright chilling. And irradiated.

Inventories in video games? They matter. Rob Sherman, creator of interactive fiction Black Crown, explains why in painstaking (and painful) detail, weaving together a disastrous real-life hiking expedition, ownership, possessions, poetry, F2P, inhumanity, and how games get it all wrong. An absolutely amazing read.

It was a fetch quest.

You don't necessarily need noisy, crowded cities to make a section of a game exciting. Uninhabited wastelands, post-apocalyptic worlds, a sea of sand dunes, vast grasslands... These can all be strikingly beautiful places, and capable of telling enticing stories.

Minecraft aficionado Tsarcorp is the one responsible for this gigantic, 42 square mile map of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It incorporates an almost 1:1 replica of the Pripyat area, just as we've seen in the latest S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

What a mess. Ever since former developers GSC Game World began dying a slow and agonising death, the future of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series has been up in the air, with former GSC staffers moving onto a spiritual successor after a rights dispute.

The Eighth Route Army Culture Park in Wuxiang county, China, allows visitors to dress up at Chinese or Japanese troops. And then shoot each other with phony guns.

The next game from the folks who once made the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. titles won't be out for a while, but they already know that people will be trying to exploit it. They've got plans to stop those ne'er-do-wells.

In April, we fielded a rather confusing rumor that involved game developer Sergei Girgorovich supposedly telling a Russian news outlet that he had sold the rights to his development team's acclaimed post-nuclear-apocalypse-horror-first-person-shooter series, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., to Bethesda, the people who brought us the…

What people loved most about GSC Game World's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise were the lonely, post-apocalyptic landscapes that the game let you wander through. But S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s dead now and things are going to be different in the world being built by the former developers of that franchise won't be quite as sparsely…

Long-time fans of the game series probably already know this, but bleak open-world shooter STALKER isn't an entirely original concept, as it's based loosely on the premise of a 1979 art film called Stalker.

According to Russian reports, STALKER creator and GSC boss Sergei Grigorovich has issued a statement revealing that the reason a new development team couldn't get the rights to the STALKER series in order to make a sequel - as only briefly alluded to earlier today - was because those rights have been sold to Bethesda.

Just two weeks after promising signs of life from creative studio GSC Game World, it looks like post-nuclear horror FPS S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 is dead for good this time. But that doesn't mean that fans of GSC's creepy Eastern Bloc survival shooting won't have anything to play.