I was just shy of five years old when the Chernonobyl disaster took place in 1986, so I remember it being a major news story of the time but never really thought much of it since. Then when Call of Duty 4 came out in 2007 and featured a level that took place in the city where the Chernobyl power plant was located, I found it totally fascinating to wander around a digital representation of that world, and it got me interested in learning more about what happened all those years earlier. Chernobyl is in Pripyat, Ukraine, and initially after the explosion at the nuclear power plant the government evacuated the city on what was supposed to be a temporary basis, just a few days at most. That turned into a permanent evacuation, which meant that the nearly 50,000 people who lived there ended up leaving all most all of their possessions behind, thinking they’d be coming back. This created a unique situation where there’s an entire city where it appears everyone just up and vanished one day, and it’s sat there just as they left it for more than three decades. Look up some photos or videos of Pripyat and it’s an incredibly eerie and unsettling sight.

Anyway, I find everything about Chernobyl interesting, which means I’m most certainly interested in Atypical Games’ upcoming release Escape from Chernobyl. It’s essentially a follow-up to their incredibly popular Radiation Island ($4.99) and its sequel Radiation City ($4.99), and features open-world survival horror that takes place in an authentic recreation of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant complex. Says Atypical, “Escape from Chernobyl is much more then a survival-horror game, it’s our way to open up one of the most mysterious and dangerous places on the planet. We’ve carefully recreated the reactor buildings and chambers and then added our own touch of a sci-fi story and enough darkness to give you the chills." Here’s the trailer.

I’m REALLY interested to be able to run around and explore a realistic depiction of Chernobyl, and blast some crazy zombies while I’m at it. Atypical says that the game will initially be more linear as you play through story-driven content that takes you through the reactor buildings, but that afterwards the game opens up to be an open-world sandbox style like Radiation Island and Radiation City. In Escape from Chernobyl, “All the buildings have been recreated as close as possible to their real counterpart. All the buildings have interiors and are open for exploration." Because of these more confined spaces a new noise-based stealth system has been implemented into the game, so you’ll need to be careful before busting through doors guns blazing. Despite having issues, both Radiation Island and Radiation City are really entertaining games and technical marvels for being such expansive, graphically impressive 3D games on mobile. Escape from Chernobyl looks like it’ll top both of its predecessors, so gear up to enter the Chernobyl power plant when the game arrives next week on August 9th.