Usually, to make a STALKER mod, it's required that you make everything 700% harder, possibly while pouring homebrewed vodka into any available orifice and glueing beard-extending bear fur directly to your face. Lost Alpha is a little more subtle. It started life as a pure restoration of Shadow of Chernobyl's cut levels, but later expanded into a more expansive project: creating a new parallel story that takes place across these restored and recreated zones.

The mod has now been officially released, after an unfortunate leak dashed the creators chances of having their work become an official paid-for expansion to the series. Now, it's instead a great, free excuse to dig the oldest Stalker out from its bunker.

"It was a hard decision to release the game in such a quick, and unplanned way," writes Lost Alpha modder "CrommCruac". "I have to say, I'm very proud to our active team members, because we created something which is beyond our imagination. It looks awesome, it plays just fine, but somehow its still not perfect."

"We will try to update the game whenever we can to make it even better than it is now. Keep in mind, we made all of this in our free time, and mainly for free to play, we did our best to make it very close to our dream game. We feel we succeeded in that, now the question remains: Is it close to what You have dreamed of? Let's find it out together in the Zone!"

You can download Lost Alpha now from ModDB .