Chernobyl, the former beacon of Soviet industry, and Pripyat, an abandoned model city, represent full visions of the alternate historical trajectory that so many cities and industries still standing today could just as easily have taken. Indeed, Honkonen recalled being struck by the eerie similarity of Pripyat to where he grew up in Finland. With its prefab apartment buildings and 80s aesthetic, Pripyat shockingly looked like the overgrown, destroyed inverse of his childhood home, Jyväskylä.

Andrew Gibson, an English freelance photographer who has toured the zone twice, said that although the "dark tourism" desolation is what draws people in, the fact that the zone is the result "of the biggest nuclear catastrophe the world has ever seen" quickly sobers any jovial holiday, apocalyptic, or video game comparisons. "You get so engrossed taking it all in that you barely interact with the others in your group until you're sat down for a meal," Gibson said. Like many visitors, he was hesitant to use the label dark tourism because of its sensationalist connotations, yet spoke of engaging with the area's historical gravity much in the same way Podoshen described it. "Life in Pripyat stopped in 1986 and however ravaged it seems," he said, "it is as close as you can get to a regime that no longer exists." He described the "incredibly powerful" feeling of being "virtually alone in a place that was once so full of life."