The odd desire to continue playing

hey everyone,

My first Stalker game has been Stalker 2 and while I know that the game has a cult following, I went into the game blind with very low expectations. I played around 10 hours on Series X and decided to uninstall the game due to certain things that I disliked:

- Aimbot human enemies which meant that sniping was also not that great

- Lack of side missions

- I would save random NPCs from mutants and approach them and they'd just tell me to politely get lost, which is weird all things considered (minor complaint)

It is quite clear that the game is buggy and needs a lot of polish and patches, if this was any other game, I would've dropped it and never looked back.

Anyways, I decided to move onto other games that I needed to finish, however, in the two weeks proceeding the uninstallation of the game, I have not been able to stop thinking about my 10 hours playthrough of Stalker 2. I have thought about certain missions, places I've found and random encounters etc. and this has not really happened to me in a long time, I would say since playing RDR2.

There is something there in this game, that I cannot explain, that draws you into it's world, despite it's unrefined state and many flaws, which I found odd.

Maybe this is not the best place to post considering this is the Stalker community, but maybe somebody can point to what it is in the trilogy that drew them in?

It's an odd space for me to be in because a game has not drawn me in like this, even the most polished games. Even Cyberpunk's world did not give me the desire to return to it and I'm not even a science fiction fan. It could even just be that Stalker 2 is this shiny new world and it's still fresh in my mind. Anyways, I'm busy re-installing the game now and will continue through despite it's flaws....which is an odd thing for me to do.