Finished what's probably one of my favourite story mods today, so I gotta give it a recommendation now. Incubator may sound like a weird name, but it essentially derives from the whole goal of the mod's questline, finding the artifact Incubator. It is so desired by the scientists that you, Kramer, are contracted to find it for the price of half a million rubles. The mod opens with a bang, you escort a squad of ecologists and soldiers from the Jupiter underground to Pripyat, where you arrive to the laundromat under siege. Local stalkers have been attacked by what appears to be a Monolith force, and entering the place, you find only corpses. Some survivors are alive, but suffering from psi-exposure, and one even shoots himself. For a brief second when that happens, you may spot a black figure in an exoskeleton disappear near him. These stalkers in the Laundromat were supposed to deliver the Incubator to the scientists, yet it is gone now. Kramer is contracted then and there to recover it, and you set off to the city to find it.

The mod takes off from there, but before I go further, there's a ton of things you can see straight from the get-go. First, the production quality is simply insane. You have fully voiced characters in cutscenes and even outside them at times, and mostly with subtitles to boot. The graphics are excellent, feeling very naturalistic but also flashy at times, and the modmakers have added nice little touches to familiar places in the city. There's custom icons for all the items, and the gun models are very, very good. Somewhat more controversially, the mod uses HD models, so if that isn't your cup of tea, it might be jarring. Still, you get used to them, at least I did. There's also some weird models scattered throughout the mod, since the devs added women characters, which look quite out of place especially later on. But eh, Russians, man, you kinda expect this.

Now to continue on the plot. It does some excellent stuff from there on out, giving you small side missions to help local stalkers or pursue the main questline. You also get familiar but interesting missions from the scientists and military, finding samples, artifacts and so on in the world for them to tinker on. The main questline, which I do not wish to spoil, takes place almost entirely in Pripyat, but you engage in rivalry with two other groups looking for the artifact and it plays this sort of knife and dagger game where you don't really know who is your ally, who is the enemy and who you can trust. You also get some help from old friends of Kramer, especially an old guy named Limp, and it helps establish a bit more of what kind of guy Kramer is.

Now, a minor spoiler is that once you progress down the questline, you keep running into the guy who has the Incubator. The guy's model is straight out of Splinter Cell mixed with the exo and merc Sunrise suits, he has a big-ass night-vision device on his face which I'm not sure if it is hilariously dumb or cool-looking. The guy is Remark, and he is essentially your main antagonist, always appearing out of nowhere like he has some sort of cloaking device, always helping you yet gloating at the same time, as if he is showing you how insignificant you are. It is however clear that he has some connection to Kramer, and the central narrative soon shifts to finding him and who or what he is. Finding the Incubator get sidelined as an objective, still important to Kramer because he wants to learn why it is so wanted, but his encounters with Remark make him question who the man even is. Various other characters help you during this quest, but only some know of Remark. The main reveal of the mod's ending is nothing super special, you've seen it in other media too, but it isn't super obvious either. As a spoiler though, it's pretty close to the ending of another very well made mod.

Now a bit more on the mod's other content. First, the gameplay. It's pretty much standard CoP gameplay, nothing too different from the trilogy. You have item animations similar to vanilla Anomaly or Lost Alpha DC, which are pretty much the main new thing. The location of Pripyat Outskirts is also your stock vanilla map, but the mod makers have added some interesting little touches to it, for example in the form of a spinning train wagon caught in multiple whirligigs, hanging over the grocery store. There's also helicopters that brought reinforcements to your scientific expedition, which are neat. The mod has some one new mutant which you can face, a weird insect-mammal hybrid with a long tail, dog-like face and two large scythe-like feet. It only appears once in game and once in a cut-scene, so it's not super important but I have not seen it before so it was a cool encounter.

The side content is fun. They're mostly just search and destroy or search and secure missions, or item hunts, but they have again had a lot of care put into them. You have various custom items for Gauss rifle parts, a whole blown up convoy to explore and custom animated parts for some of the smaller missions. There's also a very interesting questline with an artifact that has mysterious properties, and it has some really creepy vibe to it when you first find it. It's amazing little quest, and definitely the highlight of the side content.

To name a few downsides to the mod, the main one is the quest items cluttering your inventory which you only get rid of very late into the mod. It wouldn't be an issue if they weighed nothing, but they do, and thus can cause some issues with weight management. Second is the abundance of good items early on. You get showered in good stuff very early on, in the first mission you can get a Vintorez for example, and soon get access to PKM too. It's not super jarring since there's a lot to fight, but it feels a bit too fast imo. The world is also quite empty, there is little to fight besides the main missions, and you don't even encounter some of the mutants at all, like burers, pseudogiants, bloodsuckers, poltergeists and fleshes do not show up once in the mod. There's barely any mutants roaming the world, and every artifact field can give 3-4 artifacts quickly, making it feel like a cakewalk to get stuff. You can also buy every single suit and gun from the only trader in the game very early on, making it a no-brainer to skip all the armours besides exoskeleton. Still, these are minor complaints, and do not take away from the main experience all that much.

As for the ending, the mod has multiple ones. Some are better than others, and I have not tested all the possibilities, but there's seemingly at least 5 variations. You get to find out who Remark is, what Incubator does and can even find you a girl to leave the Zone with, that one being probably the happiest ending in the mod for Kramer given that he is a massive horndog the entire mod when you run into any gal (again, Russians man...). They're pretty fitting ends to the mod, but I really don't like the fact that you get a PDA message from all the guys you helped throughout the mod when it ends. Some make sense, but generic stalker #431 sending you a message as thanks for saving him feels a bit too corny wholesome. Overall though, the mod is awesome, must play for any Stalker fan, and one of the best produced ones I've seen in English. You can get the translated standalone repack from the C-Conciousness Discord server, which I'll edit a link to in the comments.