You are playing as a Private Military Contractor trapped in the fictional region known as Tarkov in Battlestate Games’ first-person extraction shooter “Escape from Tarkov,” and you have had a night that involved you sprinting nearly two kilometers at a speed that would make most Special Forces operators blush, considering your 100 lbs. of gear. Before you can settle into the holding cell the Russian Armed Forces placed you in, there are explosions and a man banging on the metal door to your makeshift holding cell.

A man yells at you to “get to Zubr,” referring to a boat that will take you out of the Norvinsk economic zone and into the freedom of civilization. You pop the door open, dart to a weapon you see on the ground, knowing that to make it to the boat you will need to defend yourself. Unfortunately, an armed soldier who may very well have been the one to tell you where safety was turns his gun to you and fires. Your vision spins to the ground and the game fades to black.

What just occurred was one of many glitches that can ruin the final mission of Tarkov’s “story,” known as Terminal, where shooting an unrelated faction on a completely separate map can cause the friendly units on that mission to become hostile. This mission required spawning into a separate map, running your character for 1.5-2km, payment in the form of an item that took a valuable piece of loot and anywhere from five and a half hours to crea te. After being shot by an ally you are forced to do it all over again.

Lead developer Nikita Buyanov described “Tarkov” to Insider Gaming in December as being “made for satisfaction, not for fun. Not for enjoyment.” While a demand for games like this certainly exists, those games have a consistency and polish that reward players’ mastery of mechanics.

A more polished game would ask you to push a boulder uphill until you reach a plateau and another hill.
“Dark Souls,” for example, is a franchise built on being absolutely punishing to learn, with insurmountable challenges in a world designed to chew your character up and spit them out, but when you leave a bonfire and try to fight a given boss again, you know where it is, what it will do, and can prepare accordingly.

“Tarkov” would rather you push a cube up a steeper hill while anything from a game-breaking glitch to another person can kick your legs out from under you and laugh at your misfortune.

While touting how “realistic” and “hardcore” it is, “Tarkov” intentionally goes out of its way to build a world where megacorporations create horrifying drug cocktails to test them on abducted people, and every military-aged man has a gun intending to kill anyone else. While doing this, it provides you the tools to create incredibly realistic weapon builds based on real-life parts and ammunition.

The game then sends you into a defunct factory to meet Tagilla, a shirtless man in an armored vest and reinforced welder’s mask who snarls like an animal while, purely by how “realistic” and “hardcore” he is, taking high-caliber rounds designed to shoot people through the walls of a building without flinching. He cheers before he caves your skull in with a sledgehammer. Later, it will show you cultists that do not appear on thermal imaging, a sniper who does not have to actually hit you with his gun to kill you, and a corrupt police officer whose baton can cause your gun to magically jam every time he brandishes it.

“Tarkov” has been available to closed alpha testers since August 2016 and the public to play since July 2017. Since then it has become a phenomenon in the gaming sphere, finally releasing its “Version 1.0” in November. It claims to have “pioneered the genre of extraction shooters” on its Steam page, despite “Tom Clancy’s The Division” featuring one of the first extraction shooters as an additional game mode in March 2016.

Escape from Tarkov is a game that starts at $49.99, has upgrades that make it cost up to $250 and manages to maintain its place as “the benchmark” of the extraction shooter genre. This is not because it does anything particularly well, but because it has almost nine years of tenure. Other extraction shooter games exist, such as “Arena: Breakout Infinite,” and “Delta Force,” both of which are free to play. “ARC Raiders” provides a third-person extraction shooter, and even “Destiny 2” developer Bungie is entering the Extraction Shooter genre with “Marathon.” If you want the extraction shooter gameplay loop without dealing with other players, “Incursion: Red River” is in Early Access, and “Road to Vostok,” which will also add base-building to the formula, is coming to Early Access in April of this year. It stands to reason that the best way to “escape” Tarkov is to simply not buy it in the first place. For those of us who have, the uninstall button is right there.