A decade before Stalker, this obscure Ukrainian Quake clone was quietly breaking new ground for first-person shooters

A decade before Stalker, this obscure Ukrainian Quake clone was quietly breaking new ground for first-person shooters | PC Gamer Skip to main content Open menu Close main menu PC Gamer THE GLOBAL AUTHORITY ON PC GAMES US Edition UK US Canada Australia Subscribe Sign in View Profile Sign out Search Search PC Gamer Games Hardware News Reviews Guides Video Forum More PC Gaming Show PC Gamer Clips Software Codes Coupons Movies & TV Magazine Newsletter Affiliate links Meet the team Community guidelines About PC Gamer PC Gamer Magazine SubscriptionWhy subscribe?Subscribe to the world’s #1 PC gaming magTry a single issue or save on a subscriptionIssues delivered straight to your door or device From$1Subscribe now Don’t miss these RPG Cara Ellison, senior narrative designer on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 before Paradox switched developers, discusses her love of Troika’s original RPG: ‘Everyone on the team helped really make that maximum goth’ RPG You’ve never heard of it, but a Russian studio made a fantasy take on original Fallout way back in 2001, and it honestly kind of rules FPS The Marathon server slam consumed my weekend: 21 hours later, I’ve gone from ‘meh’ to believer FPS Citing Halo, FEAR, and Half-Life 2 as inspirations, Sprawl: Zero waves goodbye to boomer shooters and heralds the arrival of the Millennial FPS FPS Hunt: Showdown keeps experimenting with the extraction genre, and its next twist sounds irresistible: Soon, extraction points and loot won’t appear on the map FPS Marathon day two check-in: Into the Outpost, an overpowered shotgun, and why I love doors FPS The best FPS games on PC FPS Highguard didn’t flop Games The best free PC games Games The best indie games on PC FPS If you love Marathon’s vectorheart style but not its PvP, get your aesthetic fix from the gorgeously overstimulating demo for this time trial FPS instead Puzzle Devs behind GoldenEye, Perfect Dark and TimeSplitters are done with big shooters after getting burned by Embracer, so their next game is a Balatro-like twist on Scrabble—and you can try the demo now FPS I was pleasantly surprised by this BioShock-coded roguelike FPS, and its latest update adding a speargun has me yearning to dive back in FPS High on Life 2 review FPS Highguard review PopularNEW: PC Gamer Clips!MarathonArc RaidersBest PC gearQuizzes Games FPS A decade before Stalker, this obscure Ukrainian Quake clone was quietly breaking new ground for first-person shooters Features By Rick Lane published 7 March 2026 Chasm: The Rift is an early European contender to American FPS supremacy. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Action Form) Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter PC Gamer Get the PC Gamer Newsletter Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Want to add more newsletters? Every Friday GamesRadar+ Your weekly update on everything you could ever want to know about the games you already love, games we know you’re going to love in the near future, and tales from the communities that surround them. Signup + Every Thursday GTA 6 O’clock Our special GTA 6 newsletter, with breaking news, insider info, and rumor analysis from the award-winning GTA 6 O’clock experts. Signup + Every Friday Knowledge From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what’s on the horizon. Signup + Every Thursday The Setup Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more. Signup + Every Wednesday Switch 2 Spotlight Sign up to our new Switch 2 newsletter, where we bring you the latest talking points on Nintendo’s new console each week, bring you up to date on the news, and recommend what games to play. Signup + Every Saturday The Watchlist Subscribe for a weekly digest of the movie and TV news that matters, direct to your inbox. From first-look trailers, interviews, reviews and explainers, we’ve got you covered. Signup + Once a month SFX Get sneak previews, exclusive competitions and details of special events each month! Signup + An account already exists for this email address, please log in. Subscribe to our newsletter Weird WeekendWeird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it’s the canon height of Thief’s Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl is to Ukraine’s games industry what Doom is to first-person shooters, a cultural star so dazzlingly bright that it can easily blind us to what came before. Yet just as Doom was preceded by Wolfenstein 3D and Catacomb 3D, Ukraine’s game development history stretches much farther back than Shadow of Chernobyl.GSC Game World had itself released several successful strategy games before it turned its eyes to the nation’s infamous nuclear power plant, while Sherlock Holmes specialist Frogwares was making detective games involving Arthur Conan Doyle’s sleuth as far back as 2002. And who could forget the legendarily janky open-world FPS Boiling Point: Road to Hell, a game that itself is surely due for a Weird Weekend. (Image credit: Action Form)Yet even these games merely represent the twilight zone of Ukraine’s videogame ocean. Delving into the midnight zone brings us to the library of Action Forms. Founded in the same year as GSC (1995), Action Forms’ debut title was Chasm: The Rift, an early 3D FPS that was, in some ways, way ahead of its time. You may like ‘I consider it a millennial shooter’: The FPS dev making hit shooters by leaning into ‘2007-core’ id Software’s second FPS only brought in $5,000, and the studio might not have made Wolfenstein and Doom if the game hadn’t made a dev fall out of his chair: ‘That was just one of the craziest things in a videogame I’d ever seen’ Just when you think there’s no room for shooters to innovate, here’s one where your health is literally your framerate If you looked at a screenshot of Chasm, you might find this hard to believe. At a glance, Chasm looks incredibly similar to Quake. The blocky 3D characters, the single-pixel blood spatters. Even its early levels boast a grungy industrial aesthetic clearly borrowed from i