It's not a pure extraction shooter, but the general idea (that is kinda a core concept to the genre) is that if you die you lose whatever you took with you when you went outside your shelter. When you die the game respawns you at your shelter and in theory you should take another set of gear you've stashed in your shelter to go out again. Alternatively you can go out with nothing and do what is considered "zero to hero" as in you use whatever you find in the wild.

It's a learning curve when you've never played extraction shooters because it requires you to think about your actions in a way you normally don't need to think about. In most games you can just take any fight to see how it goes u because it if goes bad you just reload and nothing is lost. But because there's no reloading in an extraction shooter you have to think about if it's a fight you're willing to take, if it's a good idea to push forward or go back to store what you've found. There's a constant question of risk vs reward.

I would recommend starting a new game every time you die until you feel comfortable with bringing back gear into your base and then restocking from your stash when you die. There should also be a trader somewhere in the first area who might be of help when you're looking for specific gear.

The game is somewhere between Stalker and Tarkov but I'd say it's more Tarkov than Stalker. Stalker is more focused around mutants, anomalies and artifacts, none of which are in this game. The only things that separate this game from Tarkov is the lack of online component and no map timer. Tarkov is also moving towards a zoned open-world so I think the comparison with Tarkov is perfectly fine.

And the developer has mentioned both as inspiration:

In terms of other games, Road to Vostok takes inspiration from titles Stalker Anomaly, DayZ, Project Zomboid and Escape from Tarkov.