Strictly speaking, this isn’t true throughout the entire US. Wait staff in Washington, for example, get paid the full state minimum wage, and the minimum wage act explicitly requires that tips be paid to employees rather than retained by the restaurant. Of course, actual practice or compliance can differ, but there are a few states with better laws than the norm.
As I understand it, your copy of that community will no longer update. There is a cached copy of the community on the Beehaw server, so you’ll see it and can seemingly post, but you’re posting to a copy of the community rather than the live community, and your posts will only be seen by other Beehaw users. To circumvent this, you’d need two accounts (or an account on an instance federated with both Beehaw and Lemmy.world, maybe?)
You’re likely thinking about Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. I played it and a sequel (Call of Pripyat) recently on semi-modern hardware, but YMMV. I loved Stalker back in the day.
I haven’t personally tried it, but I’ve also been watching Chernobylite on Steam with interest. It seems like it may be intended to be a spiritual successor to Stalker. It’s been on sale recently, too.