Super Nerd Sundays Presents: It Is Pitch Dark!

Metro 2033 was a dark horse for me in many respects. It’s not a game I expected to like in the least. The product of a group of first time developers from the Ukraine who have the somewhat auspicious presence of a handful of the original designers of STALKER who left GSC, STALKER’s development company, almost a year before the ambitious, buggy and messy game made its “mark” on the gaming community. It’s a game which received middling reviews from institutions I make a habit of ignoring and failed to incite any kind of real discussion, a game based on a novel I’d never heard of from an author I’d also never heard of. It had no multiplayer, making it aberration in our current era of “multiplayer or bust” gaming, and was touted as a “survival-horror-shooter,” which can either mean a game is going to be beyond incredible or a flaming pile of shit.

But if there’s one thing you should’ve learned from all the articles I’ve written about things I bought on sale from Steam in the past it’s that I’m super, super gay for deals. So during Steam’s incredible summer sale, where nearly half the store was on sale to one degree or another, I picked up a copy of Metro 2033 on the cheap. I picked it up with a bunch of other games I’d heard mixed things about such as Alpha Protocol and Supreme Commander 2, with no intention of playing it any time soon. And indeed I did not. It sat unattended on my hard drive for nearly two months before I sat down and started to play it. I didn’t have any expectations set on it. I had read no reviews at that point, had no idea what to expect in terms of gameplay. I had the vague sense that I’d be playing something a good deal like Doom 3 based on the box art and the single promo video I’d accidentally seen months earlier.

Imagine my shock, then, when I started up the game and found out that I’d be forced to manage things as basic as my air supply. That breathing itself was something the game was concerned with, and not in that retarded “ticking clock” way that Doom 3 was but instead in a way that forced me to ration equipment over multiple engagements and look for undamaged gear in order to survive. Right away I was shown the tools at my disposal and informed that they were fitted with a finite number of bullets, a number I’d do well to remember. I was shown a number of enemies without end, an overwhelming horde I’d be just as well off stabbing as shooting for all the good fighting in general would do me.

I was thrown into a survival horror game that knew it was about resource management and, as a result, didn’t try to be very scary. It instead made its horrors boilerplate, daily occurrences, the price of life in this place. It instead put the focus on player response, on demanding that players consider and conserve to survive. Sure, weird rat things might be scary in and of themselves. But Metro 2033 didn’t try very hard to scare you with thoughts about that. Instead it wanted to scare you by making you wonder, how many bullets do I have left? How many more weird rat things will those bullets kill? Is it worth it to see if I can weather them and then clear this area out for supplies or should I just run for it?

The end result is tension. Not a constant grinding tension, the game knows enough about its business to give you little breaks here and there to keep you from getting too fatigued, but a sort of mounting tension that builds up as your magazine drops lower and lower, then evaporates each time you find a promising supply cache. It’s the sort of tension which makes you wonder, have they seen me? Can I manage a stealth kill? Should I just go for it and get all the supplies I can carry out of here or should I move on and hope they don’t notice me? Because stealth is always an option too, although it is a pathetically easy option compared to some of the punishingly difficult segments that I’d best describe as “combat puzzles.” Most of these “puzzles” are, in keeping with the game’s overall theme, about getting out of the fight with enough resources for the next one, but that’s okay. It fits the world they’ve made, which is fresh and original and has just the right balance of humanity and desperation to make life seem hard without feeling like a poorly rendered picture of humanity at its worst.

Occasionally they use this sort of “puzzle to world” relationship to incredible effectiveness, like in one occasion late in the game where a particularly overwhelming puzzle emerges from a remnant of the world before the cataclysm that shaped Metro 2033. This holdover from the military industrial complex forced me to quickly calculate how much ammo I could spare compared to just how much health I could lose and, in the end, was probably the second most challenging puzzle in the game - the first being the start of the Communist-Nazi standoff which forced me to replay a single segment of the game around a dozen times until I finally had it figured out.

This sort of intelligence carries over, shockingly, to the writing. Most games, let’s face it, have absolutely shit writing. Starcraft 2, for example, had appallingly bad writing, writing it wanted to ram into your face constantly, writing that told you little to nothing about the world in which the little bits of gameplay actually occurred in and lots about a world which appeared to be totally divorced from said gameplay. But Metro 2033, a game adapted from a Russian language novel by a Ukrainian development team with an overall budget which I’m sure is roughly equivalent to the amount Blizzard spends on bagels on a Friday, managed to get some genuinely good writing in there. Sure, there’s some shitty expositional dialogue, and one character constantly spouts vaguely mysterious statements which are clearly intended to “make us think,” but amongst these forced exchanges are some interesting characters and exchanges about what life is really like in this place.

Early in the game a father stalls telling a child about his mother’s death by having him draw pictures for her on the concrete outside their squat, enduring for his child. One of your companions, who has realized that the world is what you make of it, has taken to joking and laughing at the horror around him without losing his mind, simply smiling at the absurdity of life in the Metro. A Fascist soldier is conflicted about his family’s safety and the actions he must take in order to protect them in the society he has become a part of. Married couples squabble, prostitutes sell themselves, shysters hustle and run without really learning their lesson in the end and, shockingly, people who stick together tend to do better than people who habitually distrust and abuse the strangers they meet. It’s a hostile world, but Metro 2033 actually shows human beings as what they fundamentally are: resilient damaged goods who can make the most out of anything and will cling to whatever they have feverishly. I found the snapshot of Polis to be one of the most illuminating moments of the game, a brief look at what a successful society looks like in the Metro. While it was by no means an easy place to live it was fair. It was clean, and it was kept that way by people who were well aware of the dangers outside, people who knew that they’d have to work together to keep what they’d built.

Even though it is, at times, boring and repetitive, even if it does sometimes force your hand and ask you to make important choices without giving you any information (What, for example, is the difference in damage between an AK-47 and a Bastard? A VSV and a Kalash-2012? And how the fuck am I supposed to know what a Tihar is when I find it in the middle of a sewer tunnel? Tooltips please!) I’d still recommend Metro 2033 to almost anyone who wants a solid single player FPS experience. Obviously it’s not for everyone, and at around 8 hours total it’s hard to say that it’s worth $50. But if you can find a copy at $30 or below and like the gameplay type it’s a singular experience, well crafted and smart, that demands a lot from its players and offers plenty in return. For a first time effort it’s nothing short of exceptional and, if nothing else, it’s made me wonder what 4A Games will make in the future. Aside from Metro 2034 I mean.