According to Jon Bloch, executive producer at 4A Games, Metro 2039 (revealed earlier this week via Xbox) will have a “much darker tone” than any of the earlier games in the series. The Metro games have frequently featured psychological horror and tense, ominous environments, so for the next entry to take that even further is a statement.
“A handcrafted, story-driven, single-player campaign, where you’ll feel the weight of the rotting world pushing down on you, forcing you deeper into your claustrophobic nightmares,” Bloch continued in the reveal video of the studio’s sequel to Metro Exodus.
“We will go where the worst of humanity can be on full display,” added Andriy Shevchenko, creative director on Metro 2039.
In the five-minute reveal trailer, we see Metro 2039’s voiced protagonist, The Stranger, battling internal demons as he seemingly hallucinates Moscow engulfed in flames and children being taken away in chains. The running theme is that he needs to wake up, but when he comes to, he’s in the barren, frost-covered, war-torn Russian capital, with demons flying overhead.
Unfortunately, The Stranger is “forced to undertake a harrowing journey back down to the Metro, a place he swore he would never return to,” reads a news release. After a quarter-century of “bitter conflict” in the tunnels beneath Moscow, “the underground factions are unified under one banner — the Novoreich, led by a new Führer: the legendary Spartan, Hunter. The Führer promises salvation and a new life for the people on the surface but in reality, communities remain trapped deep within the Metro, flooded by propaganda and misinformation, suffering under his authoritarian regime.”
Metro 2039 carries forward 4A Games’ primary focus of making worlds that feel real. “We build worlds with details that make a place believable,” Shevchenko described. “The kind of details that you don’t notice on the surface, but you feel it immediately.” This is possible through 4Engine, the studio’s bespoke, purpose-built engine. Thanks to that, if they “want to build a new feature or build something in a specific way,” they can “just make it.” “We’re limited only by our vision,” Bloch explained.
Pavel Ulmer, co-creative director and lead audio designer, stresses that the team is “not romanticizing the post-apocalypse or making a theme park out of it,” though.
“Metro has always been a more tragic view on our actions as humanity,” Ulmer said. “Then, tragedy came to us.”
“Everything we had planned for the next chapter of Metro changed in 2020, then more significantly in 2022,” explained Bloch. “When Russia’s full-scale invasion began, it changed the lives of everyone in the studio,” continued Ulmer. “But more so of our teams and families in Ukraine.”
“The war has shaped us. We have changed the story to be even more about choices, actions, consequences, and what you have to pay to have a future,” Shevchenko explained. “Reality forced us to take a different approach, told from a uniquely Ukrainian perspective. But this is still a Metro story, in the Metro universe.”
Metro 2039 will be released this winter on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
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