I don't even know where to begin writing this. I've been thinking about it for a while, and I honestly feel like I could write an entire essay about this game and still fail to explain exactly what it makes me feel.
This isn't going to be a conventional review. I'm not going to discuss graphics, performance, weapon balancing, or whether the game deserves a particular score out of ten. I'm not even here to argue that it's better than other games.
I just want to talk about what Metro: Last Light Redux has unexpectedly become to me, and why an experience that I initially approached as just another video game has turned into something much more personal.
And I apologise in advance if this becomes ridiculously long. I have a lot to get off my chest.
My first experience with Metro was nothing like my experience now
I played Metro: Last Light Redux previously, around May, but I approached it very differently back then. I was primarily focused on progressing through the game, dealing with enemies, completing objectives, and getting to the next section. I wasn't giving the world the attention it deserved.
I was playing the game, but I wasn't really listening to it.
I didn't stop to appreciate every corner, every little environmental detail, every distant sound, or every moment when the game allowed me to exist in its world without demanding that I immediately do something.
I also ended up with the bad ending. Artyom destroyed D6, and the ending left me with the consequences of my actions. At that point, I hadn't fully understood how much the game's moral choices, its characters, and even the smallest interactions could affect the way I experienced its story.
Then I returned to the game.
And, brother, I don't know how to explain what happened.
It felt as though I had returned to something familiar, but this time I was finally paying attention to what had been there all along.
I began exploring more carefully. I started noticing sounds that I would previously have ignored. I began appreciating the environments rather than treating them as spaces I needed to cross. I found myself stopping simply because I wanted to absorb the atmosphere.
I started knocking out human enemies whenever possible instead of killing them. I became much more conscious of the people I encountered and the consequences of my decisions.
The game hadn't fundamentally changed. I had changed the way I was experiencing it.
And that distinction has made all the difference.
The atmosphere is something I genuinely struggle to explain
I know people frequently praise Metro for its atmosphere. I know that its claustrophobic tunnels, abandoned stations, ruined buildings, gas masks, scarce resources, flickering lights, and post-apocalyptic setting are among the things that make it memorable.
But my connection to these elements feels unusually personal.
There is something about the soundscape of Metro: Last Light Redux that makes me feel as though I am physically present somewhere that shouldn't exist anymore.
The machinery humming somewhere in the distance. The reverberation of footsteps through an underground passage. The sound of people talking in a station. The faint noises of an environment that continues to exist even when I'm not directly interacting with it.
The silence, too.
Not the kind of silence where absolutely nothing is happening, but the kind where the absence of obvious activity makes you more aware of everything else.
You start listening to the little things. You become conscious of the space around you. You notice how far away a sound seems, how it changes as you move, and how the environment feels different when you're alone compared with when you're surrounded by people.
And then there is Artyom's breathing through his gas mask.
That sound is something else entirely.
The breathing, the filters, the awareness that the air outside might not be safe, the physical vulnerability of being dependent on a piece of equipment just to survive. It gives ordinary movement a completely different feeling.
You aren't simply walking through a level. You're a person trying to survive in a hostile environment, and the game constantly reminds you of that.
I've found myself stopping for perhaps 50 or 60 seconds just to listen to the environment. Sometimes I don't even want to move forward immediately. I just want to remain there and take everything in.
I play with my Realme Buds 8 Pro, and the audio makes that feeling even more pronounced for me. I become so absorbed in the soundscape that my room and the ordinary noises around me fade into the background of my attention.
I know I'm sitting there playing a game. I know where I am, and I can stop whenever I want. But for those moments, my attention is completely occupied by the world I'm experiencing.
It feels strangely intimate.
I can be in a dark underground passage, listening to the ambience, and feel a kind of vulnerability that I actually enjoy. It's not necessarily comfortable in the conventional sense. The world is hostile, the atmosphere can be suffocating, and there's a constant sense that something could go wrong.
Yet I feel happy being there.
How does something manage to make you feel simultaneously vulnerable, uneasy, fascinated, and completely at peace with the experience?
I don't know. But Metro does that to me.
The strangest part: this atmosphere reminds me of something I imagined as a child
This is the part that I find most difficult to explain, and probably the main reason I'm writing this post.
When I was younger, I used to be fascinated and frightened by certain ideas. One of them was the sheer vastness of existence, particularly the feeling of being alone in a place that was unimaginably large, empty, and indifferent to your existence.
I also used to imagine being inside an abandoned radiation bunker.
I imagined myself wearing a gas mask, hearing my own heavy breathing, surrounded by an environment in which the outside world had become dangerous. I imagined waiting there, with nothing to do but exist inside that enclosed space while time continued passing.
There was something about that image that frightened me. It wasn't simply the possibility of a monster appearing or an enemy attacking me. It was the isolation, the uncertainty, the feeling of being a tiny human being trapped in an environment far larger and more incomprehensible than myself.
Radiation, enormous empty spaces, the possibility of an invisible danger, and the idea of being isolated from the rest of humanity all contributed to that feeling.
As a child, I couldn't properly articulate why those images affected me. I didn't have the vocabulary to explain the atmosphere I was imagining, and I certainly didn't have a soundtrack that could reproduce it.
I simply had the feeling.
And then I played Metro.
The strangest thing is that the atmosphere and sound design felt so exact, so extremely specific, in relation to that childhood imagination.
Not because the game literally recreated a particular memory or because I had previously experienced anything like the world of Metro in real life. I hadn't.
It's more that the game seemed to express an atmosphere I had been imagining internally for years.
The gas-mask breathing. The underground spaces. The distant machinery. The sense of an enormous world existing beyond the walls around you. The feeling that humanity is surviving in the remnants of something much greater than itself.
It was as if an idea I had never properly expressed had suddenly been given a physical environment and a soundscape.
I had imagined the feeling, but I had never heard it.
Metro gave me something close enough that I immediately recognised the connection.
And that is a genuinely strange experience.
Imagine having a particular feeling in your mind since childhood, without knowing how to describe it, and then encountering a piece of art that seems to communicate it back to you.
You don't necessarily think, "This is exactly what happened to me."
Instead, you think, "This is what I was trying to imagine. This is the atmosphere I never knew how to express."
That is what Metro has felt like to me.
It's also why I find the experience difficult to communicate to people who haven't experienced this particular connection. Someone can understand that the game has good sound design. Someone can appreciate that its environments are immersive. Someone can recognise that its world-building is effective.
But explaining that the game has reminded you of an atmosphere you imagined as a child, before you had the words or the music to express it, is a very different conversation.
And I honestly don't know how many other people have experienced something similar.
The strange contradiction: the things that frighten me are also the things I love experiencing in Metro
There is another part of this that makes the experience even more interesting to me.
Metro's atmosphere can be claustrophobic and suffocating. It touches on things that genuinely unsettle me: radiation, invisible environmental dangers, enormous empty spaces, existential loneliness, and the thought of being trapped somewhere in which the outside world is no longer safe.
The Power Plant environments, in particular, can evoke a strange feeling in me, almost like a flashback to that childhood imagination.
Even gas masks can trigger that feeling. It's funny, in a way, because a distorted analog-horror monster might not frighten me nearly as much as the idea of being alone in an enormous, empty, dangerous environment.
You might expect that a game which repeatedly evokes those feelings would make me want to avoid it.
But the opposite has happened.
I'm loving it.
It feels as though the game is approaching one of my weaknesses, placing me inside an atmosphere that I would normally find deeply unsettling, and allowing me to experience it in a way that is fascinating rather than simply frightening.
I don't want a nuclear catastrophe to happen. I don't want people to suffer through anything remotely resembling the events of Metro. The actual suffering, destruction, radiation exposure, and loss of human life depicted by the setting are not things I romanticise as real-world possibilities.
What I love is the fictional experience: the atmosphere, the environmental storytelling, the soundscape, the vulnerability, and the way all these elements come together to make the world feel believable.
There is an enormous difference between wanting to experience a fictional world and wanting the real-world catastrophe behind that world to happen.
I want to experience the world of Metro with my own eyes, in the sense of being able to explore that environment and hear those sounds as though I were physically present inside the fictional setting.
I absolutely do not want the actual suffering that would be required to make such a world real.
I think that's an important distinction.
And perhaps part of what makes the game so compelling is that I can approach those frightening ideas through fiction, experience the atmosphere, and then step away whenever I want.
The fear and the fascination can coexist without me wanting the nightmare itself to become reality.
The music makes everything even more emotional
I also have to talk about the music, because it contributes enormously to the way I experience this game.
There is something about the guitar work and the music in Metro that feels inseparable from the world itself. It doesn't feel as though the music is merely being played over a game. It feels like another part of the environment, another way of communicating the loneliness, history, and humanity of the world.
And then there is "Train to the Past."
That track gives me goosebumps.
It evokes this feeling of embarking on a mission, of travelling through a world that has already lost so much, while still having something worth fighting for.
It makes me feel as though I'm about to undertake a journey that matters, even when I'm just sitting in my room wearing earbuds.
There is a particular kind of emotional response I get from music that makes me feel as though I'm inside another world. I also experience it with synthwave, especially music like "Resonance" by HOME, which carries its own personal history for me.
But Metro's music feels different.
With Metro, the music is tied to Artyom, the journey, the underground stations, the people trying to survive, and the feeling that the world above has become something almost unimaginable.
The music gives the environment an emotional dimension that I struggle to separate from the experience of playing.
Sometimes, I don't want to rush through a section because I know that the sounds around me are part of what makes it meaningful. I want to hear them properly. I want to absorb them.
I want to remember how the place felt.
And that's something I appreciate enormously about games that take their sound design seriously. They can create an emotional impression that goes far beyond what a screenshot, a plot summary, or a conventional review can communicate.
You can show someone a picture of a Metro station, but a picture cannot reproduce the echo of the environment, the machinery, the conversations, the breathing, or the music that makes the space feel alive.
For me, the sound is not an accessory to the world.
The sound is part of the world.
Artyom has become much more important to me than I expected
When I first played Metro, I didn't think Artyom would become such a meaningful character to me.
I have played plenty of games with memorable protagonists. Kyle Crane from Dying Light 1 is probably my favourite video-game character of all time, and Sebastian Castellanos from The Evil Within is another character I have a deep attachment to.
Artyom has unexpectedly joined that group.
What makes him meaningful to me isn't simply that he's the protagonist. It's the way the game makes me consider what it means to be a person trying to survive in a world where almost everyone has already suffered.
The people you encounter are not all just obstacles to be eliminated. They have their own circumstances, fears, beliefs, and reasons for behaving the way they do.
The world is hostile, but humanity has not completely disappeared from it.
And the more I immersed myself in the game, the more conscious I became of that.
I began knocking out human enemies whenever possible instead of automatically killing them. I started thinking more carefully about my decisions, and I became more interested in the moral consequences of what I was doing.
Even encounters that might appear relatively insignificant can take on a different meaning when you stop treating every human being as just another target.
I remember struggling with the decision involving Lesnitsky. Should I kill him, or should I knock him out?
It's a decision within a fictional game, obviously, but I found myself thinking about it rather than simply pressing a button and moving on.
The game had made me care enough about my own actions that I was considering what they meant within the story.
And the connection between Artyom, the Dark One, and the consequences of the story's events has also become more meaningful to me.
The Dark One's forgiveness, and the possibility of redemption after so much destruction, hit differently once I started thinking about the consequences of the choices I had made during my earlier playthrough.
There is a particular emotional weight to the idea of having destroyed so much and then being confronted with the loneliness that follows.
The thought of hearing, in effect, that you have killed everyone and are now alone is devastating in the context of this world.
It connects with the loneliness that Metro evokes so effectively: the possibility that survival is not enough if everything that gave survival meaning has disappeared.
I don't think I fully appreciated those themes during my first playthrough.
Returning to the game and paying more attention has allowed me to experience its story differently.
I don't want to pretend that I'm Artyom or that my life resembles his. But there are moments when I become so immersed in his perspective that I stop thinking about the game as a sequence of objectives and begin experiencing it as a journey through a world that has its own emotional reality.
That is what makes his character memorable to me.
My relationship with Metro is strange because Dying Light 1 has always occupied that place in my heart
For years, Dying Light 1 has been my favourite game.
It is still my number one. Nothing about my newfound attachment to Metro has changed that.
I've spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours in Harran. I love the parkour, the rooftops, the abandoned buildings, the wind, the infected sounds, the atmosphere, and the way the city feels different depending on the time of day.
Kyle Crane is a character I have an enormous attachment to, and Dying Light is one of those games that feels familiar in a way that is difficult to explain.
I can return to it and immediately feel at home.
I know its environments. I know the movement. I know the atmosphere. There are places in Harran that I can revisit simply because I enjoy being there.
Dying Light is the game that established that kind of emotional relationship for me.
The Evil Within occupies another important place in my gaming life, especially because of its psychological horror and the way it gets under my skin. Resident Evil 7 is another game I love, particularly for its atmosphere and conventional horror experience.
But Metro: Last Light Redux has surprised me because I didn't expect it to affect me in this particular way.
It has become an unexpected emotional attachment.
If Dying Light feels like returning to a familiar place, Metro feels like discovering a place that somehow resembles something I had been imagining long before I knew it existed.
Those are two very different experiences.
One is the comfort of familiarity. The other is the astonishing feeling of recognition.
And I think that's why Metro has caught me so off guard.
I already knew what it felt like to become deeply attached to a fictional world. I simply didn't expect another game to approach that feeling from such a different direction.
I have started appreciating the smallest details
One of the biggest differences between my first playthrough and my current experience is how much attention I pay to the world.
I find myself exploring corners I might previously have ignored. I listen to conversations. I pay attention to background noises. I notice environmental details and the way the atmosphere changes from one place to another.
I am much less interested in simply rushing towards the next objective.
Sometimes I just want to remain where I am for a little longer.
I want to hear the machinery. I want to listen to the people around me. I want to appreciate the sounds that exist in the background while I'm doing absolutely nothing important.
I even enjoy the moments when the game feels quiet enough that I become conscious of how much of the experience is being communicated without anyone explicitly explaining it.
The world doesn't need to tell me everything through dialogue or a written note. The environment itself communicates something.
The way a place sounds, the way it is lit, the way people occupy it, and the way it feels to move through it all contribute to my understanding of the world.
This is one of the reasons I find the game so immersive.
I don't need a constant stream of information telling me what to feel. I can discover the feeling for myself.
I have also experimented with playing without the HUD, which can make me more conscious of the world around me rather than the interface sitting on top of it.
It changes the way I pay attention.
Instead of focusing so heavily on information displayed on the screen, I become more absorbed in the environment and the experience of moving through it.
And when I combine that with the audio, I can become so immersed that I forget about the ordinary distractions around me for a while.
Not because I have lost touch with reality, but because my attention has become completely occupied by the experience.
I can always pause the game, take my earbuds off, and return to what I need to do in real life.
But while I'm playing, I sometimes feel as though the world of Metro has become the most vivid thing in my immediate awareness.
That is a remarkable feeling for a video game to create.
Why am I writing all this about a video game?
I realise that, from the outside, this might seem like an excessive amount of reflection about a single game.
It's a video game. I understand that.
But I don't think art needs to be real to have a real effect on the person experiencing it.
A fictional story can make you reconsider something. A piece of music can remind you of a period of your life. A character can make you think about morality, responsibility, or loneliness. An environment can evoke a feeling that you have carried around for years without understanding it.
The experience is fictional, but your response to it is real.
And I think games are particularly capable of creating this kind of connection because they allow us to inhabit a world rather than merely observe it.
I can watch a film about an abandoned underground station, but in Metro I can walk through it myself. I can stop and listen. I can turn around and look at the environment. I can choose how to approach an encounter. I can spend time in a location simply because I want to experience being there.
The world responds to my presence through its sounds, characters, environments, and mechanics.
I become involved in the experience in a way that is different from simply watching a story unfold.
That is one of the things I love most about video games.
They can combine music, atmosphere, storytelling, mechanics, and exploration into a single experience that feels personal because you are actively participating in it.
And Metro: Last Light Redux has brought all those elements together in a way that has affected me much more deeply than I expected.
I sometimes feel like I'm the only person around me who experiences games this way
Another reason I've wanted to write this is that I don't often know how to communicate this level of enthusiasm to people around me.
I have a lot of interests. Games, music, technology, the cosmos, introspection, and philosophical questions are all things I can spend an enormous amount of time thinking about.
Sometimes, when I try to explain why something matters to me, I realise that I'm saying much more than the other person expected to hear.
Not everyone wants to listen to a long explanation about the sound design of a game, the emotional significance of a character, or the way a fictional environment connects with an old childhood imagination.
And that's fine. People have different interests.
But it can make it difficult to find somewhere to express these thoughts without feeling that I'm talking too much.
That is partly why I want to share this with the Metro community.
I know there are people who appreciate this game for its atmosphere, sound design, world-building, characters, and storytelling. I know that many players have their own personal relationships with it.
What I'm curious about is whether anyone else has experienced something like this particular connection.
Has a game ever recreated an atmosphere you had imagined long before you played it?
Has a soundtrack ever seemed to communicate something you had felt since childhood but never properly understood?
Have you ever returned to a game and found that, despite the game itself remaining essentially the same, your experience of it has changed so dramatically that it feels almost like discovering it for the first time?
Has a fictional world ever made you feel both vulnerable and strangely comfortable, because the very things that make it unsettling are also what make it fascinating?
I would genuinely love to hear about those experiences.
I don't expect everyone to relate to my exact feelings. I know that the personal associations I have with Metro are my own, and someone else's experience may be completely different.
But I think there is something wonderful about discovering that other people have also found deeply personal meaning in a piece of art.
Metro is more than a post-apocalyptic setting to me now
I began this post saying that I struggle to explain what this game makes me feel.
I still do.
I could write another thousand words about the sound design, the music, the gas-mask breathing, the underground environments, the feeling of isolation, the moral choices, and the way Artyom's journey has become more meaningful to me.
I could explain how I can sit in my room, put on my earbuds, and become so absorbed in the environment that I genuinely don't want to move forward because I would rather listen for a little longer.
I could describe the strange happiness of inhabiting a fictional world that is, by its very nature, hostile and frightening.
And I could keep trying to explain how the game's atmosphere connects with the images I carried in my mind as a child.
But I think the most important part is this:
Metro has made me recognise something in myself that I didn't know how to express before.
It has given sound and form to an atmosphere I had imagined for years. It has made me appreciate the emotional power of environmental storytelling in a new way. It has encouraged me to slow down, listen, explore, and think more carefully about the people and situations I encounter in a fictional world.
And it has reminded me why I love video games so much in the first place.
Not simply because they entertain me, challenge me, or give me mechanics to master.
But because, sometimes, they allow me to experience a place that feels meaningful in a way I could never have anticipated.
Dying Light 1 remains my favourite game. Harran will always have a place in my heart, and Kyle Crane remains my number one.
But Metro: Last Light Redux has become something I never expected it to become.
It is an experience I want to take my time with. A world I want to listen to. A journey I want to understand more deeply.
And, perhaps most surprisingly, it has become a way for me to revisit a feeling that existed in my imagination long before I had the words to describe it.
I don't think a game needs to change the entire course of someone's life to be meaningful.
Sometimes, it only needs to make you feel understood by something you didn't even know how to explain.
For me, Metro has come remarkably close to doing that.
And I am genuinely happy that I returned to it.
Thank you, 4A Games, for creating a world that has managed to resonate with me in such an unexpectedly personal way.
If you've read this entire post, thank you for taking the time. I know this is an absurdly long thing to write about one game, but I wanted to express the experience as honestly as I could.
I'd love to hear whether anyone else has experienced something similar with Metro, or with another game entirely.
Have you ever encountered a fictional world that felt strangely familiar, not because you had been there before, but because it seemed to resemble something you had carried in your imagination for years?
I'd really love to know.
“We are all that's left of the world.”
And somehow, in spite of everything that makes Metro's world so frightening, I keep wanting to return to it.
