Metro: Last Light

This review contains spoilers.

Metro: Last Light is a fitting sequel to the good but problematic Metro 2033, sharing many of its strengths and weaknesses. It still excels at creating an oppressive atmosphere that enhances the survival-horror aspect of the narrative, and it still fails at building its stealth sections against human enemies, which tend to morph into cluttered firefights. Its story, meanwhile, returns to the anti-political message of the first game, still trying unsuccessfully to defend empathy and condemn ideology (in its broad, general sense) at the same time, but now in a much more complex and fascinating way.

The prologue has Artyom, now a newly appointed ranger, reminiscing about the old days before the apocalypse, when he was a kid going out with his mother in search of ice cream. But soon, “the righteous and the sinful were called to be rendered according to their deeds” and humanity “hid from God’s sight in the Metro.” In this game’s world, the last of humankind is trapped inside the subway system, making cities out of stations, avoiding the radiation on the surface while hiding from the hellish monsters that stalk the streets.

The game opens with Artyom having a vision, a dream of the Dark Ones – the sentient creatures he nuked at the end of the last game, which makes its “bad ending” canon – manipulating some soldiers to kill each other. Their description matches the scene, building a monstrous aura that paints them as this one-dimensional evil that must be vanquished at all costs. In other words, it justifies the genocide Artyom perpetrated, which is fitting, since it’s his words: “Huge, towering a full head over the highest man… nightmarish creatures, creepy as a man turned inside out. Monsters born to destroy us. The word was, they were incredibly strong and unnaturally evil. That with bare pawns they could tear armed men apart. That’s all lies. Truth is even scarier.”

We soon learn, however, that one of these Dark Ones has survived the missile strike and Artyom’s friend, Khan, asks him to go find the creature and try to communicate with it. Khan believes the attack on the Dark Ones was a grave mistake, but Artyom’s superior, Miller, disagrees and sends the ranger to finish the job, alongside an experienced sniper named Anna. Artyom’s orders are clear: he is to lure the beast into the open and if he tries to bond with it in any way, Anna will have two targets instead of one. And the dismissive way she speaks to Artyom – calling him “rabbit” – indicates she won’t hesitate to take the shot. The mission, of course, goes awry and Artyom gets captured by the Nazis, who take him to a crude concentration camp assembled in the tunnels.

These first scenes are just as effective at building a hopelessly bleak atmosphere as the ones that open the first game. As we move through D6, the enormous military facility Artyom found in Metro 2033, we hear soldiers talking about recent events with a sardonic air of defeat. One of them is told that their colleague, Romanov, got so traumatized during his last expedition that he now only speaks to God. The soldier just laughs at this tale and says, “I hope Romanov is not expecting an answer.” Evil in this world is a tangible thing, it has claws and wings or guns and swastikas, while goodness still feels like a fairytale to these people.

Violence is the norm, so much so that Artyom quickly dismisses Khan’s pleas to reason with the last Dark One precisely because murdering it would make him fit in. “I must do what Hunter demanded of me, what Miller ordered me, what Anna expects of me. I must prove to them that I deserve to be one of them,” he writes. And there’s talk of war too, with the Communists and the Nazis seeking to take D6 for themselves.

Metro 2033 presented the Communists and the Nazis as two sides of the same coin, two oppressive communities that intend to suppress and control the Metro’s stations. The only good faction here is the Order, the one Artyom is a part of, and the one that is supposedly “free of ideology,” seeking only to protect the people from the monsters. Last Light further develops this theme, but unlike its predecessor, in a curiously complex way.

First, Artyom gets captured by the Fourth Reich when the mission to murder the remaining Dark One – which is revealed to be a kid – fails horribly. And, while he’s being held by the Nazis, we can already spot a significant narrative difference to Metro 2033. After all, while that game didn’t care to delve into the ideologies it was criticizing – thus criticizing them just for being ideologies, and not for their content –, Last Light is trying to explore at least one bit of the Nazi belief system: when he’s imprisoned, Artyom witnesses a man being executed after the Nazis measure his skull and find the results wanting. The belief in a superior race is at full display here, with the soldiers shooting the man – they call him a mutant – just because his skull isn’t shaped like a true Aryan.

In this underground concentration camp, Artyom meets a communist called Pavel, and it is through Pavel (who is even named after a friendly ranger Artyom meets in Metro 2033) that Communism is suddenly framed in a positive light. Here, we have one of its members saving the main character and showing a welcoming disposition, making jokes about The Three Musketeers while teasing Artyom about the wonders of his ideology.

When they escape to the surface, for instance, where we must use masks and constantly change filters to survive, Pavel finds a pack of supplies left nearby and comments how that is the way of his people, to treat everyone as a brother, sharing resources to those in need. It’s a gameplay convenience – without the supplies, we wouldn’t have been able to proceed – being perfectly used to develop a theme.

Soon, we arrive at a station controlled by the Red Line, a station that is considered “the cultural capital of the Metro,” which marks another huge departure from a note Artyom wrote in Metro 2033: it stated that the Communists and the Reich didn’t care about art forms at all and didn’t pay attention to culture. In Last Light, however, we can even stop to watch many different performers – ranging from musicians to monster trainers – at the local theater run by the Communists, which is a nice touch.

But it is in this settlement, after watching the performances, when Pavel and Artyom stop for a drink, that there’s a huge betrayal that impacts the whole story of the game. Pavel drugs Artyom with the drink and sells him to his superiors, who intend to torture the ranger for information.

This is the moment when Artyom’s eyes finally open to the terrible truth, the truth that he was lied to, that the promises of equality and friendship were all just bait to get him to drop his guard. And so he starts to believe that the most dangerous thing about Communism is that it lures people in with false promises of equality, that it makes them loyal before they discover, too late, that the Red Line is just as violent and cruel as the Reich. Communism is more dangerous than Nazism, Artyom thinks, because it makes sense, it’s just not true. They may not measure skulls and kill based on race, but they still revel in violence and seek to acquire power at any cost. In Last Light, Nazism ideology may be rotten to the core but at least it’s honest about its cruelty, while Communism deceives us.

This makes for a much more fascinating argument to dissect and contest than the incredibly shallow one made in the first game. Especially because Last Light’s structure in the opening act mirrors the general theme: it gets Artyom – and, by extension, us – to soften up to Pavel’s words, and see him as a friendly force, to then pull the curtain back and reveal it was a trap all along. The narrative never intended to really distance Communism from Nazism, it was just a ruse to reinforce the particular dangers of both ideologies.

But unlike Metro 2033, Last Light doesn’t limit itself to saying that Communism and Nazism are the same because ideology is wrong by itself, and so the higher moral stance to take is to reject politics altogether. Last Light actually shows that both groups preach different things, but while Nazism is wicked by itself, Communism deceives the people. The big question in Last Light is if this means that the actual ideology of Communism is framed in a good light, and the problem is that it gets twisted by those in power, or if it’s all deceiving by design – that the contradiction is inevitable because it is intended. It’s a question that Last Light raises but struggles a lot to answer.

Artyom doesn’t mince words after the betrayal, vowing to take revenge on Pavel, who seems to switch gears after the event, now using much more harsh and cruel words. The friendly disposition is gone now, as if it were just a façade. This makes Artyom directly compare the Communists with the Nazis and even say he now considers the first one the worst of the two. When watching the communists march toward D6, the protagonist writes, “And the very silence accompanying their war preparations seems more sinister to me than all the Fuhrer’s speeches…” It’s their silence, what is not being said about their true intentions, that makes Communism so dangerous to Artyom.

And this is why they are the main antagonists in Metro: Last Light: they are the main problem Artyom is trying to solve. The Nazis barely appear anymore after Artyom and Pavel’s escape, which is a problem because the game shows they were also preparing to take over D6, but the final battle is all about killing the invading Communists. The leaders of the Red Line, Czeslav Korbut and Andrey Moskvin, are also both one-dimensional in their cruelty and ambition. The characterization of Korbut, for instance, is the pure stereotype of a cartoonish villain, with a missing eye, a pointed face, and a cruel-sounding voice.

In a crucial note for the story, Artyom links each faction and event, putting everyone in the same box, and this includes even himself.: “We are all damn heroes saving humanity. The Nazis killing anyone however slightly mutated. The Communists eager to herd everyone into one state and thus introduce peace in the Metro. Me, who in order to save people has destroyed a whole new sentient species. We’re talking of salvation all the while killing, killing, killing… And that was the way of man always.”

If Metro 2033 painted Artyom’s faction, the Order, as a benevolent force without ideology, Last Light shows how that was never the truth. It’s impossible to disassociate politics from the killing of monsters because we must first decide what is a monster and what is not. In Last Light, for example, the Dark Ones are suddenly characterized as benign, pacific beings, unjustly hunted and murdered by the Order. There are even flashbacks of them saving Artyom as a kid and building a special connection to him. Khan was right all along: they weren’t trying to kill the rangers, but to communicate with them. The rub is that humans can’t handle the experience too well and then go mad. This is why they built the connection to Artyom when he was a kid, they wanted to turn him into a bridge between the two species.

This whole reveal is problematic in the sense that it hinges on Artyom forgetting that his first experience with the Dark Ones was positive. So, when he writes “The meeting with the Dark One just got displaced from my memory,” we can’t help but see it as the narrative convenience that it is. And when he writes, “I was the only one free from their influence, but I suspected myself to be a sleeper agent of the monsters,” we simply don’t buy it. After all, the fact that Artyom remains silent during normal gameplay and cutscenes – only speaking the words of his diary in the chapter intros – hurt any attempt to build an internal struggle.

There’s a shift when Artyom finally finds the remaining Dark One – who is just a child – and bonds with him, seeing his younger self in the kid. From this moment on, Artyom’s starts to refer to the Dark Ones as angels – as there’s often a religious undertone in the dialogues of Last Light – and vows to protect him from harm. The kid helps Artyom in return, handing him supplies from time to time and allowing him to spot enemies at a distance.

Right after discovering he was meant to function as a bridge between humans and angels (but actually obliterated them from the face of the Earth), Artyom must traverse a literal bridge that was blown up in half by bombs. The symbolism may not be subtle but it’s effective nonetheless. However, it gets more intricate when we realize that the bridge is full of hungry monsters that intend to kill Artyom.

These creatures prove that there are exceptions for the good treatment of the monstrous other, for there are indeed some beings that are really feral, far beyond a civilized discussion, creatures that are truly one-dimensional evil and incapable of redemption. And when we get to the bridge and spot those very monsters, the kid, who can see the color of their souls or disposition, promptly says, “Red… dangerous.” A bit later, to hammer the point home, this is how the boy describes Artyom’s enemies: “Very red… very eager to kill.”

The analogy made here is as subtle as the bridge. The Communists, who live in the Red Line, control the Red Stations, and are directly referred to as the Reds, are compared not to the Dark Ones – the other who is actually good – but to the one-dimensional mutants and gargoyles – the other who is indeed very, very bad.

It’s important to note that we can actually traverse that bridge without harming the mutants and even get an achievement for managing that. For Last Light tries to have it both ways: it paints the Communists as these monstrous, backstabbing villains who act just like the bloodlust-driven monsters we kill. It shows they have even infiltrated agents into the Order – so that more Communists can betray Artyom –, tapping into the paranoia that permeated the Cold War. The game pushes us to feel nothing but catharsis when taking their lives, but the thing is that it also tries to punish us for doing so, as if saying the act is wrong.

To get the good ending in Last Light, we must show mercy to the Communists that have betrayed Artyom (such as the double agent and Pavel), sparing their lives. The bad ending that we get by murdering them has Artyom exploding D6 to kill the Communists and dying in the process. The good ending has the Dark Ones, the angels, arriving at the last minute to save the day, for the kid has learned by Artyom’s good deeds that he should care about “the other,” and so he comes to save D6, and help his friend alongside the remnants of the Dark Ones, a small group of survivors who were just discovered by Artyom.

The problem is that these “angels” save D6 by killing the Communists. Last Light tries to have it both ways and, of course, can’t handle the resulting contradiction: it says that the good action is to spare the Communists… but just for others to kill them for us. In other words, Last Light’s narrative is marked by this indecision, this tension in the characterization of the main antagonists, and the contradiction regarding how they should be dealt with.

Just like the first game, Metro: Last Light also struggles with character development, especially regarding the side characters. Khan is still defined by his connection to the supernatural – saying stuff like the metro system is alive and taking Artyom to a river that will show his fate – and nothing more. Anna amounts to a sexual reward for Artyom’s growth and heroic deeds and nothing more. The Communist leaders are just greedy and cruel and nothing more. Pavel is the only one who shows promise to surprise us – even the Dark One kid says he’s more grey than red, more sad than angry – but Pavel barely appears after the betrayal and the confrontation is over too quickly.

Just like the first game, Metro: Last Light is at its best when it’s not dealing with human beings other than Artyom. It excels at pure horror, depicting the fight between a man and a non-sentient beast. It’s at its best when we are exploring the dark tunnels of the metro system covered by cobwebs – which slow Artyom down and must be burned down – and we are trying to avoid the many unspeakable monsters that prowl it. There’s a great sequence where we are driving a railcar named Regina, traversing a barely lit tunnel full of monstrous scorpions and mutants, and we often come across open corridors inviting us to leave the safety of Regina to look for resources – and maybe find more than we bargained for.

Monsters are fast and brutal in the Metro games. There’s this mutant that moves and acts like a deformed putrefied gorilla that starts to slash madly when it gets near Artyom. Since our guns need to reload often – and the process is very slow, too – these beasts make for anxiety-filled encounters, where we can easily get surrounded by many of them, all slashing madly non-stop from every side.

A highlight level is a swamp, which we must explore in search of a way to activate the mechanism that will call the boat out of there. The problem for Artyom is that hitting the water will alert the nearby mantis-like monsters, and there’s even a flying demon that patrols the area. So, we must scour every inch of the place slowly and carefully, hearing movement from every side, not knowing if it’s coming from one of their babies that just run around aimlessly, posing no threat, or if it’s one of the big ones that has just spot us. And to top it all off, it’s happening on the surface, which means there’s a timer attached to it, as Artyom needs to wear a mask and constantly change its filters. The mask can break too (it gets full of cracks to show us it is close to doing so) and even get dirty if blood or other more disgusting liquids get splashed over it (there’s a button dedicated just to wipe it clean). Overall, it’s a tense, nerve-wracking level.

This leads to one of this series’ main problems so far. The mechanics and systems of the Metro games are built to heighten its survival horror aspect and not to serve a proper, actual shooter. On the contrary, things like the long reload times and low ammo make the sections where we must shoot dozens of Communists or Nazis feel clunky and frustrating. Stealth is encouraged to be the first option to tackle all encounters with human enemies, in order to save ammo, but the lack of tools and mechanics at your disposal – there’s nothing besides crouching, turning off lights, and using silent weapons and takedowns, which can still alert enemies – means that stealth is only a temporary resource.

The best moments in these games are actually the ones that are simply eerie. There are places in the world of Metro where death is an instant tattooed in time: to traverse them is to be haunted by the memories of the dead. When Artyom and Pavel are escaping the Nazi camp, they get inside the wreckage of a plane, where they start to see flashes of the passengers and crew, the ghastly footprints of their last moments alive. Pavel goes mad, takes off his mask, and starts to choke, which means Artyom, who got a hold of himself faster, must save his life.

Finally, we must also praise the art direction, since Last Light evolves the setting in creative ways. One of the settlements in the metro system, for example, is half-flooded with groundwater and people must come and go in boats. This leads the locals to charmingly call this city-station Venice.

The problem with judging a piece of art using a moral criterion is that you limit art as a whole, making it a self-aggrandizing mirror that should only reflect the validation of your own worldview and moral values. You make it much more about your ego than about the art itself. When experiencing something like Metro: Last Light I find it much more productive to analyze what it does and what it says, to judge the quality of the discussion it provokes, the complexity and nuance of it, which allows a way to delve into its tensions and contradictions. In that sense, Metro: Last Light provides a full meal.

June 07, 2024.