Catharsis From The Dark

The Metro series of video games adapts Dmitry Glukhovsky’s book series that began with Metro 2033 in 2002. In Glukhovsky’s fiction, the world was ravaged by a nuclear war, forcing everyone underground, where they survive and make new homes in the metro system. The stories have always been dark and violent fables about the lengths humanity would go to stay alive and hopefully continue to co-exist. Since its announcement, however, developer 4A Games has pitched 2039 as the darkest entry yet, and according to executive producer Jon Bloch, that reflects the real-world difficulties under which the game is being developed.

“Team experience dictated the need to do this,” Bloch says. “Previous games were mostly about preventing war. The themes and morals that were presented and discussed in previous games were more on the gray side, so that people could make their own minds up about the actions and the consequences and the different endings that you’d get based on what you did during the game. But when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, we had to rethink how we were going to approach things and what kind of story we wanted to tell, because war had come to our front door.”