Some would say it's cheating to include a game based on a novel, but wrapping a great story around a video game is no easy task, as attested to by the scarcity of book-to-game adaptations out there. The Metro games are set in post-apocalyptic Moscow, where everyone is living in subway tunnels beneath the city because the surface is radioactive and populated by mutated monsters. You control Artyom, a young man who must leave his underground home for the first time in his life to venture through the subways and even surface of Moscow to get help for his home station of Exhibition, which is being overrun by mutants. The Metro games are layered with haunting elements of the supernatural (such as the shadowy ghosts of people who have died in the Metro), and convincingly depict a moribund society struggling to survive in torrid conditions. In Metro, we see humanity at its best and worst extremes; ugly ideological conflicts between communists and nazis plague the subways, but you also encounter selfless people who lay down their lives to protect others. A powerful and intimate story, all amidst the relentless din of gunfire reverberating through Moscow's subway tunnels. Who'd have thought it?
Gamer, Researcher of strange things.
I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.
