If you’ve been reading this column for the past two years, I’m a broken record on pointing this out, but there’s something strange about how easy it is to be bad and how herculean it is to make good things. Along the way you might have to gun down dozens of faceless, screaming enemies, but it is all in the interest of an action that is greater and grander. Destroying the mutated bear that’s been hounding the forest people for a generation is good. Good actions work on a grand scale, though. But the end of the road (or in the case of Exodus, the track), there’s a promised land for those who managed to make it. At the ground there are questions about choices and what you should do and what you have to do. They lose some friends along the way, and they see their enemies and wonder if, in fact, there but for the grace of God they go. A rag-tag group of people have to set out across the wastes to find a world worth living in. For people who are into post-apocalyptic media, this is an extremely familiar terrain. It’s built up from Cold War fears, and its world is one that has been decimated by nuclear war and the accompanying spillover effects that a war might make.
Metro Exodus is a down-the-line post-apocalypse. And, strangely enough, what’s being repeated, retreaded, and replicated is the future. As I wrote in my review for Paste, there’s something over-familiar about every single part of Exodus that makes it feel like a retread of cultural beliefs about the nature of humanity and the stories we tell about each other. Metro Exodus, out last week, is the logical output of a couple of decades of doubling down on these ideas.