Metro: Last Light made me really, really want to bathe it. Games like Mirror's Edge really did a convincing job of giving players a body within a game world. Again, though, this place is a mess, and you're certainly not moving through it in some hermetically sealed bubble. 'You're covered in blood!' he exclaimed - though he seemed perplexingly unconcerned about whose blood it might be. Pavel, meanwhile, actually reacted when he noticed Artyom - now probably wishing for a pair of windshield wipers - scrubbing away heaping globs of gore. Blood erupted in suitably volcanic fashion, and the gas mask had front-row seats to the sloppy spectacle. But then - agonizing hour-seconds later - Artyom found his range. Jagged rows of teeth gnashing inches away from Artyom's neck, its breath fogged up the mask as limbs of all shapes and ape-rat-ness flailed in mortal panic. Artyom hit the post-apocalyptic jackpot in the form of a loaded shotgun, but was immediately pinned to the ground by what can only be described as a giant ape rat - mostly because I don't know what it was actually called. However, the gas mask really shined (by which I mean 'got completely caked in every irradiated goo imaginable aside from Mountain Dew') in combat, of all places. It's a dirty, dust-and-grime-coated mess, and it doesn't particularly care that you're buzzing around on its surface.

In both cases, Metro's world felt alive - but not in a pristine, robotically scheduled Skyrim sort of way. As you might expect, our presenter immediately reached up and wiped away the resulting uranium-green blood smear, because eHe passed another corpse, at which point its band of rot-borne flies migrated to the mask's surface, lingering and squirming about. In its nearly pitch black depths, they encountered another traditional gaming trope: a handy, dandy dead body - aka, 'Hooray, treasure!' Disturbing its eternal slumber, however, yielded no loot - well, except for giant mutant spider creatures, because of course it did.Īrtyom, though, isn't Richard Cobbett, so he nonchalantly crushed one of the headcrab-wannabes as it skittered across his mask. So Artyom and his presumed dead (at least, after the events of Metro 2033) companion, Pavel, marched on, taking shelter from the downpour in a total trainwreck of a train tunnel. Mundane? From a conceptual standpoint, perhaps, but the E3 demo gave no indication of it. This could very well end up being a shooter in which the thing you do most isn't shooting things it's wiping your face. But it's all at once indicative of Metro's focus on putting you in Artyom's eerily silent shoes and a brilliant mechanic in its own right. Sarcasm aside, no, it doesn't sound like much on paper.

I know what you're thinking: Hallelujah, this will change the way we play shooters forever, and it's not the Citizen Kane of gaming because Citizen Kane is - retroactively - the film equivalent of this mask-wiping masterpiece. So our presenter made Artyom do something that - to my knowledge - no game character's ever done before: he, you know, wiped it off. Then, one by one, they drizzled down it, blurring mournfully serene remains of buildings and struggling-to-survive grass tufts into a mess of gray and green. Rain drops began to pound on his gas mask - like bullet-quick pieces of gravel pinging off a car windshield. And also a gas mask.Īfter a blinding flash of sunlight nearly knocked Artyom flat, thunder crashed and lighting tore open a cloud-eclipsed sky.

So what follows is the story of a videogame. It might seem like a curious object to take home from a gaming convention, but given the events that unfolded during Last Light's demo, I can't think of anything more fitting. Inside it, I found an actual, factual gas mask - sturdy yet pliable, and reeking of fresh-off-the-assembly-line rubber. When I walked into the E3 demo room for Metro 2033 sequel Last Light, I was immediately presented with a small, thin military-green bag.

Metro last light walkthrough rail car