Brave the Dangers of the Post-Apocalypse in ‘Metro Awakening,’ Out Now on Meta Quest

Are you ready to face the dangers of the post-apocalyptic Moscow metro system? In Metro Awakening, the year is 2028 and the survivors of nuclear Armageddon cling to existence in underground subway systems buried by the chaos of conflict. This story-driven first-person adventure is built exclusively for VR by blending atmospheric exploration, stealth, and combat into the most immersive Metro experience to date—and it’s available right now!

To learn more about the game and its development, we spoke with Martin de Ronde, game director, and Augusto Roselli, lead producer for Metro Awakening. You can watch the tense gameplay trailer to see what kind of action you're in store for down below, or check out the all-new launch trailer right here. Viewer discretion is advised.

Martin de Ronde: At Vertigo Games, we’re always looking for stories and worlds that would be impactful in and translate powerfully to VR, where players can experience an intense level of immersion. Metro’s world naturally has that aspect, so with the series being part of the Embracer group, it was the perfect opportunity. The universe is rich with atmosphere and tension, and that offers this perfect blend of survival and exploration. Just closing your eyes and imagining what the Metro VR game would be like, it’s not an extremely difficult thing to do, right? It’s like, okay, I can see myself being in this dark corner. I can hear something behind me. I’m afraid, I have to turn around and this big mutant is jumping at me, it’s like, if you do that in VR it’s going to be fun, of course, scary in a good way.

Augusto Roselli: And one of the first conversations that we had was if you can imagine that interaction of the gas mask and dealing with the oxygen and wiping it off. That’s just a perfect translation to VR and that is the picture that was kind of put on the table. I was like, “Oh! It’s not just a shooter, it’s a shooter that also has all of these physical things and everything is manual and there’s a crank and everything is so tactile.”

AR: Absolutely. I think we’re looking for also allowing some of the players that really like to get into those details. People got so into the details. You have to pick up enemy guns to get loot and take out their actual magazines, take a look at how many bullets there are and then pull it in. Something that we didn’t realize in the beginning was play testers would pick up the guns, take out the magazine and then empty the chamber, and then try to pick up that bullet as well.

MdR: Scarcity is a thing!

AR: Yeah, for people that really like the manual aspect of VR, of doing things in a tactile way, it’s, yeah, we went as deep as we could in that for sure.

MdR: Well, the next step was when we started working on the game and figuring out what kind of a game it is. The lazy thing would have been to say, let’s take Metro 2033 and just port it over to VR. What we wanted to create was an original game, so we teamed up with the original writer of the books, Dmitry Glukhovsky, who was also one of the co-writers of the screenplay and he wrote the original story for this game.

What we said then, we want this to be a narrative driven game. We want it to be a more intense game and we want the story to take more center stage, and if you have that, and you know how the pacing is going to change, then it can become tedious. If shooting is like 80% of the action, then yes, having to manually reload every single time becomes a chore, but if you know the correct pacing, then it actually becomes this gratifying and satisfying thing of, ‘Oh, now I’m going to go into the action and now it is fun to basically count my bullets and reload and make sure that I get every single bullet every single time from every fight in order to be able to overcome the next fight that is taking place like ten or fifteen minutes.’

AR: There is a lot of attention that went into the game design to not become super-frustrating to do the action. As an example, if you grab a pistol, and there is a space that we found a sweet spot where if you get it close enough, we’ll pull the gun into your hand.

You don’t have to, but if you want to do it manually, you can, we’re not going to stop you, but if you come in a little close to it, we’ll slide it in for you. Another example, some weapons allow you to just pick up the new magazine and you can just slot it in and we’ll kick the other one out for you, so you can put it in, but there’s details like that that we either automated the action or instead of having to do the full motion we’ll do a little bit of the motion for you. Sometimes it’s really hard finding that sweet spot.

MdR: Yeah, so, we wanted it to be a very much a story driven game and obviously the games are based on books, so that wasn’t too hard because when we got in touch with Dmitry we said, “Look, we want to build this story driven game and we want to not build it around Artyom.” Artyom is the main character in the other three games. We said, “We want to do something new and refreshing and we would like to ideally base it around one of the series’ favorite characters, Khan, who is, as you know, the Roman philosopher that Artyom meets in the first two adventures, and he was like, “That’s fantastic. We are going to effectively do an origin story for Khan”, so that’s how it came about and that’s effectively what the game is.

You find out more about how Khan came to be who he is and it’s actually a very personal emotional story about Khan’s past, how he started, how it turned out, and how we ended up with the position he’s in when you meet him in the mainline games in Metro 2033 and Metro Last Light.

That was the departure point. Dmitry penned a story outline, like 3 or 4 pages, we looked at it. I didn’t break down in tears per se, but it was very emotional. Russian literature and entertainment culture is different from western literature and entertainment culture in the sense that there’s oftentimes no happy endings, if you know what I mean. There was actually, I learned this years and years ago that Russian movies, when they were taken to the U.S., the ending was often changed for the U.S. market for there to be a happy ending. This is early 1920s, 1930s when movies were still very much international. So, his story that he wrote for us was like a bittersweet story in a way, but we felt it was perfect for the setting of Metro.

When it comes to gameplay, the action still needs to be reminiscent of what people already love from Metro 2033, which is all about stealth, it’s all about scarcity, so you’re literally roaming the tunnels, you find the occasional bullet, you have to listen, “Is there a mutant down the tunnel? Can I avoid it? Do I hear the sound of other enemies, enemy voices? Can I listen in on their conversations? Do they tell me something so that I can sneak past them?” It’s the living world chatter that we all know from the original series, and we started bringing them together. There are story driven sections and then there are definitely stealth sections and then there’s some all-out action sections, and they all are patched together in a very nice and balanced way, and that’s how we started piecing the game together.

AR: Yeah, if I was to give the store description that we usually go for, and especially for people that haven’t played Metro, I’d say, Metro is very much a story driven action-adventure experience that invites players to dive into the world of the franchise, which is an eerie and harsh place that takes place in post-apocalyptic Russia for a very personal story to discover the more supernatural elements of the Metro.

For Metro fans, I think this is a love letter to the franchise, both in terms of going into the world of Metro for the first time via VR, for players that played, especially Metro 2033 and some of the DLCs, and there are definitely locations that people will go back to that they will recognize from the other games, and of course, playing the story and exploring the story of such a beloved character like Khan that has always been sort of a mysterious character. I think it’s a good mix and a good balance.

MdR: Yes, and this is a good point because we didn’t know or we still don’t know, of course, what your entry point is going to be, are you a VR gamer -- but you’ve never played a Metro game before? Or are you a Metro gamer that is jumping into VR or are you somewhere in the middle? And we needed to make sure that everybody could play these games and not go like, oh, you need to play the first three Metro games in order to be able to play the new one.

That said, if you have played the previous Metro games and you’re a big fan, you’re going to get all the recognition stuff and there’s references to actually existing sequences in the mainline series that we’re using in the game.

The books are also different from the games, obviously, once the books were done, they were never written to become a game, they were written as a book and they were then used as a source of inspiration for the games. They obviously left out certain elements, and Dmitry now saw an opportunity to bring back some of the characters and some of the factions that had been left out of the original mainline games.

AR: Which hopefully gives everybody a chance to whatever your entry point is, if it becomes this game, then to then branch out into playing the mainline games or reading the books. Getting deeper into it.

MdR: It’s a journey through uncharted territory where you’re constantly having the feeling that you want to go back to your mommy, you know what I mean? It’s scary out there, you’re leaving your home station and you’re going into the wild, so to say, and in VR that can be extremely scary because there’s noises around you, there’s creatures that are attacking you. When you’re doing that on any headset, it needs to be as immersive and as realistic as possible. For a mobile standalone headset, if we were to do this four or five years ago, that would be a challenge. You would probably have a very stylized depiction of the Metro universe, but the devices are so powerful nowadays, even the Quest 2, that allowed us to create a level of visual fidelity. The art team has done an amazing job, the coders have done an amazing job to get a game running that I think is artistically and graphically very, very impressive and very supportive of our vision to give people the belief that they are literally walking inside the metro system in Moscow.

AR: I’d say in terms of a technical challenge, for us, I think there were three main areas that posed a big challenge for us. One was the art style, we wanted to remain as faithful as we could to what people know the Metro franchise to be and on the previous entries have always been benchmarks, so the best that you can do on the platform that they came out of, and this is something that we wanted to be faithful to in a way. Another part is, the immersion is such an important part, the game is told through stories that we have, these impactful, deep character conversations. There’s over an hour-and-a-half of performance capture footage with multiple characters.

So putting that together and making it work on the Quest 2 was definitely challenging and the third one was light and darkness.

The game is dark. It’s meant to be. Often, the metro is lit by candlelight or the last throes of a generator somewhere, flickering lights, and there are sections where there is no light source, and we wanted to have that horror element, so we gave the player a flashlight. And at that point, when you create a dynamic flashlight, it needs to interact with other dynamic areas in order to give players the chance to shoot down lights to create areas of darkness.

I also have to say it was a delight to be able to move on to the enhancements of the Quest 3, where players will see a big difference. I think the main one is the ability that we have to create physically based materials, essentially that allows us to create reflections. So metal looks like metal, wood looks like wood, and the walls actually have a little bit of depth to them. That gives you a sense of presence. And on the Quest 3, we’re able to then push that level of realism even further, which is really nice, despite some compromises we needed to make on Quest 2—but it still looks incredible on both. We’re blessed with a team of veterans that have been working on VR for a very long time.

MdR: In 2015, we started and we were kind of like the go-to guys for new hardware coming out and working with dev kits for devices that weren’t on the market, whether it was Quest Go or the original Quest. So we are used to working with hardware that has restrictions and constraints and then you just go in and you try and get the most out of it. And of course, we have been having moments where we were like, ‘Are we going to be able to get the performance out of it?’ And then it works.

MdR: There’s sections in the game where you’re being chased by something in a dark tunnel whilst you’re on a metro carriage and so it’s moving and, yeah, the numbers of things chasing you could bring down the performance, but because it’s such a dark area, if you lower the lighting in the tunnel, then you don’t have that performance issue. But at the same time, it becomes much scarier because the only thing you can see in the darkness is the glint of their eyes and it actually is an upside for us, that specific constraint, that we had to lower the draw distance for the performance’s sake.

MdR: I would definitely recommend playing on easy. That sounds super simple and straightforward, but if you want to really appreciate the story and you want to play it as it’s meant to be experienced almost and you’re not used to those tense situations as much, it’s the way to do it honestly.

AR: There’s a few different areas that scale actually. One of them is that it touches almost on every aspect related to survival and combat. So for example, the health doesn’t regenerate on harder difficulties, but on easy, if you just stay still and don’t take any damage, your health will slowly regenerate all the way up to 100. And also enemy AI will differ between the different difficulties, where the higher difficulties, they will try to flank you and be more aggressive and throw grenades and be a bit more in your face about tactics. And on the easy mode, they’ll work less together and they’ll miss more. Their accuracy goes down. And then the other part is scarcity, where on the harder difficulty, we made sure that you’re always given the bare minimum amount available so that you can go past the next challenge, but not much room for mistakes or waste. On easy, we make sure that there’s a plentiful amount of resources going around.

AR: The scarcity system is dynamic, and it’s based on what you have available, not on a fixed amount. We created a dynamic scarcity system that scales to the situation.

MdR: It’s keeping you always on edge.

MdR: Yes.

MdR: Pay attention. Pay attention to everything that’s being said. Listen to the dialogue. It’s not just a vehicle for the game. The story is part of the game. And listen to the philosophical musings of the characters. Appreciate the dialogue, the conversations that the characters are having, the personality. Dmitry and the screenwriter put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this. And, yeah, we hope it comes across for people to really appreciate it.

AR: I’ll piggyback on that. I think my advice would be indeed, for players to not try to rush it. This is not a game that was designed for people to get to the end as fast as possible and try again multiple times. Ideally, it is something that you can explore multiple times in multiple different ways, try to get achievements. We’d love for that. And see all the secret places and little stories that we have. But, especially on that first playthrough, embrace the journey. Take your time, go slow, understand the story, and embrace being in that world.

MdR: Play it cinematically! You know, if you’re standing in front of a character that is explaining to you what has happened in VR, you can obviously wave at him in his face or try to hit his chin or something. I see people sometimes do that. You’re ruining it for yourself. Appreciate the love and labor that we put into this. Because, yes, you can obviously try and pick somebody’s nose when he’s standing in front of you, but that wouldn’t happen in a cinematic scene.

AR: I would say, to play devil’s advocate, if you want to tackle this more as a combat survival horror style game, you can. It’s been very fun to see our developers become extremely proficient with the guns, for example, and kind of try to John Wick their way into scenarios where they’re shooting everybody efficiently in the head, reloading extremely fast, and they’re checking their things and preparing scenarios and taking out guns in the right way or going full stealth and trying to ghost the entire game and not kill anyone. There’s so many different ways of playing.

MdR: One of the challenges in the game is to play the entire game without killing anyone. Because you’re a pacifist, you can kill the monsters, which is kind of weird in a way, but you’re not supposed to kill any humans. And then you play it as the character would probably play it because he’s a doctor. He’s sworn an oath to heal people instead of kill them. It’s quite difficult.

Metro Awakening is available now on the Meta Horizon store for the Meta Quest platform. You can dive in now and put your survival skills to the ultimate test. Do you have what it takes?