Metro 2033

After reading Metro 2033 (Метро 2033) by Dmitry Glukhovsky, it should come as no surprise that it has a video game adaptation. The novel's post-apocalyptic world is practically created for it: the remnants of Moscow's population surviving in the city's Metro network, away from the surface's post-war toxicity and other -- sometimes supernatural -- dangers that tend to seep into the underground too. Of course, the dark Metro also holds the usual hell: other people.

These survivors live in the Metro's stations and have formed various factions due to the lack of official governance after the apocalypse. Some stations are independent, maybe allied with nearby ones, while some are part of a faction that holds multiple stations. I found it a bit awkward how Glukvhosky early on splurged out a multi-page information dumps in the middle of dialogue. It was always sudden for the book to continue with someone talking right after as if there had been no long history lesson happening. Turns of events are also often deus ex machinas but the novel justifies them in the end.

Metro 2033 features quite a bit of political and social criticism, and liked that it doesn't try to mask it in analogues, instead being straightforward with it. In 2021, Glukhovsky publicly showed support for the Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny as well as for Ukraine in the war later, which has led to an order of his arrest (in absentia). It's safe to assume Glukhovsky is not in Russia these days.

Metro 2033's protagonist is Artyom, a young man in his twenties, living in one of the Metro's fringe stations. Artyom was born before the shit hit the fan but was too young then to have proper memory of those times. He gets roped into performing a message delivery by a stalker* he meets and the reader gets to follow Artyom's serpentine journey from station to station. He's not too knowledgeable about the Metro which makes him a good protagonist: you get to learn about the Metro with him. The lore dumps feel more natural when it's someone else telling Artyom how things are.

(*Glukhovsky, as Artyom, explains the meaning of the 'stalker' loan word the Russian language has adopted. It doesn't have the connotation nor quite the same meaning it has in English. Rather, a stalker is someone whose occupation involves making trips into prohibited and/or dangerous areas. In Metro, stalkers are people who go up to the surface. Artyom doesn't mention it but the word was coined in the novel Roadside Picnic (Пикник на обочине, Piknik na obochine) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in 1971. That novel has also inspired a video game (series) called S.T.A.L.K.E.R..)

I loved that the book has an actual map of the Metro. It has a lot of detail: numerous stations, factions marked, and also notes of dangers. Deciphering the map on the small paperback version of the book was sometimes arduous. I had hard time remembering long Russian names and had to sometimes recheck a couple of times what was the station I was actually trying to find on the map.

A part of that difficulty is due to the transliteration of the Cyrillic script: some letters become two in the Latin alphabet and you get weird looking words. For instance, ж becomes zh, thus Запоріжжя is Zaporizhzhia -- a double zh. The romanization of Russian into Finnish is also slightly different from English, which I need to keep in my mind when reading a Finnish translation and then blogging about it in English. Although in reality I need to take care with just the two names I can actually remember: the protagonist (Artjom) and the author (Dmitri Gluhovski).

The novel was translated into Finnish by Anna Suhonen. The one thing have to say about the translation -- and it could be in the original as well -- is how an assault rifle is always referred to by the full word which in Finnish is quite long ('rynnäkkökivääri'). If Artyom is carrying just one gun with him, you really don't need to repeat its specific type in every sentence. You could shorten it to rifle or just gun; surely the reader will understand what you're referring to.

I think the video game adaption (also titled Metro 2033) follows the novel's story pretty faithfully. I have in fact kind of watched it being played through on stream more than once but only occasionally paying actual attention to it. I did remember the ending scene, although I didn't have a context of what exactly was being blown up before reading the book now. The game features a moral system which can lead to an alternative ending. Glukhovsky has thought that interesting and I agree: one of the advantages of an interactive medium. Apparently one of Glukhovsky's sources of inspiration was in fact the first Fallout game, which kind of explains why this novel caters so well for a video game adaptation.

Glukhovsky ended up choosing the Ukrainian 4A Games to adapt his novel due to them being an Eastern European studio and having experienced the fall of the Soviet Union first hand. I wonder though, if the novel was to be adapted for the first time now, over a decade later, would 4A or whoever, instead of a linear story game, go for an "open world" design instead. The whole Metro with all of its stations could be realized in one game. I reckon that would be cool.

I was impressed by the novel's atmosphere enough to now want to play the game and its sequel Metro: Last Light by myself. I already had them both because they've been given away more than once. There's a third game too, Metro Exodus, which seems to get pretty deep discounts by now. I can pick up that later; no need to add it to the long backlog quite yet. I suppose I will be also reading Glukhovsky's sequels to the novel: Metro 2034 and Metro 2035.

Edited 2024-01-06: Fixed some language.