Even 15 years on, Metro 2033s morality system is one of the most haunting in video game history.

Metro 2033 is celebrating its 15-year anniversary today, March 16, 2025.

Below, we examine how its subtle morality system helped to illustrate its broader points about humanity and violence.

In video games, evil tends to be gigantic.

These moments are not exactly comical, but they have a glee to them.

They have the joy of a cackling cartoon villain.

In some sense, Metro 2033 is no exception.

This works in a simple binary way.

Completing certain tasks will net protagonist Artyom moral points.

Get enough points and he’ll have the opportunity for the good ending.

Fittingly, Artyom has humble origins.

He is not a soldier.

He is as explicit a player-insert as a game like this can muster.

A sort of greatness awaits him.

But at the start, he is only arrogant because of his youth, not his power.

He is incapable of atrocity; it takes an invitation for him to become a monster.

Metro 2033 opens with Artyom’s older friend and mentor Hunter visiting his home station.

Doing a favor for a friend is a long way from dropping a bomb.

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There’s a lot of downtime in Metro 2033.

But the stations themselves act as tours for the mundane life of the Metro’s citizens.

Beggars plead for money, domestic disputes bleed through thin walls, and conversations wait to be overheard.

Arytom does more than fight monsters.

He can give to beggars or ignore them.

He can chat up the station’s inhabitants or blow right past them.

In other words, Arytom can avoid atrocities by paying attention to other people.

But generosity is only a part of it.

The morality system also values this attention even when it isn’t applied to human beings.

These systems in combination encourage Arytom to search for materials to aid his journey.

Finding caches left by dead rangers or even examining the corpses themselves will net Artyom more moral points.

Levels are linear, but labyrinthian.

The game rewards the player when they explore its margins or off the path set for them.

In a sense, Metro 2033s emphasis on the path less taken makes it an anti-military shooter.

Metro 2033 takes cues from this, but often allows for multiple approaches.

Its UI is absent of any path indicators.

But even in those moments, the morality system still tracks deviations from the path and rewards them.

In other words, when Arytom obeys orders, he kills innocents.

Hunter attributes violence to the Dark Ones, but Arytom never actually sees it occur.

Instead, Arytom sees them looking at him and they scuttle off into shadows when he returns their gaze.

Hearsay and rumor make them out to be an existential threat, but experience gives Artyom something else.

The Dark Ones dot his journey with visions, mostly of Moscow before the bombs fell.

It’s a simple message: “Don’t do this again.”

The Atom Bomb rends the world, just not in literal terms, but psychically–spiritually.

The Dark Ones are vessels of that loss: prophets that seek to prevent its second destruction.

But even these men were composed of small choices.

American Prometheus, the biography upon which Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is based, gives its subject curious virtues.

This is a nuance that Metro 2033 cannot quite manage.

If he is simple and bullish, he will kill them all.

But atrocity is woven into mundanity in insidious ways.

Even generosity can go hand in hand with violence.

There is a simplicity to Metro’s moral fable that undercuts its aspirations.

Light is soft, scant, and diffuse.

Darkness is dank and all-enveloping.

What plant life appears is gnarled and dead, twisted like the metal of the Metro infrastructure.

The shadows of ghosts stand in flashlight brightness, vanishing with the click of a switch.

The world is haunted.

Metro 2033’s journey is Arytom deciding whether he will be haunted too.

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