Metro 2033: Spatial Involvement
Metro 2033, as expected, offers spatial scenes that go hand in hand with the story and emotions that the game wants to transmit. As mentioned earlier, the game has a clear on-rails gameplay which is reflected in many aspects of the game, such as storytelling, goals, navigation, player choices, etc. The way space navigation is explored, is simply as fluent as the storytelling is storied. It looks perfect, but from behind a glass wall —it is a cover up for the limited resources.
It is not hard to find your way through the game space, as on-rails suggests it is just like going straight. There are though at most two areas that allow a more complicated (relative to the rest of the space) architectural structure, which took more time to navigate and to find the way, but other than that it is simply pretty and easy to go by. Even though it’s straight forward with many tunnel like structure, in terms of space complexity and choices allowance, the way it is presented keeps the player’s attention on the task. The space is rather interesting, presenting a 3D world which is easily navigable in all dimensions. It is often required to move in all three in order to reach the goals. This is typical to FPS games and Metro brings no surprise. What it does instead, is to bring a simple puzzle like navigational environment that surprises more by the emotions it transmits rather than logical complexity.
The virtual environment presents structures that are common in our understanding: city, metro tunnels, tubes, interiors (of buildings, blocks, library, offices, churches, etc.). The simplicity does not come from the fidelity of representations of these objects, but from the way they have to be navigated.
The space is intended to be traversed only once. The path is represented on a map that is shown at the loading screen between stages and the player can’t link the game space with its map representation. This is a common behavior in FPS games, not surprising or confusing.
The interest arises from the attention that the player has to offer to the world in order to meet the minimum requirements of the goals: to stay alive. The environment can cause death to the player in expected, unpredictable, repetitive or erroneous ways. The player can easily fall into a hole while trying to silently pass the enemies, trigger a trap or get stuck in a glitch. The game space is taking its share from the user attention and is one thing that the player has to focus on at all times.
Metro 2033 has the properties of a common FPS and so it requires at least the lowest bar of attention to the game space, as FPS games that link with the player via a human avatar, resembles many aspects of the real space. Other than that, being design to be an atmospheric FPS (shooter) it does require some attention in order for the space to be navigable.
