Contains spoilers.
Metro Exodus works poorly as a morality tale, a thriller, a horror, or an epic hero s journey. Played as a lyrical ballad, however, a Soviet drinking song belted out around an oil drum camp fire, complete with bad jokes, questionable embellishments and drunken operatic flourishes, it starts to make sense. It is a profoundly odd game, I found, though not in the same ways as its predecessors. It relinquishes the series supernatural elements in favour of a campy uncanniness, a blas chuckle in the face of desolation, and a childlike optimism at finding a slightly shinier variety of shithole at the outskirts of a doomed world.