On the occasion of the release of the second part of “Metro Simulator” by the Russian studio KIshMish Games, I decided to share my thoughts about the game and its cultural contexts. When creating a simulator of something familiar and everyday for a wide audience, developers accidentally or intentionally touch on many semantic contexts and archetypes. So it will be interesting to try to sort through at least some of the contexts. This will be a gonzo review in four acts.

Act one. Creation of the subway

Today, passenger traffic on the Kaluzhsko-Rizhskaya line of the Moscow subway – the location of Metro Simulator 2 – is more than a million people a day. This unimaginable crowd could populate an entire separate city. So the Moscow metro is always something superhuman, superhuman, like an ancient chthonic deity.

Metro is always about the past. It preserves the traces of metro builders – tens of thousands of young people and girls gathered from all over the country for the construction of the first line. At the same time, plans for its creation began to mature at the beginning of the last century, in the pre-revolutionary years. But political cataclysms were followed by crises and an outflow of population to villages, so the project was postponed for now.

Trains between the first Moscow stations were launched in 1935. The first passenger was Stalin personally – a man whom the structure of Soviet society also turned into something superhuman. Cultural anthropologists might call this a rite of legitimation: the ruler, who represents the entire people, is the first to ride the subway.

Later, Muscovites used the stations as bomb shelters. In the post-war years, Soviet neoclassicism flourished in them – an emphatically pompous, solemn architectural style, as if the classical architecture buried in the ground had additional cartilage and growths. The stations have become a rethinking of either palaces of culture or temples, where a mass of people unite in a common emotional outburst.

At the same time, https://bingoirishcasino.co.uk/bonus/ the metro calls for the future. The start of subway construction in Moscow was the impetus for the development of several industries at once. Until now, when creating new stations, the latest developments in technology and architecture are taken into account.

Developers from KishMish Games manage to find one after another archetypes of the Soviet era. In their previous recent “Bus World” the player played the role of a bus driver; one of the main locations was Pripyat on the eve and immediately after the nuclear power plant accident. Metro Simulator 2 revisits a modern mythological image associated with public transport.

Act two. The train is leaving

Test train on the VDNH–Medvedkovo route. News. Aired August 12, 1978. GOSTELERADIOFOND

The first Metro Simulator recreated the Solntsevskaya Line. This is a young branch, launched in 2014. Many of its stations differ from each other only in color design and are not memorable in any way. The second part of the simulator gives you the opportunity to ride along the Kaluga-Rizhskaya line, the appearance of which took shape in 1958–1990.

U-turns are also made in controlled trains. One of the main characters of the game was “Numbered” – this train is known to everyone who has ever descended into the post-Soviet subway. But what is important for us is not the appearance of the carriage, but its contents. Here is a haven for lovers of late Soviet aesthetics, the work of the Strugatsky brothers, films like “Solaris” and “Youths in the Universe”. The developers carefully recreated all the levers and toggle switches, fonts, pipes and trim of the driver’s cabin.

At the same time, the game has a low barrier to entry, and control requires only habit from the player. Most switches are needed only when starting a search and changing the cabin to the opposite one, and the most important instruments for us are the speedometer and speed limiter. Nevertheless, it takes skill to be able to change gear at the right moment and use the emergency brake correctly – so I even had to undergo training twice. In any case, over time the brain gets used to it, and penalty points stop being awarded every minute. The main thing is to catch the rhythm.

Rhythm is generally the principle of subway life, both in the simulator and in life. Speed, traffic schedule, opening and closing doors, even the moment the next stop is announced – everything adds up to a kind of music of the trip. In the Metro Simulator series, even sudden incidents are subject to rhythm. In the first game, for example, there is a scenario in which a passenger falls at the next station along the route, and the player in the tunnel urgently needs to reorganize the movement of the train. We won’t see the fallen man, and we don’t think about what will happen if we do nothing and break into the station anyway. We don’t have time for this: we keep the rhythm.

The game also conveys another feature of the subway: its complete isolation from the world on the surface. It doesn’t matter to the player what is happening outside, and this, unlike the same “Bus World”, is not taken into account in any way in the gameplay. Hence the claustrophobic flavor of being in “Metro Simulator 2”.

Act three. Emptiness between stations

We all know the term “liminal spaces”, which has become a creepy meme. Meanwhile, they are a serious psychological phenomenon and a field of study in several humanities disciplines at once. In the subway we are constantly faced with liminal spaces, empty areas of transition from one location to another. The subway platform in an indie game turns out to be an absolute liminal space, its ideal embodiment.

Liminality is generally an obligatory component of everything connected with the subway. As we have already defined, this is a transition, that is, a place in which a person moves from point A to point B, but is practically inactive. In addition, the metro is made up of creepy tunnels and stations that empty at late hours. Not to mention that the subway forms liminal spaces on the surface. From research it is known that urban spaces between stations or located away from stations become areas of liminality. They form wastelands and semi-abandoned areas that city dwellers usually try to avoid.

In Metro Simulator 2 itself, stations became the most carefully designed element of the setting after the train. We can use the standard “player – controlled subject – characters” scheme describing the active elements of the game. The controlled subject in this simulator is an impersonal driver, with whom the real player is free to completely identify himself. The main character in our case does not coincide with the game subject: he is a train, the main active element that forces the setting to react to his actions. By the way, the fact that one of these heroes was the time-worn “Numbered” only enhances the feeling of abandonment.

The characters, in accordance with our scheme, in “Metro Simulator 2” are not passengers, mindlessly stomping on the platform and crawling into the carriage on command. The main characters, each with a strong personality, are stations. They determine the player’s points of interest, force him to act, becoming intermediate (or tactical) gameplay goals.