Why I love... Roaming the post-apocalypse

How modern releases are continuing to find creativity and beauty within gaming’s most prevalent setting: the end of the world

- By Aaron Potter

While it might seem strange to enjoy immersing yourself in the dried up and downtrodden, it’s only because modern games do such a great job at portraying these wasted lands. Some might argue that the post-apocalyptic setting is overplayed by this point, but you only need look at some of the last year’s most high-profile releases to find some fresh interpretations.

Players used be subjected to the dour browns of Fallout 3, for example, but 2019 saw the likes of Far Cry: New Dawn, and for every Mad Max there’s now a more chaotically fuelled take, such as Rage 2.

It’s precisely because this concept comes up so frequently in games that I’ve become increasingly fascinated by it, always curious about how devs choose to interpret the idea that life goes on in some fashion after a single cataclysmic event.

One series that has always handled the post-apocalypse uniquely is Metro. Based on Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky’s book series of the same name, it imagines a world where most of the population has been eradicated by a large-scale nuclear attack, forcing survivors to hide underground due to the contaminated air.