Metro 2039 Gamescom Trailer: Back Into the Dark Tunnels

I have a confession that undercuts my credibility as a person who writes about games for a living. I get scared. Not the polite kind of scared where you tense your shoulders and carry on. The kind where a mutant drops out of a maintenance shaft at the edge of my torch beam and my thumb finds the pause button before my brain finishes processing what I saw. I sit there. I breathe. I un-pause, and I creep forward like the game owes me money.

Thousands of hours across this hobby and the reflex hasn't faded. Metro does it to me worse than anything Capcom has ever built, and Metro doesn't even market itself as horror. That's the whole trick of the series, and 4A Games showed me at Gamescom Opening Night Live tonight that the trick still works.

The new Metro 2039 gameplay trailer ran during the ONL broadcast, and I watched it with the same low-grade dread I felt in 2010 crawling through the first tunnels of Metro 2033. Then I watched it four more times, because 4A packed enough into three minutes to keep me busy until the hands-on stations open in Cologne on Thursday.

The setup: Hunter runs the Metro now

Metro 2039 lands four years after Artyom walked out at the end of Metro Exodus. The Moscow factions that spent two games shooting each other have merged under one banner, the Novoreich, with a Führer at the top. That Führer is Hunter, the Spartan Order legend who sent Artyom on his errand in 2033 and then vanished into series mythology. 4A has taken a character the fanbase treated as a ghost story and installed him as the villain of the whole regime, which is a swing I respect and a swing that could go wrong in the last act.

The regime runs on propaganda, misinformation and indoctrination. Underground, with nowhere to run, that idea has teeth. You can't leave a station whose loudspeakers lie to you when the surface will kill you in nine minutes.

You play the Stranger, a former Metro resident who swore he'd never go back down. He's the first speaking protagonist the series has had, and I've seen the fanbase split on that in the replies since April. Artyom's silence worked because his diary entries did the talking between chapters. The Stranger talks, argues, and gets talked at, and tonight's trailer sold me on the choice inside thirty seconds of dialogue. He also suffers waking nightmares, which 4A has been teasing since the reveal, and the Dark Ones speak to him during the footage.

That last part matters to me more than the story beats. Metro 2033 and Last Light had the paranormal stuff running under the gunfights: hallucinations, ghosts on the surface, whispers in the dead stations. Exodus pushed most of that aside for its road trip. The Dark Ones showing up in a 2026 trailer tells me 4A is going back to the version of this world that unsettled me the most.

What the trailer showed, and what I paused on

GamesRadar's Josh West clocked the toy box, and my own frame-by-frame matches his. There's a gas-powered blowtorch for cutting through barricades above ground. A UV lamp that looks like an exploration tool. A blueprint system for weapon parts and upgrades. Breaching charges, which turned up in an earlier trailer this year. In-field weapon customization returns from Exodus, so you can swap barrels, stocks and sights out of your backpack without hunting for a workbench.

I love this stuff for a specific reason. Metro's crafting has never been about builds or DPS. You kneel in the dark, you dig through a bag, and the game keeps running while you do it. Exodus made that a tension mechanic, and 2039 keeps it in a game with shorter sightlines and less room to retreat. Fitting a suppressor while something breathes two corridors over sounds like my personal nightmare, and I'm going to do it a hundred times.

The mutants have mutated further in the four years since Exodus, which reads as 4A giving itself permission to redesign the bestiary. GameSpot's take on the trailer leaned toward the human atrocities on show rather than the creatures, and both readings hold. The footage moves from soldiers in the tunnels to mutants on the irradiated surface, with the same claustrophobia joining them together.

The animation work is where I stopped being a journalist and started being a fan. Reload animations on returning weapons have that mechanical drag the original trilogy nailed. Hands adjust the Breacher, check radiation, watch filter timers. 4A's engine has been building on the ray-traced foundation it shipped with Exodus in 2019, and the lighting in this trailer does the horror work on its own. Wet concrete. A torch beam that reveals about two metres of anything useful. Shadows with volume to them.

Back to the tunnels, and my honest fear about it

4A has pulled the structure back in. Exodus opened the series into wide semi-open maps with a caravan and a seasonal cycle, and 2039 returns to linear, claustrophobic level design under Moscow. The community has argued about that since April, and I understand the Exodus fans. Volga and the Caspian gave that game room to breathe.

My position: the tunnels are why I love this series and why I hate playing it after midnight. Exodus scared me in bursts. 2033 scared me for eight hours straight, because a corridor gives you two directions and one of them is behind you. Short sightlines take away the thing that makes me feel safe in shooters, which is information.

Here's the version of that fear I keep coming back to. In 2033 I learned to hate a specific sound before I ever saw what made it. Nosalis claws on tile, somewhere ahead, bouncing off curved walls so the direction lies to you. I'd stand still with the lighter out and my heart doing something no doctor would sign off on, and then I'd pause, drink some water, and go again. That's the loop for me. Terror, pause, water, terror. Tonight's trailer put me right back into it from a couch in a lit room, which is a strange thing for a marketing asset to achieve.

The demo in Hall 9.1 has to prove that the claustrophobic survival feel still lands next to modern gunplay. Playfront made that point in its Gamescom preview roundup and it's the right test. 4A could have shipped a guided walkthrough behind closed doors. Handing the controller to the public for four days instead reads as confidence.

The Ukrainian context that changed the whole game

4A Games sits at the centre of something no trailer can carry on its own. The studio is majority Ukrainian, now spanning more than 25 nationalities, and it reworked the narrative of Metro 2039 after Russia's full-scale invasion. The team has framed the story around the cost of securing a future, with tyranny and silence running through it. There will be no Russian localization at launch, subtitles included.

A series built on Dmitry Glukhovsky's novels about a ruined Moscow, made by Ukrainians, releasing a game about an authoritarian regime that unites everyone under one flag and floods the tunnels with propaganda. I don't think 4A needs to spell out the parallels, and the trailer doesn't try to. The regime imagery does the work.

That context also reframes the villain choice for me. Turning Hunter into a Führer says something about how a war hero converts into a strongman when the people around him need someone to follow. If 4A commits to that idea, Metro 2039 will be the most political game the series has produced, and it will have earned the right.

February 2027, and the traffic jam waiting there

4A and Plaion confirmed on stage that the game holds its February 2027 window on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. 4A picked that slot to dodge the autumn scramble around GTA 6, and I'd have made the same call. February gives a horror-adjacent shooter room to own a news cycle in a quiet quarter.

Except February 2027 has stopped being quiet. Fable is there. God of War Laufey is there. Ananta arrives in January. Every publisher that ran from Rockstar's shadow has piled into the same corner of the calendar, and 4A now shares a month with two first-party heavyweights. My advice to Deep Silver, for whatever a Ziggurath byline is worth: pick a date in the second half of the month and announce it soon.

Demand looks healthy. Metro 2039 passed one million wishlists within two weeks of its April reveal, which Embracer called the fastest wishlist milestone in company history. It also leads the Gamescom Awards 2026 nominations slate, months before anyone can buy it. Insider Gaming flagged that oddity today, and it tracks with what I saw in the ONL chat tonight.

The helmet, and my wallet's problem

4A revealed the Collector's Edition centrepiece on Monday: a full-scale wearable replica of the Stranger's Spartan helmet, built from the in-game 3D model, complete with hinged visor, integrated gas mask components, battle damage and the character's own modifications. It sits at the booth in Hall 9.1 this week. Pre-orders open later this year, contents beyond the helmet come later, pricing stays unannounced.

Collector's editions have spent five years teaching me to expect a resin statue with a wonky face and a steelbook. A wearable helmet cast from the actual character model is a different proposition, and the secondary market agrees: sealed Metro Exodus editions have gone for multiples of their retail price on eBay. Deep Silver has run a registration page for pre-order priority, and I've already put my email in, which I recognise as a betrayal of the sceptical distance my job requires.

What I'm testing on the show floor

Ziggurath is in Cologne this week and I'll be queuing in Hall 9.1 when the demo opens on Thursday. Four things go on my list.

Filter economy first. Metro's surface sections live or die on how stingy 4A is with gas mask filters, and the trailer shows the Stranger checking timers. Second, enemy telegraphing in tight spaces: I want to know whether 2039 gives you an audio cue with usable direction, or whether it keeps the 2033 approach of letting the tunnel geometry lie to you. My money is on the second one, and my nervous system is furious about it.

Third, the weapon customization flow under pressure, since a backpack menu that pauses the world would undo a lot of the tension 4A built. Fourth, how the Stranger's voice sits during quiet exploration. A talkative protagonist can puncture dread with one line in the wrong place.

The thing 4A keeps getting right

One more note on why this series owns a slot in my head that Resident Evil and Silent Hill have never taken from it. Horror games hand you a monster and a locked door. Metro hands you a job. You need filters, you need a working gun, you need to reach a station four kilometres north, and the horror arrives as an interruption to work you were already doing. My guard is down because I'm counting bullets. That's why the jump lands.

Tonight's trailer keeps that structure intact. Cutting a barricade with a blowtorch, sweeping a room with a UV lamp, checking a radiation reading on the Breacher: none of that reads as horror design on paper, and all of it puts my hands somewhere other than the trigger at the moment something decides to move. 4A has been building that specific cruelty since 2010 and it has lost none of it.

Where I've landed tonight

Metro 2039 has done the thing I wanted from it since April: gone back down, turned the lights off, and pointed the series at the horror it does better than most games that carry the label. I'll play it with headphones on, alone, at night, because that's the correct way to play a Metro game. I'll also pause it about forty times, drink an unreasonable amount of tea, and lie to my friends about how calm I was.

February 2027 sits five months out. The hands-on impressions land tomorrow morning, and Ziggurath's own go up as soon as I've prised the controller out of my hands.