Metro 2033 author Dmitry Glukhovsky has a new VR game, as well as an 8-year prison sentence inside Russia

Russian-born journalist and author Dmitry Glukhovsky has been in the public eye since the early 2000s. That’s when his Metro stories first kicked off online, originally as a viral transmedia project and later as a series of successful novels. Those books would eventually become the inspiration for the Ukrainian studio 4A Games’ beloved, award-winning trilogy: Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, and Metro Exodus. Now he’s on the cusp of a new entry in the series, a VR title from Vertigo Games (Arizona Sunshine) called Metro Awakening. Polygon sat down with Glukhovsky in early September to learn more.

The mainline Metro series follows protagonist Artyom through the byzantine passageways below a post-apocalyptic Moscow and, ultimately, among the strange factions making their way forward in that grim, dark future. According to Glukhovsky, those novels and games have always been driven by his own personal ideologies — by his own politics. That’s why, when Russian president Vladimir Putin launched the illegal invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, Glukhovsky knew he couldn’t back down.

“The Metro books and the video games, they all have this anti-war, pacifist, anti-dictatorship political message,” Glukhovsky told Polygon in our recent interview. “Some people confuse them [with] horror stories, [but] they have the horror stories to entertain the gamers. From Metro 2033 to Metro: Last Light and Exodus, this is all about xenophobia. This is about manipulation from the state, from the government. This is about how the governments push us into global conflicts.

“Now if, in reality, when this thing really happens, and a global war begins possibly from my own country attacking the neighboring country — which is very dear to me and from where a lot of friends and former loves and business partners stamp [their passports] — if I shut the fuck up right now, this is to say that all of my previous books and games were fake.” 

After a few social media posts on these topics following the invasion, Glukhovsky had sealed his own fate. By August 2023, he had received an eight-year prison sentence — delivered in absentia by a Russian court — for “deliberately spreading false information about Russia’s armed forces.” 

“I am totally certain that I’ve done the right thing,” Glukhovsky said, “and I would definitely repeat it. [And] it’s important to, because the Metro games always had this component of social commentary, of analyzing how dictatorships work, of trying to wake people up — as ridiculously ambitious [as] that might sound — and to make them aware of the manipulations of hate speech, xenophobia, fear of external enemy, [and] the [fallacy of the] besieged fortress.”

Metro Awakening, he said, tells a much more personal story. At its center is the mysterious Khan, a sort of mystic known for guiding Metro’s Artyom through supernatural horrors. This game, it turns out, will be Khan’s origin story.

“When […] Vertigo studio came to me saying that [they wanted] to focus this new game on this character […] I was very excited, because […] with his things that he can hear but others can’t, things that he can see but others cannot, he feeds perfectly well into the idea of VR in a world where some things are real, but a lot of things are surreal.”

First revealed with an atmospheric trailer in February 2024, Metro Awakening is a prequel to the mainline Metro series. Players begin the game as a character named Serdar, described as a doctor in search of his wife. But Glukhovsky says their relationship as portrayed inside the game world is much more complicated than that.

“This is not your typical love story,” Glukhovsky said. “I think that a love story for a man […] it’s always very personal when you get to feel these things. It’s usually not stereotypical. It’s not what the media [says that] love is. It’s much more controversial [and] it’s not what you probably really want even to experience, because it deprives you of control and of your own life. 

“You stop belonging to yourself and you belong to, in the best case, to a tandem,” he continued. “In the worst case, to something completely external. And it can get naughty, it can get dirty, and it can get dark, and it can get grim, and it can go completely south. So I thought that few things can tell us about a man’s character […] as a dark and grim love story.”

More than anything, Glukhovsky said he’s just happy that the main character this time around has both an external voice and an internal monologue — two things somewhat lacking from previous entries in the Metro series. As an author, he said it gave him a lot more narrative space to work with. He said it’s also an opportunity to help gently steer the franchise in a slightly different direction.

“The great danger that awaits everybody who witnesses his homemade little thing transform into a franchise is just to let it go,” Glukhovsky said. “You let it go. You let executives take over. You let hired writers take over who can do their best, but it’s just a hard job for them sometimes. 

“I think it’s very important for somebody who creates to assure that [the] people who they hire give [a] shit basically,” Glukhovsky said. “Not just that they give [a] shit, not professionally, but they can feel the things that you tried to make them feel; that they [are] fans of the franchise, they’re fans of this world, of this universe.”

But why VR? Glukhovsky explained that it seemed like a natural progression to him, and that so far the technology has completely blown him away.

“I’ve just been playing the most recent version that is ready to release earlier today,” Glukhovsky said. “You look at the gun, it’s [a] fucking real gun. And the gloves are real gloves, and everything is so real, and so realistic. Just being there, that was a real breakthrough to me. But narrative-wise, you don’t have to create anything particularly different.”

Even though it’s a love story at its heart, Glukhovsky said the Metro franchise still has a powerful message to tell — especially to its audience in Russia.

“It’s very important to keep telling [this story],” Glukhovsky said of the larger Metro universe. “Even if myself and other people have failed in warning the Russian society about the dangers of it, I think it’s very important to preserve this political, educational wake-up message in the entertainment because entertainment goes much broader than any [other outlet], and it then has [a] much deeper emotional impact than any news outlet would have. 

“But it doesn’t mean that I am not going to do any non-Russia-centered stories in the future,” Glukhovsky added. “There’s going to be one feature getting released later this year, hopefully, that is focused on the [United] States [that] has nothing to do with Russia.”

Metro Awakening arrives on Steam, for Meta Quest, and for PlayStation VR2 later this year.