Metro Exodus Diaries Part Thirteen

This is my ongoing exploration of the Metro series, played in release order, where I will chronicle my playthrough like a text-based Let’s Play. This time I continue Metro Exodus.

After almost drowning and sneaking past more hunters than I dared to count, I was reaching the sanctuary of a church…

That’s when the bear from earlier burst through the wooden doors and attacked me. What’s more, it was such a beast that it ran through gravestones and metal fencing like they weren’t there. I threw multiple molotov cocktails at it, and shot it with a variety of ammo before it decided enough was enough and legged it.

Beat attack!

After trying to see where it had escaped to, I climbed a ladder to gain access to the church. After listening to a message from Anna and Miller, I put some fuel into a generator, cleaned my tools and went to exit. Olga was on the other side, it turned out that she had gotten Alyosha away, and sent him on to the dam where Miller wasn’t going to wait for very long. She told me that I should follow him, using a boat stolen from the Pirates like she had done.

So, I sat down and had a toke on a cigarette while Olga told her life story. The guy in charge when they were kids had taught them how to survive. It seemed that they had been stranded here with few (if any other) adults. After putting up with one too many raids from bandits, the older boys split off to become the Pirates - a more proactive (and violent) group compared to the Pioneers. They all followed their teacher’s lessons, but it appeared the Pirates remembered them differently.

Lady could go on and on...

After listening to her talk for about 10 minutes, she sat quietly to tend to the grave of their leader. After going down a ladder, I went on my way. I used a zipline and followed a road, discovering the Pirate settlement. Taking the road further left, I snuck around the settlement to a boat - distracting two men before stealing it. Unfortunately, the route only took me deeper into the settlement. To exit, I needed to sneak past and knock out several men to reach the gate controls.

Things went perfectly, until one managed to sneak up behind me. Shooting at him - and missing - I knocked him and a second man out before opening the gate. Luckily, where I was now wasn’t very accessible, having to take several gantries and bridges to get close. So, under fire, I hurried down to another boat and got in, paddling off through the open gate.

Before too long, I reached a point where I couldn’t get any further in the boat, so I got out and walked into the swamp. Ahead I found an old lumber mill - with an ionizing radiation warning symbol painted on a door - and explored a bit. The power was out, so I had to go outside and fight off some shrimp before I found a generator and turned it on. Which brought more shrimp to kill.

Why was this symbol here BEFORE the bombs dropped...?

Returning to the mill, I turned on the power to an elevator and went up into a bit of a garden. There was a snake that I couldn’t see, so I hurried through and kicked open a door, startling the man inside. He greeted me as a bandit and asked me to sit for tea. He was accompanied by a crow that spoke like a parrot, and two corpses whom he spoke for. He even gave them different voices - clearly the guy was insane. Presumably he was one of the Pirates who refused to leave this base when the teacher told them to. It obviously didn’t help matters that he was confined to a wheelchair, and drank (and smoked) a tea that he had grown and dried himself.

Obviously, I did not smoke or drink while I sat listening to him talk about himself, and the two men he had killed so they wouldn’t abandon him. Something in the area was radioactive, at least downstairs, and I didn’t want that adding to my problems.

Clearly he entertains himself often

Eventually, he knocked one of the bodies too many times, and it dropped a guitar it was holding. I played on it while the Admiral drank and smoked - and soon had a nap. Getting up, I searched for a way to the roof so that I could access the zipline up there. It took longer than I care to admit, but I cut a rope and a ladder dropped down. As I exited to the roof, Miller’s voice came over the radio, in the middle of explaining that they were almost at the dam. What’s more, they had found the name of the drug to cure Anna - but we’d definitely have to leave the valley to find it.

Hopping on the zipline, I managed to cut Miller off by accident. Unfortunately, the road that I reached presented two options. A broken bridge with certain drowning, or a tunnel with definite spiderbugs. What’s more, the bear I had fought earlier was climbing nearby.

WHEEEEE!

Into the tunnel I went, my torch lit and head on a swivel. It was tense, but without incident. Until something shorted out my watch and torch. Whatever it was, I started running up some stairs and into another tunnel. As I reached what looked like a dead end, I found a torch and lit it! I stood near it to reload - I had only just put a seven-bolt magazine on my crossbow - before running further up the tunnel to another torch.

Now with some time to catch my breath, and with my torch working once again, I went on to the next section via a crawl space - and wasn’t jumped on the other side. It was some kind of workshop at one point, but obviously now filled with spiderbugs. After spotting some stairs, I carefully made my way to them before running up. The room at the top had a lantern that I lit, then looked around. There was a big, powered door - which wasn’t working - and a canister of fuel for a generator. Obviously, it was back in the workshop…

Hurrying like a madman, I raced downstairs and straight into an office, so that I’d have a couple of walls at my back. No spiderbugs attacked, and thankfully that was exactly where I had to go. After pouring in the fuel, I started the generator - which powered some lights and the door. I didn’t hang around to loot, I wanted to get out, so upstairs I went. There were some corpses covered in smaller spiders, so I shot them with shotgun shells to disperse before looting the bodies.

From a letter, it turned out that these were the people who had left just before the teacher of the Pirates & Pioneers killed himself. Hardly an ideal fate, getting trapped in here…

Heading up some stairs, I overheard Alyosha talking to Miller over the radio. I opened the door and he almost stabbed me, but was happy to see me. Olga had let him go - they apparently had a thing for each other - and the train was almost here. We just had to go through the remains of a village and use a zip line. A sad fact was that the dam was deteriorating, so the entire valley would eventually be flooded. Worse, the water being held back was highly irradiated, so the Pioneers and Pirates would have to leave - and we couldn’t settle down here after all.

That downed helicopter happened to be a perfectly viable thing to stand upon

As we walked through the village, I checked out the houses for supplies. A letter sat in one of them, lamenting that the dam was full of radioactive water, and that they regretted leaving. There was also a mention of the spiderbugs, which was weird as I’d only ever seen them in confined spaces, not in the open.

Alyosha mentioned that he’d seen the bear earlier - and as if summoned, we could hear it occasionally. I went across a rickety bridge and it collapsed under my weight, taking Alyosha down with us. It wasn’t a far drop, but it partially trapped us both and gave me a bad bump on the head. After blacking out for a moment, I awoke to find Alyosha freeing himself - and the bear coming to check me out.

Alyosha hit it with a molotov cocktail and it climbed to escape. Unfortunately, despite freeing me it also caused the rocks that I was laying on to shift and begin falling. To avoid joining them, I had to climb up after the bear.

By the time I reached safety, the bear had put itself out and came after me. I shot it a bunch, threw dynamite at it - I was out of molotovs - before it slapped me. Dazed, I managed to dodge out of the way as it came after me, sending it over the edge of the cliff we were apparently on. Alyosha came to my rescue as I also slipped, but the bear wasn’t done yet. It had managed to grab the rocks and started to climb for me! As It was about to attack me, I stabbed it in the eye and it fell to its death.

Presumed death

With no time to rest, Alyosha had me help tighten the zipline and clip onto it. Just then, Olga arrived with others. Alyosha was tempted to remain and Olga all but asked him to, but he told her to get everyone out of the valley, and that he would return. He clipped onto the zipline and we both headed over to the dam as the train arrived. We unclipped as soon as we could and ran after the train, getting on without it needing to stop. We didn’t have time to stop - Anna’s life was in the balance…