👹 The Beast In My Head That Ruined Everything 👹 #MetroExodus

My brother kindly bought Metro Exodus for me as a Christmas gift, knowing I am a big fan of the game series. Anything miserable and Eastern European gets my hands rubbing together in glee and I must, MUST get around to reading the books that the games are based on. 

Having played the game for around five hours, I was really getting stuck in, until something happened that slammed the brakes on for me and resulted in my enjoyment of the game coming to an abrupt halt.

I was travelling to the next quest marker when I got rushed by a load of mutated animals completely by surprise, as I turned, one was already mid-leap, fangs bared and it clearly wasn’t coming in for a nice, homely hug. 

I had just come out of another protracted firefight and so was reduced to throwing knives and my back-up weapon, a cool single-shot pistol that I had upgraded to a double-barrelled shotgun hybrid. After getting a right biting off the seven or so little scallywags, the ever-darkening, red-tinted screen slowly cleared and my enemies lay still. I had survived the ambush!

Strangely, I appeared to be standing close to some weird tree, it took up a large portion of the left side of the screen, moving away from it, it disappeared but when I again stopped moving…it reappeared. 

Looking upwards, it dawned on me that somehow, one of the beasts I had killed was now atop my character, like some absurd hat. It was even reflected in the shadows, in-game.

To make matters worse, when I stopped moving, the beast glitched even further, completely obscuring 50% of the screen, it’s dangling leg over my face appearing as some sort of hairy tree branch. 

I tried everything, jumping, swimming, sleeping, dying and reloading. I even re-loaded the oldest save I had, all to no avail. The only option is replaying the game from the start, but after being so far into the game…it’s a hugely disheartening thought. 

I was loving the game and got flashbacks to the time I was playing Darksiders 2 where a similar thing happened in that the scenery just refused to load in a later stage of the game, meaning that no longer could I listen to the exchanges between Michael Wincott and Mark Hamill…my time with them was through.

A few days on from the beast in my head that ruined everything, I’m still not sure that I have the heart to restart at the moment. Maybe I’ll return to it in a few months, either way, it’s a tedious way for my time with the game to stop. What a swizz.

Britt