Launch trailers are released weeks before anything launches, trailers have their own trailers, and one day there will be a fifteen millisecond teaser for the reveal of the logo that is set to appear in a five second viral video that is itself advertising an advert for a web-based spin-off of your favourite game. I’m sorry, that’s just the way of it. Metro: Last Light is defying convention by opting for a post-release trailer that is there minutes long and also a thing of beauty. The creation of Alexander Bereznyak, 4A’s lead technical artist, the ‘Mobius’ video is a journey through a single moment in the life (and death) of a Metro station. The camera drifts through the frozen figures, tableaux in a high-tech ghost train, and lingers on scenes of desperation, heroism and catastrophe. Watch.

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Metro: Last Light is my current slithering, senses-constricting conquest, but I haven’t quite finished it yet. Thus far, however, my feelings align pretty well with Jim’s, bringing Hivemind Orgiastic Synergism rates up to 212.5783 percent. Last Light’s different from 2033 but still of a similar spirit, and I quite like the idea of viewing its intoxicatingly disheveled world from different perspectives. That’s precisely the idea behind 4A’s summer flood of single-player DLC, so I’m definitely not complaining. According to legends, complete Hivemind synergy will actually cause> the apocalypse, so you’ll probably want to dive into the break’s dank tunnels for safety. Also, details.

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To hear former THQ boss Jason Rubin tell it, Metro: Last Light studio 4A Games is maybe not the best place to work. He doesn’t mean that in a whip-crack-y, everyone’s-a-jerk way, though. Quite the contrary, actually: he recently claimed it was a case of absurdly talented people working elbow-to-elbow in “appalling” conditions. Their offices? “More like a packed grade school cafeteria than a development studio.” Picking up new hardware was apparently also quite the ordeal. “When 4A needed another dev kit, or high-end PC, or whatever, someone from 4A had to fly to the States and sneak it back to the Ukraine in a backpack lest it be ‘seized’ at the border by thieving customs officials,” said Rubin. But what about 4A’s side of the story? Creative director Andrew Prokhorov recently saw fit to chime in.

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We’ve yet to WiT Metro: Last Light on RPS, thanks to the review code not working, but its recent release has prompted ex-THQ boss Jason Rubin to write an astonishing article on the development of the game. Over at GamesIndustry.biz, Rubin has written an incendiary post on the daily struggles that Kiev-based dev team 4A Games faced, calling their game “a stunning achievement”, and asking for more recognition of their abilities. If accurate, he paints a team building a game with a tiny budget, in a country where implied corruption necessitates smuggling higher-end equipment past customs officials, for a company he describes as “irrational”. I’m British, so my monocle is currently on the floor.

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