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Metal Garden

The wind howls through, the concrete sky rumbles, and taking in the last of your cig, the beacon for your fellow nomads lightly beckons them to your run down mech to scavenge. This is as far as it can take you. The rest of the journey will be on foot.

So does Metal Garden open, inviting you into the encompassing concrete mega-structure with a short text scrawl and a break. You quickly acclimate to its first person controls and feel, toeing through a small valley and tussling with other nomads until you encounter a camp, a dying king and a key; The thing sought by so many entombed within this concrete sky: a hole in the world. An exit.

While linear (and to its benefit), Metal Garden weaves in hidden paths, alternative forks; areas that make the world feel like there is more to it. Often these paths offer some ruins and survival resources, occasional notepads building the setting and scenario, or further encounters with other nomads and legionnaires of the kingdom. On top of the way you navigate these spaces, the sound design is so robust in giving each area a distinct setting, whether it’s the rumble of lighting pocketing the concrete sky when you’re outside, the soughing waves eroding a long rundown motorway, ferrous machines screeching with disuse as you goad them into action to create platforms for yourself – everything is aimed at making the world of Metal Garden encompass age; several civilisations have come and gone, everything is entombed within and the world is both so large yet so sparse that people have no choice but to be nomadic to find ways to live.

I delighted in these spaces. Such a sense of wonder and the structure of them invites, speculates. They do not stay over-long either, each level a chapter of your journey. As part of your progression through this game, you will also be accruing new guns, salvaging what ammo and health packs you can. Resources are scarce (depending on your difficulty level chosen) and encounters are scrappy—enemies will often advance towards you or encircle you, forcing you to never set down roots and to duck and weave with your slides and hover boots. Losing an entire bar of health will net you a semi-permanent injury that can stack, ranging from being unable to sprint to a shakier aim-down-sights. Lose your entire pool of health enough times and it is a game over, however, injuries can be alleviated by making use of med bay kits that dot the environs, whether nestled in camps or other nooks.

In the interim between when I last played the game as well as when I wrote about it on my prior Spinning Disk entry, I have been unable to expel this game from my mind. I have so deeply enjoyed it. Such a concise sense of journey, the exploration, the encounters – It’s delightfully short and it keeps its pace up without being overwhelming, along with some surprises that had me on the edge of my seat. It knows when to reel back and let itself breath and be absorbed, to let you spend time wandering and wondering, and it knows when to surprise, usurp your expectations of what comes next. I think that is an integral part of what makes this feel like the well wrought game it is.