I recently picked up Metro: Last Light on Switch for €1.50 during a sale. The game has plenty of questionable design decisions, but I want to talk about one in particular: the resources available to the player.
Any resource given to a player is a form of communication from the designer — an attempt to explain what to do and how to do it in order to enjoy the game, or at the very least (if the designer failed to make the gameplay enjoyable in the first place) to show how they think the game is supposed to be played.
Take health, for instance. Losing it frequently — or losing it all — is the game’s way of telling you to change your playstyle or focus on certain skills: avoid enemies if they kill you too quickly, or lean into dodge mechanics — rolls, cover, skills that deflect attacks.
Or ammo. If you’re constantly running low, you’re probably meant to be more conservative: aim for weak spots (both a tactical and a skill challenge), or look for alternative ways to deal with enemies — traps, melee, or simply avoiding fights altogether.
The key thing is that all this communication is immediate. Running low on something? Adjust your tactics, focus a bit more on that thing, and you’ll be fine. Worst case, restart from the last checkpoint and try a different approach.
This is especially clear in Doom Eternal, where the feedback loop is incredibly tight — low on ammo or health, glory kill a weak enemy; critically low on both, chainsaw something immediately; short on armor, find a weak enemy and spray them with the flamethrower. Every resource shortage has a direct, in-the-moment answer.
All of these mechanics are forgiving by design — they teach you how to play through a satisfying loop of pressure and response.
So. Metro: Last Light. The game has health (regenerates fairly quickly), ammo (plentiful on normal difficulty, also purchasable), a flashlight (rechargeable — worth topping up before a fight), and a gas mask (which can be knocked off in combat, so try not to be reckless in hazardous areas; also needs wiping when enemies cover it in blood or slime — dodge the slime, avoid melee when possible). All fine so far. BUT.
There are also gas mask filters. The mask doesn’t work without them, and in contaminated rooms or on the surface, the hero suffocates and dies in about 15–20 seconds. Filters don’t replenish automatically and can’t be purchased — they can only be found. Which would be fine, except that finding anything in this game is genuinely painful: it’s almost entirely dark, the flashlight barely helps, and the brown-black-green color palette makes interactive objects nearly indistinguishable from the background. Each filter gives you roughly a minute and a half of breathable air before you need to swap it out — or reload from a save if you’ve run out.
To make things worse, the game uses autosave checkpoints with no manual saving and no way to load a previous checkpoint (you can only restart a level from the beginning). This produces situations — on the “Swamp” and “Church” levels, for example — where you have seconds of air left (or none at all), there are no filters anywhere nearby on the level, and the game autosaves right at that checkpoint. Reloading does nothing. The player is completely stuck.
What is the game designer trying to tell you here? They might claim: “you should have explored more carefully.” But in these situations there are no filters nearby to pick up, there weren’t enough across the previous two or three levels either, and you can’t buy them. So what is the game designer actually saying? They’re passive-aggressively smirking at you:
— Heh, buddy, you’ve been playing the last five levels wrong — not the way I intended. You should have poked around every corner and crate to find all the filters. Then you wouldn’t be here.
— But what am I supposed to do right now? — asks the frustrated player who has reloaded the same checkpoint ten times, the one where they die immediately upon loading.
— Replay the previous 4–5 levels from scratch.
— !!!
Don’t be that designer. Nobody likes passive aggression and Captain Hindsight. Don’t trap players in genuinely unwinnable situations that require replaying a large chunk of the game because you miscalculated the resource balance. At minimum: don’t let the player past a certain point if it’s already clear they won’t have enough resources — or quietly plant some extras along the way if you can see they’re going to be critically short.
Better still — don’t add mechanics that work against the game’s own intended experience. If the game is meant to be explored slowly and thoughtfully, don’t put the player on a timer and inject artificial urgency into the story. You’re sending completely contradictory signals.
And remember: the game must be completable from any checkpoint. Especially from the beginning of any level.
On a more positive note — the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. handles a very similar system far better. Radiation replaces contaminated air, but the game almost never forces you into irradiated zones. Nearly all of them are optional (with a couple of story exceptions where you’re well supplied), and when you do choose to venture in, you’re making your own risk-reward calculation. The game doesn’t push you into it, and you can’t paint yourself into a corner.
P.S. Glad I only paid €1.50 for this one. I’m definitely not finishing it — I’ll probably just watch a speedrun on YouTube to catch the cutscenes.
Originally published on Medium in Russian.