Railroads and Vaults

My comments on Miracle of Sound yesterday got me thinking about something. I mentioned how much I liked Open Air by Miracle of Sound, and how I liked how it compared against 'When the World Ended'

What I mentally compared it against also, was Fallout.  I find it bitterly ironic that the Russian post apocalyptic story is more uplifting. What's more ironic is that Metro's uplifting is basically Fallout's 'normal.' 

Metro's core conceit is that the bombs went off, and things were made very, very bad. The surface is coated in toxic gas, humans and mutants swarm through dingy dark tunnels that are the only barely survivable areas. Humanity is reduced to licking moisture off of walls and eating rats and lichens. Filth and misery pile up everywhere and the tunnels are ghost haunted because people fear that the afterlife itself was blown asunder by the apocalyptic exchange of weapons.

Fallout's conceit is that cartoonishly evil governments fired rockets at each other motivated by greed and blew everything up.

In Fallout, in half of the games you're a dweller in a vault, a place meant for survivors to hide out and then come out and restore the world. The vaults are mostly clean, bright, and well maintained. They have food, shelter, pool tables, and other amenities, and when you step outside, its post-apocalyptic crapshack, with people living in ramshackle houses, even three hundred years after the bombs have dropped.

Fallout is shackled to its aesthetic.  Metro conversely has people who were alive when the bombs fell, and who remember the world before. The big differences come from Exodus though. In Exodus the protagonist of Metro discovers that its only Moscow (which was nuked directly) which has air you cannot breathe and a surface blasted clean of all life save for mutant abominations. 

The Metro people find a train, and they ride outside and find that they can breathe the air, find that animals, plants and the like are still growing, they find more humans who are trying to live in the post apocalypse. Coming out of the vaults of the Metro and discovering a damaged but LIVING world is a sea change in tone for the series. They thought that humanity was going to die in the cramped dark, swimming in human excrement, with even their ghosts trapped forever. But it turns out there's hope outside, a chance to start over anew.  The tone becomes one of optimism and looking forward because they're coming from a destroyed world to a merely broken one.

The russians in Metro, despite the bombs dropping about thirty years prior have already started building new buildings, reclaiming old ones, and generally know how to make a roof that keeps the rain out, unlike the folks in Fallout after three HUNDRED years. 

Fallout has you coming from your secure, safe, underground vault into a place that's irradiated, hopeless and destroyed.  You then have to fix whatever the problem of the game is, but the tone is one of loss, it pessimistically looks back. 

The irony for me is that irradiated, mutant infested craphole sums up both surfaces, but the Muscavites are overjoyed whereas the Vault dweller is terrified.  Kind of interesting to me for reasons of tone, but also of how looking forward as opposed to looking back can drastically change your outlook.