Metro Exodus

4A Games' 2019 entry takes the series out of the tunnels. Artyom leaves Moscow on a locomotive heading east, and the game becomes a set of large semi-open regions - the Volga, the Caspian desert, a Siberian forest - each a self-contained chapter with a day-night cycle, optional camps and a hub train that repairs between them. The scarcity is intact: weapons are assembled from scavenged parts at a workbench you carry, ammunition is crafted from raw materials, and your gas mask cracks visibly as it takes damage. What Exodus adds is a stealth system good enough that non-lethal runs are viable across whole levels, and a morality system that tracks whether you spared people, which decides who is still alive at the end. The writing is stronger on the small scale than the large, and the crew of the Aurora carry it. Its ray-traced global illumination update in 2021 was among the first genuinely transformative implementations of the technology, and the Enhanced Edition requires an RT-capable card.