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The Gamescom 2026 Demo
September 12, 2026 at 07:05 AM
Initial version (2026-09-12)
In August 2026, at the show in Cologne and in a separate remote session for press, 4A Games let people outside the studio play Metro 2039 for the first time. The section they were given ran from a station settlement, out through the tunnels, onto the surface and into a bandit hideout, and it is the largest single body of hands-on material the game has produced. Everything on this page describes that pre-release build as it was played in August 2026. It is not the finished game, and any of it can change before release.
This page reflects accounts and official material published up to September 2026.
The section reached players two ways. At the show in Cologne, 4A Games ran a short build at the booth, roughly twenty to thirty minutes long. Separately, press and creators were given a longer remote session, described as running anywhere from about two hours to about four, with the embargo on their accounts lifting on 26 August. The two sets of accounts describe the same route and the same set pieces, and when the publisher released a new trailer in September it said that trailer was captured from "the same campaign content playable at gamescom".
One caveat carries across every account of the longer session: it was streamed from remote hardware rather than running locally, so nothing written about it speaks to how the game performs on any platform. Screenshots from those sessions were not cleared for publication either, which is why the coverage of this build is almost entirely written rather than shown.
The build was taken from the middle of the campaign rather than the opening, with a fair amount of equipment already unlocked and story-critical material walled off. Several accounts note that they were shown very little of the plot on purpose.
It opens at Sevastopolskaya, the one station 4A Games has named for this game, with a conversation. The station is under pressure from bandits operating outside it, and its administrator wants them dealt with. The Stranger offers to clear them out in exchange for information about Hunter. The administrator is indifferent to why the Stranger wants it; he only wants the station defended. On those terms the two of them strike a deal, and that deal is the section's objective. The bandits' leader is named as Kaban, a henchman of Hunter, and nothing else about him has been published. The bandits operate with the Novoreich's backing rather than independently of it, and they were the only human enemies in the build.
From there the route is the one the series is built on. The settlement is left through a guarded exit, the tunnels follow, and then the surface: an open zone in the ruins of Moscow, larger and more open than the corridors under it, with the objective sitting in one corner of the map and a great deal of ruin in between. The station itself was busy with residents working, talking and gathering along the platforms, children running about, and people who look up and answer when approached.
The hideout at the end of it could be approached more than one way. One account went around the compound and found a back entrance to get the drop on the defenders; another walked into a straight firefight and had to work out where everyone was before deciding who to deal with first.
The clearest thing the build demonstrated is how little of the interface sits on top of the world. Almost nothing the player needs arrives through a menu. The same principle is described more generally on Gameplay and Mechanics.
System | How the Demo Presented It |
|---|---|
Inventory and crafting | The backpack is set down on the ground or on a crafting table and opened up, rather than pausing into a menu. |
Filter timer | Remaining filter time is shown on a digital watch the player has to look at, counting down with audible beeps. |
Aiming | No crosshair at all. Iron sights and optics are crafted onto individual guns instead. |
Map and objectives | A physical folio, turned over to read the current objectives handwritten on the back. |
Saving | Marking an X in a logbook by the exit of the settlement. |
Light | A flashlight that is as necessary for seeing in dark places as it is a liability for showing where the player is standing. |
Smaller physical details work the same way. A lighter burns cobwebs out of the way. A windowpane struck with the butt of a gun cracks under the first blows and breaks on the third. Debris is physically wiped from the gas mask visor. The cumulative effect, in the accounts of the session, is a world that answers like a place rather than a level.
The build handed the player a set of tools alongside the guns. Several of these appeared in a single preview when the embargo first lifted and were treated cautiously here; by September 2026 the fuller wave of accounts had corroborated them, and they are listed below at the strength the accounts now support. The weapons themselves are covered on Weapons.
Tool | What It Did in the Build | How Widely Reported |
|---|---|---|
Gas mask and filters | Required on the surface, with filters consumed over time and craftable from raw materials. | Every account |
Ultraviolet light | Reveals clues to lock combinations and picks out things the naked eye misses. Several accounts single it out as the most generally useful of the tools. | Four independent accounts |
Night vision | Used to move through unlit basements past mutants without engaging them. One account builds its most memorable moment of the session around it. | Four independent accounts |
Cutting torch | Severs door latches to open sealed rooms, which often hold logs or supplies. It cannot be used on any obstacle, only on ones the design allows. | Three accounts, under three different names |
Breaching charge | Placed on walls to blow a new path through. Placement is deliberately limited rather than free-form. | Four accounts |
Lighter | Burns cobwebs and light obstructions out of a path. | One account |
Backpack battery | A charger in the pack powers the electronics; its capacity can be increased at a workbench. | Two accounts |
One naming problem is worth recording. The cutting tool appears in the accounts under four different names across three sources, which means the mechanic is well attested and the proper noun is not. Until 4A Games names it, it is a cutting torch and nothing more specific.
Controls came in for the most consistent complaint. With medkits, filters and the flashlight on the directional pad, the lighter, night vision and ultraviolet light on a shoulder button plus the same pad, and throwables on a shoulder button plus the face buttons, two separate accounts found the hot-swapping tangled. Both were playing an unfinished build without the tutorial that would normally introduce any of it.
The economy underneath all of it ran on two common materials, metal and chemicals, which fed the everyday consumables: ammunition, medkits and gas mask filters. Attachments drew on a separate and rarer resource, which made fitting out a particular gun a deliberate decision rather than a routine upgrade.
The split between what can be made where is new. Basic supplies could be crafted anywhere, straight out of the backpack, with no workbench needed. Workbenches were still required for attachments, weapon and suit upgrades, secondary ammunition, and cleaning guns so they do not jam. The effect described in the accounts is fewer scavenging chores and more decisions about where a finite supply should go.
Blueprints sit on top of that. They are hidden off the main path and unlock attachments, gear and upgrades; some drop from mutants, others sit behind a lock whose combination has to be worked out. That is the main argument the build makes for exploring at all, since following the objective markers alone was enough to finish the section.
The surface map marked ruined civilian buildings, pharmacies, shops and hospitals among them, alongside the story objectives. Detours into them produced supplies, blueprints, and the self-contained environmental vignettes 4A Games calls Frozen Stories.
Ammunition is scarce and movement is heavy, both carried over from the rest of the series. Two things in the build were new. Leaning from cover lets the player put an eye past a corner without stepping out of it. Every weapon also carries a secondary ammunition type, rarer and far more dangerous, with incendiary rounds the ones the accounts reached for most often; picking the right one mattered more than aim against the tougher creatures.
Against people, the build rewarded stealth. Sentries could be watched from cover and taken out quietly, lethally or otherwise, and being spotted brought reinforcements. The two show-floor accounts disagreed sharply about how well the bandits fought: one found them flanking and rerouting around a fixed position, the other found them shuffling between the same pieces of cover. Neither read should be taken as a property of the finished game.
Against mutants it was the opposite: firepower, and knowing when to spend it. Nosalises appear on the surface as well as below it, described as bear-sized and mole-like and hunting in packs across open ground. Flying insectoid creatures were in the build too, and 4A Games has not named them. One session gave up on a pack of Nosalises after repeated attempts and went around instead, and the account of it describes the game as much more about avoiding conflict except when necessary.
Two sequences in the section were about something other than survival. One was a set piece in a haunted school populated by ghost children, where notes left around the building explain what happened there and set up a puzzle involving animal masks and lighting candles in the order the notes give away. The other was a training video found in one of the regime's own facilities, in which Hunter addresses his forces in black and a gas mask and names the Dark Ones as an enemy to be destroyed. Both are covered at more length on Story and Themes. The video establishes the regime's own rhetoric and nothing past it: the Dark Ones remain teased rather than confirmed as anything the player fights.
As of September 2026 the following were all still unstated, and nothing in these accounts settles them. No station, line or district other than Sevastopolskaya was named. No mutant other than the Nosalis was named by 4A Games, and the creature names that appear in some accounts of the build are recognisable from earlier Metro games rather than confirmed for this one. No weapon beyond the Shatun and the breaching charge has an official name. Nothing in the build explains who or what the Stranger is pursuing; the publisher has said explicitly that this is being held back.
Because the longer sessions ran on remote hardware and screenshots were withheld, the build also says nothing about resolution, frame rate or system requirements. Those are tracked on Platforms and Age Ratings.
