I think the atmosphere is there. Some things did change, but the plot is there. They don't show the Dark Ones in the trailers, but they are there. The start, the end and the middle points are all there, the heroes are my heroes - Artem and his stepfather, Hunter, Miller, Han. All the main characters that bear the philosophy, messages are there. It's Hunter that says "kill whatever enemy you've got without any mercy” against Han who is more subtle and philosophical; his approach is that man is blind so you never know for sure. They have slightly altered monsters, adding some monsters of their own and I'm fine with that. Ghosts in the books are present but not visible. They decided to make them a kind of dark shades. They have to be creative, and not follow the book letter by letter. They have to have their own space to fill with their own creative energy. Otherwise, it would be a stupid, idiotic game like the Lord of the Rings games where you practically watch the movie in a crappy quality. On one hand this is a scripted shooter, on the other, it has great, cinematic graphics, unparalleled I think, I don't think I've seen anything like this before and probably won't see until the end of this year. They have managed to preserve the most important things: the spirit, the atmosphere, and it's a kind of new genre. It's a philosophical, spiritual shooter, where you don't just shoot everybody around, but you have to understand people, listen to them. You have NPCs who suddenly have their own dreams, passions, hatreds, enmities, hopes, and they share it with you or talk to each other. You have myriads of small untold or unfinished stories, like "where's our mommy?" I've never seen such a thing in Half-Life, where you're just butchering monsters. I think this comes from this game being based on this thick of a book with a detailed world. It shows the spirit of humanity being locked in this bunker and the whole world being condensed to just the metro, full of people believing in there being no tomorrow, dreaming of coming back to the surface even though they know that the radiation would last for centuries, hoping that people elsewhere survived. They managed to put it all in the game.