TinerasoftYou were born in a sealed, planet-sized megastructure, and like everyone else, you expect your life to end here. Then one dreary day, your mech breaks down, and to make matters worse, you’ve smoked your last cigarette. Unlike a lot of first-person shooters, Metal Garden isn’t about making you feel powerful, but a new update makes it more approachable than ever.Launched in March 2025, Metal Garden is largely the product of solo developer Aleksandra Herout, published under the name Tinerasoft. A slow, moody, and overwhelmingly gray-colored game, it’s nonetheless one of the best shooters I’ve played in years. And in the biggest update since its launch, it just added an auto-aim feature that keeps your weapon pointed at the enemy closest to the center of the screen, meaning that even if you haven’t honed your chops on other shooters, Metal Garden is easier than ever to get into. Even without auto-aim, a wealth of difficulty adjustments let you tune the experience to your liking, whether you’re looking for an easier time or a harder one.The update should make things easier to handle for people who don’t usually play first-person shooters, which is a good thing, because Metal Garden is far from typical for the genre. It’s certainly not my usual kind of game, but I haven’t been able to get Metal Garden out of my head since I played it earlier this year (and, to be totally honest, I’ve been waiting for an update to justify writing about it all that time, too). Its combat is simple but enjoyable. But it’s everything around the fighting that makes it one of the best games I’ve played all year.Playable in under three hours, Metal Garden is a perfect example of how games can build an entire world just by letting you walk through a tiny sliver of it. A few paragraphs of text at the beginning and end and a handful of dialogue lines are all the exposition you get, with the rest of the story coming across through atmosphere alone. You’re a wandering, mech-riding nomad in this enclosed world, which is defined by constant battles between megacorporations and roving gangs. But someone claims they’ve found a way out of the megastructure, and you find yourself on the path toward that seemingly impossible escape.A minimalist story is just enough to set the mood for the game. | TinerasoftMetal Garden is a gloomy game, every surface from the walls of buildings to the sky coated in shades of gray. Despite their gargantuan size, the Brutalist structures that define the environment are nearly empty, save for hordes of identical scavengers picking the bones of the world and gunning down anyone who encroaches on their territory. Navigating it means crawling through ducts, activating ancient machinery, and fighting your way through to an uncertain end.But for all the dourness of its setting, what stands out in my mind most from Metal Garden are its moments of unexpected beauty. In this massive expanse of concrete, even the sight of a lone tree or a scraggly patch of grass becomes surprisingly poignant, a reminder that there’s a world outside these walls you’ve never seen and never will. Amidst the grim loneliness of the setting, coming across a few remaining wild animals is enough to instill a strange sense of hope, and a field of slowly spinning windmills is an awe-inspiring sight.Moments of strange beauty stand out in the dour world of Metal Garden. | TinerasoftMetal Garden is a game of tense gunfights, where you’ll spend a lot of your time dodging through minefields or double-jumping through the air to toss grenades at foes below. But the moments that make it special aren’t found in its action setpieces, but rather in the quiet moments between them. For every pitched battle that I fought through, struggling with injuries that accumulate over the course of the journey, I spent just as much time staring across some melancholic landscape, imagining what it must be like to wake up in this ruined world day after day. At the end of the journey, Metal Garden concludes with one more haunting landscape, more inscrutable than the rest, and just a few more lines of text that haven’t left my mind since I read them.Metal Garden is available now on PC.