Voice-over - which eschews the potentially othering effect of Russian accents in favor of the universal language of macho American video game banter - establishes the player as a special forces operative codenamed P-3, who’s been called into service by this society’s scientist-priest-king, Dmitry Sechenov. Spiral-propellered drones whiz around, smiling automatons dispense exposition, streamlined aircraft fuselages hang in a preposterously vast office lobby, and monumental art deco edifices tower over military parades.īut this isn’t the paradise we’ve come to play in. It must be 40 minutes before you are allowed to do anything more than gaze upon the works of the art team, and the utopian, technocratic, alternate-history Soviet Union they have imagined. I had a chance to play Atomic Heart’s opening hours, plus a short preview of a later section, recently it opens with as grand a piece of table setting as you’ll ever see, as the player is carefully shepherded through a spectacular tour of a flying city.
Now, just five weeks from release, the game remains staunchly art-led. It was a more extravagant and colorful Soviet version of a Fallout or BioShock aesthetic, given a perversely cheerful spin. The surreal, retro-futuristic designs of then-unknown developer Mundfish, set to a strutting Iron Curtain tango, caused a sensation: featureless, furry humanoids mixed with primitive robotics, 1950s utopianism in ruin, and a more abstract, gelatinous kind of organic horror. When Atomic Heart first attracted attention for its first official trailer back in 2018, it was all about the artwork.
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