EASTWORLD

ATOMIC HEART is a beautiful, flawed, and deeply weird Soviet Westworld

- Rich Stanton

Four or five hours into Atomic Heart, it swings into one of many seamless first-person cutscenes. A man points a gun at you, babbles something about a giant plant, and your protagonist gruffly swears, complains and sets about fetching the thing to blow up the thing. You return with explosives, which are ignited by a cigarette while your character calls the plant a “fuckbag”, and the scientist dies afterwards. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

A lot of Atomic Heart will leave you grasping for purchase, as it freewheelingly veers from enormous set pieces to endless fetch quests, as critiques of Russian exceptionalism rub up against a protagonist who calls robots “fat turds” and a script written with the help of a swearing thesaurus. You’ll gaze into the eerie, porcelain face of an android and marvel at how well the aesthetic captures this unsettling world of humanoid robots, and then be grossed out by a vending machine begging you to “squirt your polymer in me”.

This is one of the oddest big-budget games I’ve played in a long time, filled with as many good ideas as bad ones, like it’s been made without a filter and everything went in. The game’s influences are numerous – Westworld, Fallout, Arkane’s Prey – but the one that looms above them all is BioShock.

Atomic Heart’s narrative-focused opening is like a communist version of Columbia and the grandeur of its sprawling research institute, a utopia gone wrong showcasing the best of retro-futurist Soviet robotics, makes for one breathtaking vista after another. But the influence runs far deeper than aesthetic.