
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.
