EASTWORLD

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

- Rich Stanton

NEED TO KNOW

WHAT IS IT? A narrative FPS with light RPG elements set in a Russian Westworld

EXPECT TO PAY $60

DEVELOPER Mundfish

PUBLISHER Focus Entertainment, 4Divinity

REVIEWED ON Intel Core i5-12400F, 16GB RAM, GeForce RTX 2060

MULTIPLAYER No

LINK mundfish.com

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”.