I’ve enjoyed the look of Atomic Heart since its announcement last year and after watching a new ten-minute gameplay video I’m glad to say yep, I still don’t understand its whole ‘strange Soviet sci-fi theme park turns into horrorhell’ thing. That’s good. This is a place I want to find strange and confusing at first, with its terrible medical robomannequins, its wee walking buzzsaws, its railway of spinning gondolas, and its miracle goo. Here, see those and more in the video below, which I’d guess is from right around the start of the game.



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I am v. into the high kicks from those plastic lads.

I just want to say: IGN, who have the hot scloosie on that video, use the term “BioShock-on-acid” and I am so glad to see that “it’s like … on acid!” is still alive in 2019. It’s very much games writing on Fisherman’s Friend.

Atomic Heart is due to launch on Steam towards the end of 2019, pushed back from a planned 2018 launch.

Mundfish released a spin-off teaser game for cybergoggles in July, Soviet Lunapark VR, but it was pretty buggy. In December they pulled the cybershooter from sale, announcing they’d shut it down entirely in March 2019. They said this was so they could focus on Atomic Heart itself, and later offered to give free copies of it to people to bought Soviet Lunapark. It was likely sensible for a fledgling studio to not juggle two projects when one is so ambitious, but it might also have been sensible to not start the second in the first place. This doesn’t fill me with hope for Atomic Heart, though I am often pleased by games which dream unfeasibly big.

Yeah yeah but what’s up with this “clown trap”?