A year and a half has passed since the release of Atomic Heart. During this time, the excitement around the project died down, everyone who wanted to say something about it said something, and everyone who wanted to share their impressions published them. I managed to get acquainted with one of the most iconic games of Russian game development quite recently. At first, I doubted whether to make material on a game that was no longer in the visible information field and came to the conclusion that a really simple review would be useless reading material. However, after I became immersed in the genre, I wanted to consider Atomic Heart not only as an independent project, but also as part of the councilpunk subgenre and at the same time express some of my observations directly on the game itself. So, good luck, comrades!
Preface
The release of Atomic Heart in 2023 was quite a serious test for the project, because it had to coexist with the mastodons of the gaming industry – Resident Evil 4, Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Hogwarts Legacy, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 and many others. Most of them are projects based on fairly well-known franchises that already have an active fan base that will most likely support the project, both in rubles and simply with active attention to it. Accordingly, regardless of the quality of the output, they were doomed to commercial success. And let’s be honest, many of them were successful.
2023 was a holiday year for video game fans of all stripes, each gamer one way or another found their game of the year in which they spent or continue to spend many hours. In this regard, releasing a project based on new intellectual property to the development studio Mundfish, which had not previously developed any noticeable projects, was quite a risky undertaking. However, the setting played into the hands of the developers. It seems to me that it was thanks to him that the project managed not to get lost among the titans and still sparkle in the starry sky of game development, albeit for a rather short moment. Most brightly, of course, this light blinked for the residents of Russia and other post-Soviet countries. This is understandable – there are quite a few projects that reflect our realities on monitor screens, but I’m sure many people want to walk around among the huts, drink a glass of that same soda and sit behind the wheel of a red Lada. It was thanks to the setting that the first Stalker gained such popularity in its time, in which many elements were broken from the very beginning, and some turned out to be outright lies of the developer. But the setting decided everything. Time and time again, gamers returned to the zone to wander through familiar forests and abandoned places, listen to jokes by the fire and take as much swag from the Zone as possible.
However, if Stalker is simply an original project in a post-Soviet setting, then Atomic Heart already belongs to a fully formed subgenre of atompunk, namely Sovietpunk. What kind of animal is this??
"Towards a bright future of communist society"
At first glance, answering the question “what is councilpunk” is quite simple. This is a subgenre of atompunk, in which, depending on the time of action, the USSR either has not yet collapsed, or is not going to collapse; Communism has been built, the citizens are happy, and the state has the technology to allow the USSR to dominate the world stage. First of all, in front of other superpowers, which in Sovietpunk may not be such at all. In the case of Atomic Heart, it is a polymer developed by the brilliant Soviet scientist Dmitry Sechenov, the prototype of which was the real scientist Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov.
AND. M. Sechenov, creator of the first Russian physiological scientific school and the natural scientific materialist direction in psychology.
In other words, Sovietpunk is https://bettingsitesnogamstop.co.uk/review/palm-casino/ Soviet retrofuturism; how citizens of the USSR in the mid-20th century imagined the future. Atompunk, in turn, represents people’s ideas about a society built on the basis of the use of atomic energy technologies, an integral part of which is the arms race between the USA and the USSR in the middle of the last century.
In fact, sovietpunk is a much more complex phenomenon, including the cultural phenomenon of nostalgia for the Soviet past, including people who did not experience Soviet realities in their adult lives, as well as music in the sovietwave genre, a passion for Stalinist architecture and many other aspects. So why has this subgenre become so popular lately?? Despite the fact that most answers on the Internet traditionally associate this with nostalgia, I would answer differently, at least for myself. As I mentioned above, many people of the younger generation experience so-called phantom nostalgia, because due to their age they did not have the opportunity to live in the world of delicious ice cream and free apartments. At the same time, echoes of that era surround us since childhood. The general cultural and information background influences us in one way or another in a fairly predictable way. It seems to me that the love for retrofuturism in general is superimposed on this background.
The most notable players in this arena are the Fallout and Bioshock series . I am sure that many saw retrofuturism for the first time in one of them and became interested in it. At least that’s what happened to me after Fallout. Indeed, it is really incredibly interesting to look from a modern point of view at the development of technologies of the past, brought to the point of absurdity, and not only that, but also to become a direct participant in the events. However, no less interesting is the way of society built on the use of these technologies. And if, speaking about games, we saw the way of, for example, American society, then there is practically no Soviet one. A few representatives of the genre that come to mind are Red Alert and, albeit very indirectly, Singularity .
This, in my opinion, is the reason for the popularity of sovietpunk. This is the desire of a large number of people to transfer the retrofuturistic experience gained in other projects to the cultural code of our realities that is familiar to us all. And it is precisely this request that Atomic Heart satisfies in abundance.
"We were born to make a fairy tale come true!"
So, we have decided on the setting and its influence on the formation of Atomic Heart as an original work. Now I would like to talk about some individual elements of the game, which also contribute to the formation of the project as an ideal representative of Sovietpunk.
The plot of the game, let’s be honest, there aren’t enough stars in the sky, but sometimes it can surprise you with some good twists and in general it doesn’t let you get bored. I would not like to dwell on his analysis in detail, but it should be noted that, consistently leading us through the different complexes of Enterprise 3826, he perfectly demonstrates both the direct scientific and technical achievements of the alternative USSR, and the chronology of scientific progress, which allows us to understand why and at what point history took a sharp turn.
In general, we can say that Atomic Heart is to some extent a Soviet cranberry, but I would say differently. In terms of environment and visual details, I would compare Atomic Heart to Ghost of Tsushima, because both of these games do not surround you with cranberries, but rather a set of stereotypes about the society and country in question, helping you immerse yourself in this world. Only in the case of Ghost of Tsushima in the world of samurai, and in the case of Atomic Heart – in the country of victorious communism. The success of this immersion is directly related to the fact that in both cases the projects were developed by people directly related to the cultural code that they sought to transfer to the screen. And the set of these stereotypes is huge: from “Well, wait a minute!", to the classic Soviet bureaucracy. And success comes from the fact that both the first and second are very, very familiar to each of us.
We get to the streets of the cities themselves only at the beginning of the game, and the fact that when we get into the car we take off and see that we have been in the flying city of Chelomey all this time leaves no doubt about what kind of project the developers were inspired by when creating it.
Unfortunately, there is one gameplay mechanic that greatly interferes with immersion. It’s too aggressive a world. I am very glad that the developers did not, according to the canons of a well-known company, make an empty, completely open world, but the mechanics with cameras and alarm levels, namely their excessive concentration, really interfere with exploration even if you want to stay on the map longer.
But not only the visual and gameplay components are the same. What makes the game an original representative of Sovietpunk is the soundtrack. The soundtrack in the game deserves special praise. The decision to make remixes of popular Soviet pop songs is a hit on every gamer in the post-Soviet space. For the opportunity to ride in a red Lada to Tsoi’s "Changes" I’m ready to forgive the game a lot of flaws.
"Be a worthy son of the Motherland"
So what do we end up with??
With this short article I wanted to both put my own thoughts in order a little and share how I personally see the Atomic Heart project from the Mundfish studio. I wanted to present it not just as a strong shooter in Soviet aesthetics, but as a complex of ideas and mechanics that, working as a single clockwork, give us, sophisticated gamers, the opportunity to experience a unique experience of immersion in purebred Sovietpunk. Remove one element, even seemingly not the most important one, for example, the soundtrack or the monstrous buildings of Stalinist architecture – and the clock stops. Yes, we have seen many mechanics before in other projects, but I did not see the integrity of these elements in them. Like a funny cranberry, for example, Red Alert, they worked, but not always like Sovietpunk. And this in no way makes them bad; for example, Red Alert, I played a colossal number of hours in my time. It’s just that it was at Enterprise 3826 that I clearly realized that in front of me was one of the few purebred representatives of the Sovietpunk genre. And what can I say – in my opinion the brightest of them.