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 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”.
