Atomic Heart” is a game that many players have been waiting for for years, and its very different style has sparked a lot of debate. The art design is full of Soviet flavor and looks different from all the games on the market, as if it is the product of a different world.
It portrays an overhead world: the Soviet Union gained a kind of technological breakthrough in World War II, allowing various technologies to develop rapidly, emigrating to alien planets in the 1950s, creating advanced robots and becoming a utopia
Nowadays, more and more people pass “Atomic Heart”, and everyone gradually found that its gameplay is done mediocre, and in some places even done a little bad.
However, everyone’s initial expectations were also placed on the worldview setting and art style. In this regard, “Atomic Heart” does not disappoint at all, it contributes what is probably the most shocking opening of FPS games in recent years, and then carries it over to the detailed setting.
By now, you should have seen a lot of discussion of Atomic Heart, with people talking about the atomic punk and compositionist art. However, controversy is also emerging, with people starting to debate whether this is a “Soviet” or “Black Soviet” game, and whether it’s a “betrayal” to set Soviet characters as villains. “Today, we will talk more about the game.
Today, we’ll talk in depth about what you may not know about the art and worldview of “Atomic Heart” and see the answers to these debates.
Believe it? The production team’s attitude towards the Soviet Union may be hidden in the refrigerator that talks trollishly and in the two balletic mechanical girls – I’m not kidding.
First of all, what exactly is the style of “Heart of the Atom”?
Two years ago, I wrote about Soviet aesthetics, in which I briefly described early Soviet Constructivism – an artistic style that used geometric forms, combined with pragmatism. And many of the enemies and facilities in Atomic Heart were designed with it in mind, so they look like oddly shaped geometries.
But that’s not all the game is about. Before the release of Atomic Heart, I said that it is likely to be different from everyone’s expectations, and that the core is “anti-Soviet”. 80% of this speculation was a wild guess, but 20% was because, with the release of the concept art, Atomic Heart showed a different side of its art design – the style of the Soviet Exile school of artists.
The early Soviet art was so accomplished that they created an impact that still permeates all aspects of life today. But then where did those artists go?
They perished. The history of Soviet art can be summed up simply by the fact that it showed a blossoming creativity in the 1920s. In 1932, however, all this art was banned by Stalin, leaving only Soviet-style realism.
Soviet realism, that’s what it is. Note that there will be a comparison of the posters in the game later
And in 1933, the Bauhaus Academy of Art in Europe, also closed by the Nazis; art was betrayed.
The most magnificent building in that game’s opening scene is the Stalinist building, which has one of its roots in imperialist architecture.
Later, artists were in a permanent state of inability to create; they transformed, fled, or went into hiding. After Khrushchev came to power, some of the art was restored, allowing a cultural wave of some abstraction in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. But soon, this art was again knocked half underground by Brezhnev.
These are only glib generalizations; behind them are the ruins of a life, talent and future piled on top of each other.
The Forbidden Zone of Swan Lake
The obscure atmosphere of the underground fed Soviet conceptualism, which believed that the concept behind a work of art was more important than the art itself.
Since then, Soviet art has had a strong sense of symbolism and metaphor. Many of these artists left the Soviet Union, such as the famous Tarkovsky, and one of their favorite images was of abandoned giants in the wilderness, an aesthetic that has had a profound influence on later Russian art.
Nostalgia”, made by Tarkovsky after he fled to Italy
In “Heart of the Atom,” after leaving the original Sky City by flying car, we arrive at another place. Here, countless huge sculptures and research institutions rise among the forests and mountain passes.
Why is this place of such design? Partly because, at that time, when the Soviet Union built the colossal statues, the concept drawings were placed in the green fields and parks. But another important reason is that it may have originated from this Soviet-style ruin aesthetic.
When players first see these scenes, they are intact, but soon, they become wreckage in a runaway disaster. The concept art for these scenes is actually shaped after the ruins, and the concept art for the dueling halls is similarly reminiscent of the abandoned Baikonur Cosmodrome.
The ruins in the wilderness are partly a metaphor for the Soviet Union at the time. It is the Soviet Union in collapse, a kind of decay isolated from the world, as if it were a wrecked body in the wilderness. At the same time, it stands on top of an ancient Slavic civilization, so it is not surrounded by wasteland, but by a vast forgotten green field, with a fatalistic pathos.
Stalker was reshoot several times, and Tarkovsky spent a lot of resources to re-shoot this giant tank abandoned in the green field as well. The machinery representing human ambition and conquest, left behind in the mysterious and unpredictable nature, its metaphor is the heart of the film.
The post-Soviet countries created games that could never leave the theme of ruins: ATOM RPG, Escape from Tarkov, Stalker, Metro …… and now Atomic Heart, because these people grew up in the echoes of the fall of the giant, and the major industrial accident in Chernobyl
Then, Atomic Heart brought the term “atomic punk” to the masses. It is indeed an atomic punk game, just like its European counterpart, Fallout. But that word is an incomplete way to sum up its style.
Atomic Punk, not a broad category like Steampunk or Cyberpunk, it’s really a niche derivative label representing fantasy built on the era of atomic energy. It’s like Deco Punk, from the Art Deco (Art Deco) style of the 1920s – a label that, while it exists, is actually a bit off.
What’s the most famous Deco Punk game? It’s BioShock, but it’s better known as an anti-utopian work that uses Art Deco art. The same goes for Atomic Heart, which is actually a Retro-futurist (Retro-futurism) game built on Soviet art.
Retro-futurism refers to the post-1980s period when people look back to the future visions that appeared in the 1940s and 1950s. In the early 1950s, World War II had just ended, human faith was gradually being restored, ideologies were blossoming, and the Cold War had only just reared its ugly head.
A similar optimism had emerged in Europe before World War I. It was believed that it would be the war to end all wars, that national borders were being broken down, that Europe did not even need a visa, and that the idea of a world community was spreading. It was naive, and mankind learned from its brokenness, yet science rekindled the fire of the dream.
Atomic energy, robotics, automated processes, computers, space exploration …… all these splendid achievements filled the people of that era with the anticipation of tomorrow. They imagined that in the future, life would be unbelievably convenient, cities would be spectacular and humane, and war would be reduced to a distant dream. Thus on television, countless animations and short films showing life in the future were broadcast.
For Americans, at least Watergate and the Vietnam War had not yet occurred; for the Soviet Union, at least the economic collapse and the war in Afghanistan and Chernobyl had not yet occurred; and the Cold War was not a monster that lasted for decades.
They were all things that would eventually happen, but then, people didn’t know it yet.
Future retroism, that’s what the disillusioned people of the 1980s were trying to go back in time, to find what people dreamed of then, to recall what the world could have been like. So they created a negative cyberpunk on one side and a future retroism on the other, building a glorious heyday of parallel universes in fantasy.
What were people dreaming of then? It was the letters that the Soviets sent to future generations, convinced that a communist society had been realized and that their children and grandchildren would emigrate to space, a story you may have heard before.
At the same time, it was the after-dinner show on American television at the time. It told viewers that in the future, mankind would establish a joint migration site in Antarctica: a place where all nations would come together and where they would speak only one common language: the language of science.
Or, in a European interview program, a child who was asked about her future vision said she hoped that the poor would be like the rich and that no one would be discriminated against because of the wealth gap. Then she immediately added with a smile that there would still be a difference between the rich and the poor, because she found herself inadvertently speaking the communist mind.
The lust for power had betrayed art, and subsequently, it would betray science. But in the 1950s, the betrayal had not yet occurred, so the dream resided in every possible medium, immortalized; it would then travel back in time to its blooming origin, reminding the world with retro-futurism that humanity should aspire to be better.
But is “Atomic Heart” really portraying the glorious future that the Soviet Union could become?
This is something that gamers constantly argue about. I think the answer is yes: the production team is indeed portraying it that way. The answer, however, is hidden in the unobtrusive details.
According to the setting set, Atomic Heart was developed by 200 people; according to rumors, the production team experienced a clash of philosophies in the middle, like a miniature replica of history, so the themes it expresses must be contradictory and confusing from a broad point of view.
At the beginning of the article, I said that the production team’s attitude toward the Soviet Union was hidden in the tart-talking refrigerator and the sexy robot. Have you ever wondered why these two things exist? Why in the world of Atomic Heart everyone is talking about sex, even if it’s your glove, the top brass or the fans of ballet robotplay?
In the final hallucination, a character tells us that science enhances people’s lives, it doesn’t lie, it just puts the facts in front of them. When talking about the rest, he sighs that it is the search for light that has turned them into monsters.
I think that no one will know the Soviet Union better than the Slavs. For to understand it, one has to understand not only its dreams, but also its collapses and scars, and the warnings it left behind.
At this very moment, “Atomic Heart” is being boycotted from all sides, it is being called to be taken down and erased. This is something that will happen eventually, and we knew about it before it happened, because we were used to disappointment.
But humans will always continue to dream and will always try to accomplish impossible feats. No matter what name is used to describe this dream: Communism, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance …… it will always be corrupted, but there is no force that can corrupt its roots. For in the history of mankind, only one true age has ever been born, and that is the age of mankind.
Just as when Spartacus led the rebellious slaves two thousand years ago and looked away from his homeland in Thrace after his betrayal, he saw perhaps only defeat, only the 6,000 slaves crucified on the road from the city of Rome to Gapua.
Kubrick’s Spartacus
At the time, the backward productivity could not support the abolition of slavery, and the great scholar Cicero scoffed at it. But when civilization looks back on its childhood, it is Spartacus, not Cicero, who is remembered.
Likewise too, when we look back at ancient Rome, we see purple-robed tyrants, bloody gladiatorial fights and wars; but at the same time we see civilization, baths and the City of Marble.
Perhaps the complex and two-faced Soviet Union is also as much a combination of ancient Rome and Spartacus.
These are just some naive dreams, but someone once warned the world: never laugh at those who think they can improve the world, because only they can.
So what exactly is the “Atomic Heart”? In the game, it’s a lame conspiracy code name, but you could argue that it’s not necessarily the common idea of 200 producers.
An interesting analogy: the history of atomic energy is very similar to that of the Soviet Union. Both had the same idea born in the late 19th century and realized in the early 20th century; the weaponization of nuclear energy, in parallel with the dictatorship of the Soviet Union, and the failure of Chernobyl, bordering on the failure of the Soviet Union.
I can believe that underneath this seemingly banal game story lies a far more than just a parable about the Soviet Union, which represents the true meaning of the heart of the atom.
For our heart is made of atoms, these atoms, which circulate endlessly on this planet, from the giant towers of civilizations of days gone by, from lives passed away; it beats from ideals once, failures once, every breath ever taken, every revolution and change of times.
It is the heart that beats in the age of atomic energy and sustains the dream of gold of mankind since ancient times.
