Still won’t buy because every cent the game earns pays taxes for putin.

The real issue with this game is just how off-putting and abrasive writing and characters are (including and especially the astonishingly unbearable protagonist). I think I played it soon after release on Game Pass and despite the impressive visuals and art style, it felt deeply unpleasant as an experience because of this, to the point that it actually upset me. It tries to replicate the “shiny Utopian paradise that actually isn’t” shtick of Bioshock Infinite, but it feels like a pale imitation that mistakes production values for actually saying anything valuable. With better writers, it could have perhaps been the Russian equivalent to that masterpiece, deconstructing founding myths and sham ideals of the Soviet Union just like Inifinite so eloquently did with American exceptionalism, but it falls way short of that.

Despite the imaginative Soviet utopia of Atomic Heart collapsing even more spectacularly and embarrassingly than the real one, the devs do not have anything meaningful to say about either of these universes, being deathly afraid of appearing too political and critical of the Russian past in Putin’s Russia - but by being this “pretend-apolitical”, they are of course making a very loud and obvious political statement, one that is not a good look for them or the country this game originates from at a time when said country is trying to brutally subjugate a smaller neighbor.

It doesn’t help that in terms of gameplay and pacing, Atomic Heart is merely average at best. There’s a stark contrast between how it looks in carefully edited gameplay footage vs. how it feels to actually play, but I would be more than willing to tolerate such shortcomings if writing and world building (beneath the admittedly gorgeous veneer) had been any better.