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first impression? this large beefy man is an idiot and in love with his boss
finally got around to playing Atomic Heart after spending half a month wanting to and never getting the chance and so far it's been a lot of fun! made the absolute correct decision and went with Easy difficulty this time. i'd played the demo on Normal difficulty and uh....died a whole bunch. game's really reliant on dodging if u want to live, and i hate dodging normally but even more so in first person. -_-
that aside the gameplay's pretty enjoyable. so far there's been a very nice balance of combat, platforming, and puzzle solving, and while the platforming isn't implemented as well as it could be (lbr first person platforming isn't great) it's still really fun and satisfying when i stick a jump.
the puzzles also aren't very difficult, but i really like the timing ones for lockpicking. i mean mostly it's just very funny to me that P-3 has to stand there snapping his fingers over and over.
speaking of P-3: i love him a lot. he's genuinely pretty horrible, and also canonically really fucking stupid, but that adds to his charm as far as i'm concerned. the fact that he's just this big dumb idiot surrounded by scientists is so, so good. here's some very good P-3 moments (only mild, very very early game spoilers):
i didn't catch it, but he really does turn the key the wrong direction which is why she corrects him. god bless this man.
won't get into this more than just noting that the "huh?" is very funny bc it's clear what's actually happening here.
anyway this is a man who uses "crispy critters" as an expletive (i mean he uses all the regular expletives too, he just hits u with a "crispy critters" every now and then, perpetually reminding me that no, that wasn't a weird one-off line.) he's really grown on me a lot; dude's way more annoying at the start of the game.
but i included that screenshot to remember to talk about Charles. Charles is the weird tentacle glove on P-3's hand there. he's some kind of AI? whatever he is, he keeps up regular conversations with P-3, and a lot of it is tutorial or plot stuff, but a lot more is just them bickering. it's very interesting to be playing this genre of game (first person action shooter where the main character is your typical soldier type) and then have someone there chatting your ear off the whole time.
something else that keeps amusing me is the game framing P-3 as choosing Charles over the most horny fucking robot i've ever seen in any media. she straight up words it that way too "you're going to pick some glove over me?" she's the robot you interface with for weapon/ability upgrades so there's a lot of scenes of her sexually harassing P-3 and him just being like "please shut the fuck up." it's overdone to an extent that it loses all of the humor that was intended, but i do still enjoy her dragging Charles into it occasionally.
but so far it's just Charles and P-3 in terms of main characters. you get a little bit of P-3's boss and some other scientists, but not enough for me to really have opinions about them so far. aside from P-3's hatred of the German scientist reading a bit like jealousy (the "i hate suck ups" comment, the overly harsh "jawohl mein furher" response, which is like even more fucked up after you learn that Stockhausen is Jewish. combine that with the overly sincere, starry-eyed, almost OOC way P-3 talks about Sechenov, his clear loyalty there, and uh...yeah i'm getting Incredibly Jealous from this man. there's no other character he treats that way, not even Charles--he actually apologizes to Charles for snapping at him so much when Charles points it out. genuinely excited for him and Stockhausen to actually be in the same room; i need to see how that's gonna play out, P-3 is so damn MEAN.)
story's pretty interesting so far too, even though i haven't really seen much beyond "uh oh the robots are suddenly attacking everyone and this is real weird!" i will say something i appreciate A LOT is how many characters there are that say something along the lines of "this isn't the robots' fault, it's us humans that fucked up." P-3 is implied to be a robot-hater early on (but then u also get the scene with him and the lady robot at the beginning, where he tries to save her) but a lot of NPCs you run into still like robots despite what's happened.
another story telling element i'm big on is how Atomic Heart uses notes. i give RE games and Mr Capcom a hard time for being overly reliant on notes to give background information, but so far the way Atomic Heart seems to be using notes is solely for enriching environmental storytelling. you can read the bios for all the employees of the facility you're wandering around in at the start, and then also find their emails or audio recordings, and it starts to build these people up as characters, even when you never actually see them. you'll get an email about more robots having to be sent out bc they keep losing dozens of them, and then you find a room where it's clear someone was doing experiments on the missing robots, and you find a few audio recordings by the person presumably responsible for it, and if you look up his employee bio you get even more info about why he MIGHT have been fucking experimenting on robots and like...you never run into him, or at least i haven't so far. it's just this extra bit of storytelling you can get if you're reading everything and paying attention.
there's so much attention to detail like that in this game so far, it's just very very nice.
one more thing to say is just how beautiful the game is. the devs really stuck to their aesthetic and damn but it's a good one. even the soundtrack fits very well (and you know what, as dumb as the explanation for "future radio" is i still appreciate that they wanted to try to explain it. they wanted it to work with their world-building and it's dumb but i'm willing to suspend my disbelief. i appreciate the effort!) but if you've never heard of Atomic Heart it got a lot of praise for the art direction. there's clear Soviet era architectural inspirations, but there's also a decent amount of retro futurism, and it all adds up to a very beautiful game. it feels a lot like the sort of dialed up American patriotism + retro futurism combo you get in Fallout, only, you know, Soviet and not post-apocalyptic.
anyway, real positive start so far. excited to finally get out of this first area and maybe even see some scientists instead of just talking to them via the weird tentacle hand thingy.
that aside the gameplay's pretty enjoyable. so far there's been a very nice balance of combat, platforming, and puzzle solving, and while the platforming isn't implemented as well as it could be (lbr first person platforming isn't great) it's still really fun and satisfying when i stick a jump.
the puzzles also aren't very difficult, but i really like the timing ones for lockpicking. i mean mostly it's just very funny to me that P-3 has to stand there snapping his fingers over and over.
speaking of P-3: i love him a lot. he's genuinely pretty horrible, and also canonically really fucking stupid, but that adds to his charm as far as i'm concerned. the fact that he's just this big dumb idiot surrounded by scientists is so, so good. here's some very good P-3 moments (only mild, very very early game spoilers):
i didn't catch it, but he really does turn the key the wrong direction which is why she corrects him. god bless this man.
won't get into this more than just noting that the "huh?" is very funny bc it's clear what's actually happening here.
anyway this is a man who uses "crispy critters" as an expletive (i mean he uses all the regular expletives too, he just hits u with a "crispy critters" every now and then, perpetually reminding me that no, that wasn't a weird one-off line.) he's really grown on me a lot; dude's way more annoying at the start of the game.
but i included that screenshot to remember to talk about Charles. Charles is the weird tentacle glove on P-3's hand there. he's some kind of AI? whatever he is, he keeps up regular conversations with P-3, and a lot of it is tutorial or plot stuff, but a lot more is just them bickering. it's very interesting to be playing this genre of game (first person action shooter where the main character is your typical soldier type) and then have someone there chatting your ear off the whole time.
something else that keeps amusing me is the game framing P-3 as choosing Charles over the most horny fucking robot i've ever seen in any media. she straight up words it that way too "you're going to pick some glove over me?" she's the robot you interface with for weapon/ability upgrades so there's a lot of scenes of her sexually harassing P-3 and him just being like "please shut the fuck up." it's overdone to an extent that it loses all of the humor that was intended, but i do still enjoy her dragging Charles into it occasionally.
but so far it's just Charles and P-3 in terms of main characters. you get a little bit of P-3's boss and some other scientists, but not enough for me to really have opinions about them so far. aside from P-3's hatred of the German scientist reading a bit like jealousy (the "i hate suck ups" comment, the overly harsh "jawohl mein furher" response, which is like even more fucked up after you learn that Stockhausen is Jewish. combine that with the overly sincere, starry-eyed, almost OOC way P-3 talks about Sechenov, his clear loyalty there, and uh...yeah i'm getting Incredibly Jealous from this man. there's no other character he treats that way, not even Charles--he actually apologizes to Charles for snapping at him so much when Charles points it out. genuinely excited for him and Stockhausen to actually be in the same room; i need to see how that's gonna play out, P-3 is so damn MEAN.)
story's pretty interesting so far too, even though i haven't really seen much beyond "uh oh the robots are suddenly attacking everyone and this is real weird!" i will say something i appreciate A LOT is how many characters there are that say something along the lines of "this isn't the robots' fault, it's us humans that fucked up." P-3 is implied to be a robot-hater early on (but then u also get the scene with him and the lady robot at the beginning, where he tries to save her) but a lot of NPCs you run into still like robots despite what's happened.
another story telling element i'm big on is how Atomic Heart uses notes. i give RE games and Mr Capcom a hard time for being overly reliant on notes to give background information, but so far the way Atomic Heart seems to be using notes is solely for enriching environmental storytelling. you can read the bios for all the employees of the facility you're wandering around in at the start, and then also find their emails or audio recordings, and it starts to build these people up as characters, even when you never actually see them. you'll get an email about more robots having to be sent out bc they keep losing dozens of them, and then you find a room where it's clear someone was doing experiments on the missing robots, and you find a few audio recordings by the person presumably responsible for it, and if you look up his employee bio you get even more info about why he MIGHT have been fucking experimenting on robots and like...you never run into him, or at least i haven't so far. it's just this extra bit of storytelling you can get if you're reading everything and paying attention.
there's so much attention to detail like that in this game so far, it's just very very nice.
one more thing to say is just how beautiful the game is. the devs really stuck to their aesthetic and damn but it's a good one. even the soundtrack fits very well (and you know what, as dumb as the explanation for "future radio" is i still appreciate that they wanted to try to explain it. they wanted it to work with their world-building and it's dumb but i'm willing to suspend my disbelief. i appreciate the effort!) but if you've never heard of Atomic Heart it got a lot of praise for the art direction. there's clear Soviet era architectural inspirations, but there's also a decent amount of retro futurism, and it all adds up to a very beautiful game. it feels a lot like the sort of dialed up American patriotism + retro futurism combo you get in Fallout, only, you know, Soviet and not post-apocalyptic.
anyway, real positive start so far. excited to finally get out of this first area and maybe even see some scientists instead of just talking to them via the weird tentacle hand thingy.