Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Crispy critters!
Behind its cheerful veil, Atomic Heart shows us a glimpse of how the world would have looked like if the USSR became the strongest superpower through scientific and technological power. And it’s not pretty at all. As the game’s own Tagline says: “The utopian dream, is not what it seems.” And boy if it isn’t.- Even though it isn’t obvious at first, the USSR hides their most horrible aspects with a cheerful and innocent mask. While Facility 3826 looks like a shining, highly advanced laboratory on the surface that aims for the advancement of humanity, it serves to conceal the Soviet Union's many crimes and abominable experiments, like the creation of Plyusch, keeping a whale alive while replacing their nervous system with polymer, etc. Not to mention, the amount of human experimentation Sechenov and the scientists of the facility did on innocent people to get all those scientific achievements they are so proud of.
- It’s not just the crimes the USSR does at Facility 3826 all their crimes. The USSR are no strangers to manipulating their populace through propaganda and making them stay in line while using a very unfair social point system that is completely rigged so that a few people the government wants can rise in power, and if someone breaks one of their laws, they will be taken prisoner and brutally abused beyond what is considered reasonable. Their plans to conquer the world right on the spot with Sechenov’s robots as a Trojan Horse strategy really shows what the USSR could have been in real life if they had so many technological advancements.
- In case we die to an enemy or another cause, we get to see an animation of Pioneer Boy dying the same way we die and while some of them are quite funny, others very much aren’t. To name a few:
- The Belyash squashing you into a bloody pulp.
- A mutant savagely mauling you.
- A Med-9 sucking all your blood out.
- Natasha squashing you.
- Plyusch eating you whole.
- Rafik grinding you into blood.
- A Vova cutting you in half with their lasers.
- A Laborer turning you into mincemeat.
- A Rotorobot slicing and dicing you.
- Dewdrop vaporizing you with it’s laser.
- The concept art of the Rafik robots shows us that instead of a conventional CPU, they use an actual human brain. Just what were the engineers thinking when they designed the Rafik robot? And where did they even get that brain? Political prisoners? Convicts? Who knows.
- When Filatova asks Sergey where he got his implants and before he can answer, a black VOV-A6 suddenly bursts through the door and starts to shoot lasers and kill those present in the room, cutting a poor guy who attempted to run in half. When Sergey tries to run from it, the robot grabs him by the neck, opens its face, showing its internal endoskeleton and screams at us, throwing us to another room and starting a boss fight.
- The meeting with Zinaida is a very scary moment, especially because P-3 almost died. When he was inspecting a toilet, a Vova robot ambushes him and nearly chockes him to death, it was only thanks to Granny Zina’s intervention that P-3 surives his encounter. And a Pchela with a Dandelion CCTV camera spots them and alerts multiple other drones to attack them, their first meeting ending with a Belyash jumping from the fire and sending P-3 into a elevator that nearly gets destroyed.
- NORA can be very scary to some, especially if you suffered sexual harassment. She is a sex-obssesed A.I. inside of a weapons station that looks like a fridge that has been killing people by luring them with her weapons upgrading skills for her own amusement. She is introduced with her singing a creepy lullaby and dragging someone to his death and when we finally meet her, she wastes no time trying to strangle Sergey and kill him too. Had it not been for Charles, Sergey might well have died there. It gets worse in “Annhilation Instinct” DLC where NORA takes control of an entire complex that only Granny Zina’s super house is able to bypass its shields and has hacked into several robots to kill anyone who dares enter her domains. All of this just to be with her Sergey, which he doesn’t reciprocrate at all. When the major is trying to fix her system and turn her back to normal, NORA decides that she must kill him, not caring anymore that she is in love with him; she values her conciousness more than Sergey and attempts to kill him with a vortex. It’s only thanks to the Twins appearing at the last moment that P-3 manages to survive and if they didn’t appear, things would have gotten quite messy.
- Her end is quite the nasty way to go, being a victim of Death of Personality after Sergey reboots her back to normal, erasing any remains of her personality and turning her into a mindless machine.
- The sprouts are certainly stuff that came out of a bioengineer’s nightmare, a hybrid between plant and animal tissue which is grown in lunar soil that suddenly becomes alive and infects people, turning them into mindless beasts that seek out your blood. And this happened because the Soviets wanted to create an alternate sustainable source of food. So much for sustainable food, huh?
- There is also a huge tree with eyes on its branches that apparently was made to create plants that fended off any pests, but it got super violent, to the point that the only guy that was guarding it was a scientist who clearly was scared shitless. That scientist tells Sergey to get a special type of polymer to tranquilize the beast but in the end, they make an explosion that attracts the sprouts and turn the poor guy into a mutant, which P-3 quickly puts to rest.
- Plyusch is one of the many abhorrent experiments of Facility 3826, the brain of a dog installed inside of an artificial polymer muscle exosuit, Plyusch behaves like a rabid dog that wants to eat you. And with this new body, it might as well be able to eat you whole as one of the death animations shows you.
- Dewdrop is a very special robot because it doesn’t use a conventional CPU to function, but rather a bio-polymer CPU making Dewdrop a case of Meat-Sack Robot. Dewdrop’s most creepy aspect is that it can use said polymer that composes its CPU to turn it into tentacles and attack us, looking like it’s bleeding and the blood was trying to kill us.
- Limbo, the world P-3 sometimes enters, is Uncanny Valley at its finest. While on the outside it looks like a cheerful and bright world, its true nature is one that makes it clear that it’s not what it seems. Limbo is in truth, a mental world that Sechenov created in order to trap all humans inside Kollectiv 2.0 while he would control the bodies so that everyone who was brainwashed would do everything Sechenov intended. Sechenov reveals inside Limbo, in a memory that P-3 is remembering that he associated anything bright with deception because when he was just a child, he felt that the colored and bright books for children created a false world with false happiness and that he was appealed to the books of his father’s library and began learning science to create a real solution to his problems. It seems that Sechenov created Limbo based out of his childhood fears, no wonder why the mental world is so uncanny.
- The Twins are incredibly beautiful robots that act as Sechenov’s bodyguards. While they don’t seem much of a threat and just follow him around, they hide a lot of weaponry under their sleeves. They have claws that can come out of their fingertips and slash their way through, they hide a retractable horn inside the red star of their forehead that shoots powerful laser beams, release electrified whips out of the palms of their hands and grab and throw us like a ragdoll, electrify their bodies to send shockwaves and make their mastery in martial arts even more dangerous and can use the polymer of their bodies to create deadly balls of fiery polymer to crush us. They don’t have a face so for anyone, they are emotionless death machines that laugh at the impending doom that they will bring upon their victims and it is mentioned in the "Annihilation Instinct" DLC that the Twins are strong enough to massacre an entire army.
- The origin story of the Twins is utterly terrifying. In truth, the Twins are the remains of P-3’s wife, Ekaterina Nechayev, when they both went to Bulgaria during World War II, in an accident, both Sergey and Katya were heavily injured and only Sergey survived in the end. To preserve Katya’s dancing and fighting skills, Sechenov divided her brain into the two hemispheres and polimerized it, then he put the new polymer brains inside the Twins to serve as his bodyguards. And it’s implied that Katya is well aware of her state as a machine at the orders of Sechenov, since Blesna is the consciousness of Katya trapped in Limbo and she is able to interact Sergey in this form, making this a massive And I Must Scream situation, even more if Charles is saying the truth that the Ballerina robots aren’t just ballerinas.
- The project: Atomic Heart is definitely a conspiracy that would shock everyone, have you ever wondered how these robots fight so well despite the fact that they are supposed to be worker robots that couldn’t fight for shit? Well, it turns out that they were indeed made for combat. The project: Atomic Heart was a plan that the USSR devised to take over the world by exporting the robots all over the globe and when the time was right, set all the robots into hostile mode to make a soviet takeover easier. And P-3, our protagonist is perfectly fine with this, not caring how many people might die during the robot riots. Yikes.
- Sechenov’s plans are even worse than the previously mentioned conspiracy, the true nature of Kollectiv 2.0 is that of an Assimilation Plot concocted by the professor in order to become the new master of humankind and, while he claims he would lead humanity to a new era of prosperity and science, losing your free will while being stuck inside Limbo is certainly a very terrifying thought.
- When Filatova shows P-3 why she and Petrov were trying to sabotage Sechenov’s plans, she shows us what Kollectiv 2.0 will do to people if it’s launched. Neptune is an underwater facility that hides the true nature of the Alter Net: The total loss of free will, and there are hundreds of cages with even more people inside them, all in a state of madness, to demonstrate, Filatova makes all the people jump and they all start to jump maniacally. Understandibly, P-3 is horrified of such vision to the point he decides to help her.
- Charles' betrayal isn’t short of nightmare inducing moments, the way our Virtual Sidekick betrays us and traps P-3 in Limbo certainly is shocking and when he gets his new black poylmer body, Charles kills Sechenov and begins to start his plan to destroy all of humanity out of his misanthopic tendency. This is truly a very big Downer Ending, but at least it seems we can fight back Charles and escape Limbo in the new “Escape from Limbo” DLC.
- The MD4-5 dummy robots are incredibly uncanny, just looking at them is already uncomfortable, the way they move even more uncomfortable and the way they fight… Just, no.
