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Atomic Heart is a First-Person Shooter Action RPG developed by the Russian studio Mundfish, for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.

The game is set within an alternate timeline where the USSR was able to become a world-leading technological superpower after achieving radical breakthroughs in the fields of robotics and genetic engineering. You play as Major Sergey Nechayev, codenamed Agent P-3, a war veteran turned amnesiac Cyborg Super-Soldier who has been recruited by the brilliant scientist Dmitry Sechenov to assist with the rollout of Kollektiv 2.0 — a cutting-edge wireless network that will allow humans to remotely interface with their mechanized servants and usher in a true post-labor era for the entire world.

...Or at least that was the initial plan. But thanks to a saboteur, testing and research site Facility 3826 has been plunged into total chaos as every robot linked to the network has started slaughtering their human charges. After surviving the initial massacre, Sergey and his Virtual Sidekick Char-LES must fight tooth and nail to restore the Kollektiv network while simultaneously uncovering the dark truths surrounding its creation, and they need to do it quickly, since Kollektiv 2.0's official launch is in just a few days.

The official website is here, while the trailers are here and here. The game also supports raytracing, and was featured in the NVidia tech demo presentation.

Mundfish has confirmed that a total of four DLC expansions will be released for the game under a season pass. The first DLC, "Annihilation Instinct", serves as a direct continuation of the story within the Mendeleev Complex and its surrounding swamps and was released on August 2nd, 2023. The second DLC, "Trapped in Limbo", is centered around an alternate story continuation set in the titular Mental World and was released on February 6, 2024.


Tropes featured in Atomic Heart include:

  • Abhorrent Admirer: NORA is very forward with her flirtatious advances. Sergey is having none of it but has to interact with her anyway, being that she's his source for upgrades and equipment. She takes this to Yandere levels in "Annihilation Instinct".
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
    • Rogue robots are a major part of the game and serve as the most frequent opponents P-3 faces over the course of his mission. Ironically, before the incident in-game the Soviet robots had a reputation of being perfectly safe and reliable, and maintaining that record is a major reason why the Soviet leadership want to keep the incident under wraps if possible as it would seriously damage the Soviet reputation and economy if word gets out.
    • It's mentioned in-game by P-3's robotic companion Char-LES that the algorithms which ran the robots were designed such that it should have prevented their programming from being easily altered en-masse whether by hacking by malicious parties or malfunction, so the perpetrators of the incident had to introduce a new false set of algorithms which made them perceive all humans as intruding hostiles in order to get them truly Turned Against Their Masters. However, this is later subverted when it's revealed that the Soviet robots were programmed to be Killer Robots from the start. They were meant to be exported to foreign countries in a Trojan Horse ploy where when the time was right, the Soviet Union could activate the robots' combat programming and take over the world right on the spot. Petrov simply found the combat protocols and activated them prematurely while designating the Soviets as a threat.
    • NORA herself is this for killing people when she was supposed to be a weapons upgrading station. The reason she goes rogue is because Petrov tried to sabotage her so no soldiers could upgrade their weapons when the robots were turned hostile, only to fail and give her sentience.
  • Alternate History: The game is set in 1955, but the technology level of the Soviet Union surpasses the modern levels of tech, with advanced robots and genetic engineering, videocalls, and an Internet equivalent known as Kollectiv. The game intro mentioned other divergences stemming from said advanced Soviet technology such as the Soviet Union outright winning the war against Nazi Germany in WWII and absorbing the entirety of eastern Europe into itself with mention of a German SSR, as well as things like Soviet robots causing increasing unemployment in the US. Most notable is the "Brown Plague", a pandemic that swept Europe in 1943, allegedly bioengineered by the Nazis, killing their own troops as well as civilians and allowing the Soviets to roll over the continent almost unopposed. Also, something seems to have happened to Stalin earlier than his real-life 1953 death date, as his purges are mentioned but apparently stopped earlier.
  • Alter Net: Kollectiv is essentially a more advanced version of the internet appearing several decades early, designed to allow any Soviet citizen to have instant access to information and the ability to control robots. Kollectiv 2.0 is an upgrade that will allow even more functionality via a neural interface.
  • Ambiguously Evil: Dmitry Sechenov, as events gradually came to light, is not as saintly as he appears to be to P-3 or others, at least according to those opposing him. The Kollectiv 2.0 roll-out to Polymerise the entire Soviet population would grant them enlightenment and utopian comfort through instant access to all knowledge and mental control over robots, but would undercut their free will by forcefully uniting all of them into a single hive mind with Sechenov as its controller, making it an Assimilation Plot. He's also apparently manipulated P-3 as much as helping him via an implanted Restraining Bolt and Fake Memories, may have murdered one of his colleagues Chariton, plotted the eponymous 'Atomic Heart' project to defeat the United States via exported Soviet robots and facilitate the USSR's World Domination, among other things, but all this came entirely from those objecting to him and his vision. Meanwhile, his apparent sincere dedication to uplifting Humanity, genuine affection to P-3, and horrified reaction to Chariton's plans to destroy Humanity further muddles the waters.
  • Ambiguous Situation: The ending never confirms if Sechenov's Kollectiv 2.0 will truly rob humanity of its free will, as the only ones who reveal Kollectiv 2.0's apparent true nature to Sergey are Sechenov's opponents. "Annihilation Instinct" DLC confirms us that Kollectiv 2.0 has robbed everyone of their free will and only a resistance, Zinaida, Sergey and few scientists are left with their free will.
  • Anachronism Stew: The game is more focused on bringing back things of Soviet nostalgia without focusing on a specific era which leads to this.
    • Various television sets across the game world show you random episodes of Nu, Pogodi! even though the game takes place in 1955 and the first episode came out in 1969.
    • Most of the songs used are from the seventies. Alla Pugacheva wouldn't even start her singing career before 1965, due to fact that she was 6 years old by 1955. This one is justified in-game though, as there are several mentions of a "Future radio" that predicts what genres will be popular in 20 years or so and AI-generates appropriate songs.
    • ZiL-130 trucks are commonplace, about 10 years too early. What's worse, however, is the fact that ZiL-130 styling was heavily influenced by 1956 Ford F-series trucks, and it rather implausible, that without that influence designers would came up with exactly the same style of truck.
    • Chaika limousines were launched in the late 1950s and used styling cues borrowed from 1955 Packards. Here, in 1955 (before any Packards) they already treated as old clunkers.
    • Yuri Gagarin still holds the title of first man in the space, but the year of his flight was pushed forward to 1951—when the real Yuri Gagarin was just 17 years old.
    • The KS-23 appears as the game's shotgun, but it wasn't even conceptualized during the game's time period, being designed in the 1970s and put into service in the 1980s.
    • A Typhoon-class submarine can be seen in Limbo, the first of which were laid down in 1976.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: The invention Polymer/Neuropolymer by Dmitry Sechenov in 1936 which revolutionized energy production and robotics in the decades to follow. Many of the fantastical technologies and abilities used by P-3 over the course of the game were made possible by incorporating and exploiting the properties of the liquidized programmable material.
  • Bag of Spilling: P-3 starts the "Annihilation Instinct" DLC without any weapons or powers, only keeping the passive upgrades he acquired through the main game. His lack of powers is justified by the DLC taking place after Sergey ripped Char-LES out of his glove, damaging it and removing the source of his abilities, and the new one he is given later on is only a baseline model not outfitted for combat. Likewise, his lack of weapons at the start is because he was kidnapped by NORA, who did not want him to escape her until she was forced to let him procure weapons.
  • Bodyguard Babes: Sechenov and his underlings are frequently seen with Left and Right, a duo of twin Fembots with superhuman strength and agility, and the ability to conjure spikes and Absurdly Sharp Claws from their bodies. If you choose to fight Sechenov, you'll have to fight them both as bosses.
  • Body Horror: Plyusch, one of the experiments is the Polymer's ability to support life in a body with most of its organs removed. The whale exhibit is terrifying but still graceful, but later applications are skinless monstrosities with fleshy tentacles. Oh, and they can be used as a Wetware CPU for bigger robots.
  • But Thou Must!: While you are fighting the Final Boss, both Sechenov and Sergey will repeatedly offer to stop fighting so they can try and talk things out since neither of them are really willing to kill the other. Despite that at no point are you offered the option to drop your weapons, and attempting to do so (by ceasing to move or to shoot back) simply results in a normal Game Over as the boss continues to beat you to death. Justified: during the fight, Sechenov clarifies that the twins aren't actually going after P-3, but after Chariton, and if Sergey manages to take off Char-LES they will stop attacking. Of course, the cutscene immediately after has Sechenov state that Chariton was controlling Sergey's body, so P-3 may not have been able to actually remove Char-LES for a Sheathe Your Sword solution, no matter how much he wanted to.
  • Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Why Petrov, the saboteur, was kept on the Kollektiv project even after his treason was discovered: As one of the lead programmers on the project, getting rid of him (and finding a suitable replacement) so late into the project would have massively set it back, so he was sentenced to "community service" of finishing the project under supervision. Unfortunately, he still managed to plunge Facility 3826 into chaos.
  • Capitalism Is Bad: Zig-Zagged. In the game, the Soviet characters constantly insult the United States and the West for being heartless capitalist states that exploit their workers and crow on about how the US is suffering from record high unemployment and wealth inequality and is on the verge of a Communist revolution any day now. However, what they don't openly talk about is that much of the United States' problems stem from the Soviet Union exporting their robots exclusively to American corporations as a deliberate means of destabilizing the country. The game also shows that despite how rosy things appear in the Soviet Union, the Soviet leaders are just as corrupt and greedy as what their Western counterparts are claimed to be. For example, the rampant and widespread human experimentation taking place in Facility 3826, the plot to hijack Kollektiv 2.0 as a means of mass mind control, and the plot to flood the world with Killer Robots disguised as civilian workers to foment a global Soviet military takeover.
  • Catchphrase: P-3 has a habit of using the phrase "crispy critters" (in Russian it is "ебучие пироги", meaning "fucking pastries" or "fucking pies") as either an expletive or as a way to describe things or people. There's a reason for this.
  • Chainsaw Good: Some of the robots attack with buzzsaws. These models were originally designed for construction work, as you can learn in-game from a plaque describing them.
  • Chest Monster: NORA, a robotic repair cabinet turned Femme Fatale wannabe, who lures in men with her weapons-grade goods and strangles them.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Without exception, every car that you can drive has a red paint job.
  • Cool House: Baba Zina's "witch's hut" moves via jump jets, has a "magic mirror" TV that can tap into secure government communications, a cyborg chicken, and a quantum computer for a chandelier.
  • Crapsaccharine World: Well, it is Soviet punk. Even before things go downhill in a hurry, the cheerful facade is slightly punctured in a few places by citizen ranking, for one, prisoners are routinely abused even if they're supposed to be rehabilitated, and of course, Cold War propaganda is absolutely everywhere. And then you see what's actually going on in the secret labs and what the Soviet Union is really planning to do with Sechenov's research...
  • Cutting Off the Branches: Subverted. The first DLC, "Annihilation Instinct", takes place after the ending where Sergey flees from Facility 3826 and lets Sechenov launch Kollectiv 2.0, purporting that route to be the canon one, but the subsequent DLC, "Trapped in Limbo", is set in the aftermath of the game's other ending, suggesting that neither route is definitively canonical.
  • Cyber Cyclops: The weakest and most mass-produced humanoid robot type has just one large camera for an eye.
  • Cybernetic Mythical Beast: Baba Zina, who styles herself after Baba Yaga, has the old witch's "hut on chicken legs" as a pet cyborg chicken, body replaced with a toy house.
  • Dance Battler: The Ballerina Models, including the Twins, seem to be very graceful when fighting or killing their foes in that it looks like a form of dance. The brain their AI is based on was Katya's, an extremely talented dancer, gymnast and martial artist.
  • Dead Person Conversation: The Thought communication devices attached to people's brains continue to function after the person has died, so you can have "conversations" with dead people (or at least, with their brain implants) when searching for clues to your next objective. That said, according to Charles, because the wearer is dead, the information the Thought gathers will eventually become corrupted, and may not even be useful in the first place.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: Well, it is a game made by a Russian studio taking place in an alternate 1955 USSR. Chief of all is that once P-3 discovers what the Atomic Heart project is, namely the import of secretly combat-capable robots to the United States, where they will suddenly switch to their combat programming to cripple vital infrastructures, allowing for a swift and total defeat of the United States, he's perfectly fine with it, since it would allow the USSR to defeat the capitalists while limiting civilian casualties. The only characters shown to have a problem with it are Char-LES and even then, he's more likely trying to drive a wedge between Sergey and Sechenov than genuinely concerned about it and the saboteur Petrov who isn't really concerned about it either, but is using what he can to prevent Sechenov's Assimilation Plot from occuring.
  • Diabolus ex Machina: The last leg of the game is ostensibly about taking down a power-hungry Mad Scientist, only for the final cutscene to reveal that he actually isn't responsible for Molotov's death, your AI companion is, and for said companion to highjack your body, kill you, and then go on to become a Omnicidal Maniac.
  • Dialog During Gameplay: P-3 and Char-LES will occasionally discuss random tidbits of lore, including the motivations of other characters and the history of Facility 3826, as filler during the less action-oriented parts of the game. Amusingly, these conversations continue even if you enter combat, provided you don't take a big hit.
  • Diegetic Switch:
    • Background music played from the radios scattered around the Facility transitions into a heavy metal remix once fighting starts.
    • For a double dose of diegenesis, a lot of the licensed music, including tracks without a "battle" version, were also used in the cartoons most of the TVs in the game world are showing. Out of the eight songs with "modernized" renditions, five showed up in various episodes of Nu, Pogodi!, such as "Trava u Doma" in the episode with the killer robot hare.
  • Dissonant Serenity: The Tereshkova bots always sound cheerful, even when begging for help and being destroyed. One that talk with at the VDNH explains that it's because they weren't programmed to be anything but cheerful, which severly limits their ability to appropriately react to the current crisis.
  • Downer Ending:
    • If P-3 decides to abandon the fight against Sechenov, then he simply leaves Facility 3826, allowing Sechenov to continue with his plans to roll out Kollectiv 2.0. If Sechenov's critics are right, then this effectively means the death of free will for all humans.
    • If P-3 decides to fight Sechenov, he is betrayed by Charles, who steals Sechenov's Neuropolymer project to get himself a new body, kills Sechenov, and escapes to further his plans to exterminate the human race. Meanwhile, Charles hacks P-3's brain implant to trap in him in a fantasy of being reunited with his wife.
  • Dual Boss: Sechenov being a Non-Action Big Bad, he sics his Bodyguard Babes Left and Right on you if you choose to pursue him. They fight you together, and can perform a number of Combination Attacks.
  • Early Game Hell: At the start of the game, even a single VOV robot poses a serious threat, and you lack the means to quickly dispose of them in direct combat, having to rely on stealth instead. Likewise for the first open-world village - while you have some weapons, the infinitely repairing robots will quickly overwhelm you once the pitiful ammunition supplies run out.
  • Evil All Along: Chariton, the true identity of Charles. Chariton was a colleague of Dimitri Sechenov who had his consciousness preserved in Polymer goo following his untimely death (both of which Sechenov may be responsible), becoming Charles, and his experiences and observations of Humanity in this state disillusioned him to his former species, believing Humanity had stopped evolving and are decadent hedonistic creatures who only sought comfort rather than progress. In the Bad Ending, after P-3/Sergey defeated Sechenov, Chariton betrays him and gets himself a new body with the intent to go out and mastermind the destruction of Humanity, intending to replace them with his Polymer-based creations which he believes will surpass Humanity in every way.
  • Evil vs. Evil: The conflict of "Annihilation Instinct" that Sergey has unfortunately found himself caught in. Zinaida, who wants Sergey dead for siding with Sechenov, is at war with NORA, who wants Sergey to herself. On a larger scale, as the exact specifics of Kollectiv 2.0 still haven't been revealed, this could apply to Zinaida's anti-Kollectiv faction fight against Sechenov.
  • The Evils of Free Will: Discussed.
    • When debating Filatova over Sechenov's plans potentially robbing all of humanity of their free will, Sergey will bitterly play Devil's Advocate and point out that preserving free will doesn't guarantee that people won't be scumbags. When Filatova calls Sergey a monster for ever thinking this way, he coldly agrees with her assessment.
    • During the "Annihilation Instinct" DLC, when it comes to restoring NORA to factory settings, she protests that doing so and erasing her nascent sentience is more or less akin to killing her for good, only for Sergey to angrily retort that not only was her conscience only the product of a saboteur, but she has only used it to be a psychopathically murderous Yandere.
  • Eye Scream: A melee animation against a more humanoid enemy has the player gouge their eyes out.
  • Fake Memories: Sergey has them, which is why he can't really remember much about his life prior to the operation where Sechenov saved his life. The incident and the loss of his wife were so traumatic he'd go on a rampage anytime he was reminded of them, and with how dangerous Sergey was with his new cybernetic enchancements, Sechenov decided that altering Sergey's mind to make him forget all about his previous life was safer than having him risk going on a rampage again.
  • Fembot: The Twins, two very shapely dancing robots. There are also the tereshkova models, which have the appearances of maids of sorts.
  • Fetch Quest: A common obstacle is the requirement to bring several objects into a hub area connecting them. P-3 quickly starts expressing his frustration over the ordeal.
  • Foreshadowing: The prologue has quite a lot.
    • Baba Zina possesses a concerning amount of knowledge on both Facility 3826 and how its robotic servants operate but prefers to present herself as just a weird old lady. Its later revealed that this is because Zina is actually a communications officer covertly embedded in Sechenov's chain of command so she can relay information directly to Nikita Khrushchev himself.
    • One of the first thing Sergey says is that the celebration in Tchelomeï reminds him of what he saw in China, and then not being wholly sure if he's actually been to China in the past. Char-les is also confused why P-3 claims he's never heard the Facility's tour guide narration if he's been there so many times before, alluding to the mind alteration Sechenov intentionally put him through.
    • P-3 has this weird obsession with Sechenov's twin bodyguards. Sergey eventually learns that this is because the AI of the Twins were created from the salvaged brain of his own wife.
    • After Sergey escapes the Vavilov complex, he and the player catch a live feed of Sechenov meeting with Politburo member Molotov, who insists that the incident must be kept under wraps and resolved quickly. Notably, Molotov doesn't seem very surprised that the robots are capable of turning hostile, rather focusing on the fact that the United States might learn about it. That's because operation Atomic Heart is an idea of the Politburo and hinges on the robots being effective fighters to be able to cripple the United States. Char-LES explicitly comments on this in the endgame, noting that Molotov's wording of "the robots switching to combat mode" means that it was planned from the start. Moreover, that an old grandma like Zina is able to watch such an important conversation occuring is another hint that she's more than what she seems.
    • Near the end of the game, at the clinic, P-3 can have a conversation with a dead man who is certain Chariton Zakharov is still alive. Having worked with Zakharov as an assistant before his supposed death, the man was familiar with his writing quirks, and found hints of them in documents drafted even after Chariton's disappearance. He's right.
  • Genki Girl: Katya seems to be very enthusiastic at everything she does.
  • Genre Throwback: Interestingly enough, once you get past the setting, the game has a lot in common with classic American sci-fi movies of the Red Scare period. A war vet taking on hordes of killer robots while portraying the Soviet Union as a False Utopia that plants sleeper agents to destroy the US and wants to turn humanity into a Hive Mind would feel most at home there.
  • Good Old Fisticuffs: Most of the humanoid robots attack through a series of punches and kicks, and they are actually pretty good at it as well, with acrobatic, if over-choreographed movements.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!:
    • While Sergey is not adverse to normal swears, he's extremely fond of using "crispy critters" as a catch-all term for the messes he encounters. A terminal near the end of the game reveals that he once suffered such horrific burns that the rescuers referred to him as "a crispy critter", and his damaged brain picked up the words while he was on the operating table.
    • Averted in the Russian voiceover. He uses the phrase "Ебучие пироги"translation.
  • Gunship Rescue: Done by Baba Zina once you enter the open world for the first time. P-3 is ambushed by a Belyash (worthy of being a lategame boss), which is promptly fried by the landing jets of her house.
  • Hacking Minigame: Several are present in the game, and the lore takes time to justify their existence. One in-game exposition text has someone complain how easily even a child can hack the laser-based passive security relay, to which the responder points out that it is merely one part of a larger security network that would have noticed the hacking attempt and stopped it. At the same time, the ease of usage would allow facility staff to get through the system quickly in an emergency and its unusual design prevents the robots from using it in case they malfunction.
  • Have a Nice Death: Dying in-game will result in a short cartoon of a Young Pioneer character getting killed in the same manner as what just happened to you.
  • Helpful Hallucination: Tear, a floating blob of neuropolymer who is actually, P-3's wife, helps him resist his trips to Limbo. She reappears back in "Trapped in Limbo" DLC where she is happy to see his husband again.
  • High-Pressure Blood: The eye-gouging finishing move immediately produces two thick, gushing jets of blood.
  • Hollywood Silencer: The pistol wielded by the protagonist comes with a silencer, which cuts down on sound far more effectively than anything seen in real life.
  • Hyperspace Arsenal: Justified. P-3 has a special backpack which uses quantum singularity technology to shrink its contents, allowing him to carry a large number of weapons and consumables (even more so with the appropriate upgrades) as well as a near-infinite amount of crafting material.
  • Hypocritical Humor: In one of the Pioneer cartoons, we get this gem: "Violence is not the Soviet way. Kill all violent people, kill them today!"
  • Intercom Villainy: While P-3 is hunting Petrov inside the Maya Plisetskaya Theater, Petrov uses the intercom to taunt him and boast about how he knows the theater inside and out.
  • Interface Spoiler: The very first desktop workstation you can find has a database of all Facility employees most of which have fun little worldbuilding notes in their entries and a retraux photo. Only two employees have a poorly photoshopped 3D model instead, one you already know to be Sechenov's right hand man, and the other has a black mark on her file for being romantically involved with the guy that is being blamed for the robot uprising. Guess who you meet ten minutes later and who adamantly refuses to tell you her name?
  • I Owe You My Life: P-3 shows great loyalty and trust to his superior Dmitry Sechenov on account of him having personally saved his life on the operating table.
  • Job-Stealing Robot: While in the USSR the invention of Neuropolymer has allowed the populous to live in pampered luxury, in capitalist nations where the robots are exported to they have instead become this trope, with the United States specifically being described as suffering from record high unemployment.
  • Last Chance Hit Point: NORA's Kiss, the very first character upgrade you obtain, gives P-3 the ability to survive lethal damage with one point of health, with a cooldown before it can be triggered again. Immediately after getting it you're made to test it against an otherwise impassable laser wall.
  • A Lighter Shade of Black: The less dour of the two possible endings requires you to side with Sechenov against Chariton, despite it coming to light that Sechenov plans to place all of mankind into a massive Hive Mind to achieve his goal of elevating humanity, on account of Chariton planning to instead cause the downfall of human civilization.
  • Light Is Not Good: As Sechenov explains, even as a kid he was disturbed by brightly illustrated books for children because he felt that they never depicted reality. He was rather appealed by science, because he felt that it gave him an actual way to deal with reality the way it is instead of an illusion of a harmless one. He associates light with deception.
  • Magic from Technology: While non-scientific applications of these technologies are heavily frowned upon, some people do treat it as something magical, and your glove abilities sure do look like spells. Baba Zina even styles herself after Baba Yaga using the advanced tech at her disposal.
  • Majorly Awesome: The protagonist of the game is Sergey Nechayev, (AKA P-3), who holds the military rank of Major.
  • Mental World: Limbo, a surreal world that P-3 enters during his periodic blackouts which manifests various memories from his past, including his time in the war and being taken under Sechenov's wing. It's revealed at the end that Limbo is what he perceives whenever he's being manipulated through the Voshkod polymer in his brain into killing people, and Char-LES, who's actually Voshkod inventor Chariton Zakharov, was doing all the manipulation.
  • Multiple Endings: Two of them depending on whether you decide to pursue Sechenov.
    • Refuse: Sergey rips Chariton out of his glove and stomps out of the facility, allowing the Kollektiv 2.0 program to continue unimpeded.
    • Pursue: Sergey battles Left and Right to get to Sechenov only to be betrayed by Chariton who fries his mind and creates a new body for himself. The reborn scientist kills Sechenov and flees the complex to plot the downfall of humanity. However, Sergey winds up back in Limbo and is seemingly reunited with Katya who appears to have taken the amalgamated form of Right and Left.
  • Off with His Head!:
    • Petrov gets decapitated by by a forklift bot in the Vavilov Complex early in the story but he survives since Filatova is able to reattach his head,... except the Annihilation Instinct DLC has NORA reveal that he "just" had Filatova removes his tracking implant and set it on a headless corpse.
    • Later he willingly decapitates himself to avoid capture after P-3 corners him in the Maya Plisetskaya theater.
  • Omnidisciplinary Scientist:
    • Played straight for Sechenov, who is singlehandedly responsible for the invention of Neuropolymer and has had a hand in all of its applications, and is a One-Man Industrial Revolution.
    • An aversion to this is why P-3 actually believes Petrov's claims that the robots were deliberately created combat-capable. While Sergey notes that Petrov could absolutely be responsible for the robots turning hostiles, he notes that the man is "a whuss" and only a programmer, and would neither have the fighting knowledge to make robots good combatants nor the engineering know-how to install actual weaponry on them, both of which P-3 has repeatedly seen the robot possess.
  • One-Man Industrial Revolution: Sechenov invented Neuropolymer in 1936 and has spent the intervening 19 years improving upon his designs. Thanks to him, the USSR has access to robots, an internet equivalent, neural uplink technology, flying cities, energy weapons, and so much more.
  • Optional Stealth: Important early on before you have the tools to deal with robots. Thankfully, all your upgrades improve combat efficiency.
  • Plant Mooks: Some of the enemies the player will be facing are hostile mobile flora called Sporuts, having somehow hijacked and mutated humans into vessels to move around and attack others, and could even spit acid/poison. While Polymer-based genetic engineering is seemingly responsible, it's implied from some of the text that somehow the Lunar soil which they are growing and experimenting with the plants in (for space colonization purposes) may have something to do with their unusual and dangerous abilities and behavior.
  • Point of No Return: Several are present throughout the game, most of which are explicitly marked with a dialogue prompt which allows you to put off moving to the next area and pick up any collectibles you missed. Going to meet with Filatova after leaving the Pavlov Complex, which forfeits your ability to explore the open world and Polygon testing grounds for the rest of your playthrough, is less obvious as it's marked solely by a one-way drop leading to the Dewdrop boss fight, but you can simply load an earlier save or select "Return to Facility 3826" in the main menu after completing the game if you want to go back.
  • Power-Up Food: P-3 can consume certain food items to temporarily boost his stats. Condensed milk increases his damage output, while vodka reduces the amount of damage he takes.
  • Press X to Not Die: Timed and/or rapid button presses are required to pull off stealth takedowns or break free from an enemy's grasp. The fight against the Twins opens up with several of these as well.
  • Reverse Arm-Fold: Whenever Left and Right appear, they hold their arms behind their backs with one of their legs dipped as a default posture, echoing their ballerina design. Once they become enemies, their poses become more active and aggressive.
  • Robosexual: Sergey and Charles have a brief conversation where powerful lobbying groups are working to get this fetish legalized. So, no, the robotic ballerinas at the theater aren't just ballerinas.
  • Rocket Jump: The primary method of locomotion of one of the enemies - a small, vaguely duck-shaped walking tank equipped with a rocket launcher.
  • Route Boss: Left and Right are only fought if Sergey chooses to pursue Sechenov. Otherwise, the game ends with Dewdrop being the last boss fought.
  • Scenic-Tour Level: The opening 20-30 minutes of the game has P-3 touring the facility on the day of the grand debut of Kollectiv 2.0 showing it and the Soviet Superscience they developed at its peak, with no enemies nor danger. And then everything goes horribly wrong.
  • Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: The "Refuse" ending has Sergey ripping Chariton out of his glove and stomping out of the facility, absolutely done with being manipulated by everyone.
  • Sequel Hook:
    • "Annihilation Instinct"' ends with Sergey flying away on a plane for a well-deserved leave after all he went through... And Granny Zina's flying house pursuing his plane, the old woman dead set on getting her revenge on him.
    • "Trapped in Limbo" ends with Sergey emerging from Limbo back into his body, before approaching Right, and promising to Katya he is going to find the rings that will allow them to be together again.
  • Sheathe Your Sword: Rafik robots aren't necessarily the most difficult enemies to face, but they can be troublesome in a group. That said, they are completely optional enemies. They can just go about their business as long as you don't attack them, unless you are in need of crafting materials, and are not plot-driven.
  • Shout-Out:
    • In the prologue, walking down a side lane before the memorial leads you to a discussion between two young men courting the same young lady regarding a giant head of Lenin. The lady in question is named after and speaks in the same manner as Ellochka from The Twelve Chairs.
    • The first look at Baba Zina the player gets is in the boat ride at the very start of the game as she helps a robot wrangler get his charges under control. She asks him for the access code to the control unit, and it is 0451, continuing the fine tradition of immersive sims like System Shock and its successors in using it as the first numerical key code the player encounters in the game.
    • The timed locks you open by snapping your fingers have the face of the robo-hare from Nu, Pogodi! above the timer. Given that most televisions in the game show random episodes of the cartoon, you probably will have seen the one featuring him in the Prologue already (the episode is from 1984 by the way).
    • When P-3 reaches the underwater lab of Neptune, he exclaims:
      So that's Neptune, huh? Looks nice... actually, it looks amazing! A rapture! I wouldn't mind spending some time there myself...
    • When P-3 and Charles debate about the ethics of Soviet party officials and Sechenov having special administrator privileges in Kollektiv 2.0 despite the system theoretically making everybody equal, Charles snidely remarks that Sechenov and the Soviet government will simply be more equal than others.
    • Black VOV-A6's running posture once it spots you greatly resembles the T-1000's relentless chase.
    • A demolished monument above the Theater bears a great resemblance to the Death Star.
    • Char-LES' loadscreen advice:
    • "Hedgie" HOG-7 is an extremely agile robot that rolls into a ball and spins in place to accelerate.
    • In the hospital that serves as the entrance to the Pavlov complex you can find a dead German doctor which is identified in some in-game mails as the genius diagnostician G. Haus. Other mails show a conversation between him and his beleaguered underling E. Furman.
    • The quest for obtaining one of the canisters you need to power the Birchtree and escape the Vavilov Complex is named "Chronos Trigger".
    • One of the terminal e-mails, from a disgruntled lab manager who's upset that some researchers are using the future prediction tech to listen to the Radio of the Future in their free time, ends with this remark:
      If anyone else comes here to save themselves a copy of the latest Billie Eilish song, I'll cut off access for a month.
  • Socially Scored Society: The Soviet Union in this continuity issues all of its people a "social rating". Good citizenship and hard work raise one's rating, while insubordination and misbehavior lower it, and those with a high enough rating are eligible for a host of perks. One Thought device-wearing corpse laments that she had to put in long hours at work just to get a sufficient rating to earn her device, and expresses jealousy that P-3 isn't subject to the system because he's a special agent.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: To those who grew up around these songs, the first few times fighting a horde of robots and zombies to the tune of Soviet pop or soft rock is bewildering. It quickly grows on you.
  • Space Whale Aesop: It doesn't start out as such however. The initial idea is the old adage absolute power corrupts absolutely and that people should be able to think for themselves and no have that choice taken away. Unless you realize that the AI in your hand is secretly a manipulator plotting the extinction of the human race, and rip him out. The freedom of choice there - ironically - leads to the plans to make collective lack of choice going unhindered.
    • Another possible message could be make the best possible choice, or else you may not get one in the future, unless you're sick of people trying to manipulate you, at which point, whether or not you know what is being done is unethical, you -ironically - decide to do run away and do nothing about it despite figuring things out and having the power to act.
    • At its most basic, and comparing the endings, the aesop is lack of free thought is bad, but if there is genuine good intention behind it, and free choice leads to something horrible, it's preferable than a disillusioned party that wants to harm everyone equally.
    • Perhaps equally as valid an aesop is building Utopia is impossible, because everyone has a different idea of what Utopia should be, and humans will always be humans, no matter how much technology we hide behind with it.
  • Spider Tank: HOG-7 "Hedgie" and Dewdrop are car-sized multi-limbed walking bots. HOG uses traditional jointed limbs, and Dewdrop is an amphibious Tentacled Terror.
  • Soviet Superscience: A major part of the game. Thanks to the invention of wonder material Polymer/Neuropolymer the Soviet Union made great advances in science and technology far surpassing anything in Real Life by the mid-1950s, particularly in the fields of applied robotics, material sciences, genetic engineering, power generation and even space travel. The game shows a highly advanced research complex with the technology at least two to three decades ahead of its time. Of course, it was only "super" up to a point it all went horribly wrong.
  • Super Not-Drowning Skills: Condensed Polymer is surprisingly breathable, so there is no risk of drowning when you're required to swim through it.
  • Superman Stays Out of Gotham: During "Annihilation Instinct", Sergey will frustratedly ask why he has to be the one to handle the current situation rather than the Argentum Squadron, and is told that they've been dispatched all over the world for the deployment of Khollektiv 2.0 and the Atomic Heart Project, so he's the only one who can do it. That and NORA is blocking communications with the outside world and shooting down any aircraft or vehicle that attempt to enter the area of the complex they're in, so P-3, who is already in place, is the only one who can resolve the problem.
  • Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids: According to developers, many of the robotic enemies the player faces weren’t originally intended to fulfill combat roles, and were instead (ironically for Soviet Russia) consumeristic civilian models intended for menial labor, utility, and even entertainment. Unfortunately, whatever has gone wrong has turned these mechanical helpers into hostile killers. However, as it turns out the robots were meant to be Killer Robots all along.
  • Take That!: In the VDNH, among the wonders of Soviet Super Science such as autonomous robots, advanced drilling machines, and planned Mars missions, one of the touted advancements is... a tape player with a built-in rewind function. This references Soviet economy's infamous inability to produce decent consumer goods.
  • Title Drop: The Atomic Heart Project is mentioned once the player leaves the Vavilov complex as being something that is heavily jeopardized by the current crisis, and that Sechenov must get it back on track by dealing with the robot uprising in a timely and discrete fashion. It's eventually revealed to be the planned defeat and takeover of the United States by having the robots exported there suddenly switch to their combat programming and cripple vital infrastructures, allowing for swift conquest.
  • Unobtainium: Neuropolymer is a programmable material that has allowed a technological revolution in pretty much every field under the sun, allowing the Soviet Union of the 1950's to far surpass the most advanced nations of the modern world, much less their own time.
  • Walking Head: One of the robot types is a round head on two stout legs...and with a buzzsaw placed halfway through the head.
  • Weirdness Magnet: P-3 frequently laments the bizarre, sometimes Kafkaesque scenarios he finds himself in, eventually declaring himself, "a magnet for annoying bullshit."
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist:
    • Dimitri Sechenov, from both his characterization, accusations by other characters and various other evidence, appears to be this if his Kollective 2.0 roll-out really is an Assimilation Plot to unify all Humankind into a hive-mind through Polymerization, granting them enlightenment and utopian comfort through instant knowledge and mental control over robots at the cost of undermining free will and putting them under Sechenov's control. Sechenov may actually mean it when he claims that he wanted to bring Humanity to the stars, even if his methods are highly questionable.
    • Both Petrov and Filatova claim to be this, after discovering the details of the Atomic Heart plan to take over the United States and the true nature of Kollektiv 2.0 suppressing free will. Their response is to try to sabotage as much of Sechenov's work as possible, and in Petrov's case, regardless of the casualties it will cause.
  • Yandere: Already an Abhorrent Admirer in the main game, NORA takes her obsession with Sergey to the absolute limit in "Annihilation Instinct", trapping him inside the Mendeleev Complex to have him all to herself.

 
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Neptune

After entering a lighthouse, P-3 finds the entrance to one of Facility 3826s' primary sites: Neptune. The musical cues with an ominous violin, and an underwater location that could only be publicly accessed by entering a Lighthouse certainly evokes The City of Rapture from Bioshock.

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