Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
“The utopian dream, is not what it seems.”
Atomic Heart is a glimpse into a world where the USSR became the world's foremost superpower through scientific and technological power, and it's as dystopian as the game's tagline to the right implies.- 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: these include the creation of Plyusch, keeping a whale alive while replacing its nervous system with neuropolymer, and the amount of human experimentation that Sechenov and the scientists of the facility did on innocent people, all for those scientific achievements they are so proud of.
- The USSR are also no strangers to manipulating their populace through propaganda and keeping them in line using a very unfair social point system, which is completely rigged so that a few people selected by the government can rise in power - and if someone breaks one of their laws, they will be taken prisoner and brutally abused beyond reason. Their plan is to conquer the world with Sechenov’s robots as a Trojan Horse strategy.
- Each death is accompanied by an animation of Pioneer Boy dying in the same way - 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 an actual human brain instead of a conventional CPU. Just what were the engineers thinking when they designed the Rafik robot? And where did they even get that brain? Political prisoners? Convicts?
- When Filatova asks Sergey where he got his implants, a black VOV-A6 suddenly bursts through the door before he can answer and fires lasers at everyone in the room, cutting a poor guy who attempted to escape in half. When Sergey tries to run from it, the robot grabs him by the neck and opens its face, revealing its internal endoskeleton before throwing him to another room and initiating a boss fight.
- The meeting with Zinaida is a very scary moment: while P-3 inspects a toilet, a Vova robot ambushes him and nearly chokes him to death, and he is only saved by Granny Zina’s intervention... and then a Pchela with a Dandelion CCTV camera spots them, alerting multiple other drones to their position, 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 victims of sexual harassment, being a sex-obssesed A.I. inside of a fridge-shaped weapons station that has been killing people using her weapons-upgrading skills as a lure for her own amusement. She is introduced singing a creepy lullaby and dragging someone to his death, and wastes no time trying to strangle Sergey and kill him too, nearly succeeding had it not been for Charles.
- In the Annhilation Instinct DLC, NORA takes control of an entire complex whose shields are impenetrable by anything minus Granny Zina’s super house, and hacks several robots to kill anyone who dares to enter. Her goal? Just to be with her Sergey, which he doesn’t reciprocate at all. When the major attempts to restore her system, NORA decides that she values herself more than Sergey and attempts to kill him with a vortex - this is only thwarted by to the Twins appearing at the last moment, allowing Sergey to reboot her back to normal and erase any remnants of her personality, turning her into a mindless machine.
- The sprouts are certainly stuff that came out of a bioengineer’s nightmare. They're plant-and-animal-tissue hybrids grown in lunar soil that come to life and infect people, turning them into mindless beasts that seek out your blood, and are the result of a failed attempt by the Soviets to create an alternate sustainable source of food.
- Another similar monstrosity is a huge tree with eyes on its branches, which was apparently the result of attempts to create pest-proof plants - it became violent, enough that the only scientist guarding it is clearly scared shitless. When Sergey follows the scientist's instructions and retrieves a special polymer to tranquilize the beast with, an explosion occurs that attracts the aforementioned sprouts and turns the scientist into a mutant, forcing P-3 to put him down.
- Yet another of the many abhorrent experiments of Facility 3826 is Plyusch: the brain of a dog installed inside of an artificial-polymer muscle exosuit, which behaves like a rabid dog and attacks Sergey just like one. One of the death animations shows Plyusch eating the player character whole.
- Dewdrop is a Meat-Sack Robot that uses a neuropolymer CPU to function, and can also turn the neuropolymer into tentacles to attack with, giving it a bloody appearance.
- The Alter Net, or Limbo, is Uncanny Valley at its finest, with the vibes of a children's book gone wrong - fittingly, it's a mental world that Sechenov created to brainwash and trap all humans inside Kollectiv 2.0, allowing him to control their bodies and become the new master of humankind, with the supposed aim of leading humanity to a new era of prosperity and science.
- As Sechenov himself reveals, Limbo is based off his childhood fears, with the aesthetic deliberately reminiscent of children's books that he read as a child: Sechenov believes they created a false world that he only escaped by learning science from the books in his father’s library.
- Filatova demonstrates the level of control Sechenov can have over the denizens of Limbo, showing P-3 the hundreds of cages with people inside hidden within an underwater facility called Neptune - when she commands them to jump, they all do so in a frenzied manner that is enough to horrify P-3 and convince him to aid her and Petrov.
- The Twins are incredibly beautiful robots with featureless faces that act as Sechenov’s bodyguards, and while they don’t seem much of a threat and just follow him around, they are emotionless death machines with a mastery of martial arts and a lot of weaponry: slashing claws that extend from their fingertips; a retractable horn inside the red star on their forehead that shoots powerful laser beams; electrified whips that can be released from their palms and used to throw victims around, the ability to electrify their bodies and create shockwaves, and even abilities similar to Dewdrop that let them create deadly balls of fiery neuropolymer to crush targets. The "Annihilation Instinct" DLC confirms that the Twins are strong enough to massacre an entire army.
- Sechenov created the Twins using the remains of P-3’s wife, Ekaterina Nechayev, after retrieving them from the site of the accident in World War II Bulgaria that fatally wounded her and grievously injured Sergey. To preserve Katya’s dancing and fighting skills, Sechenov separated the hemispheres of her brain and combined them each with neuropolymer before placing them in the two robots - and both halves are well aware of their current state, as confirmed by Blesna (the consciousness of Katya trapped in Limbo). Charles also confirms this, and at another point indicates that the Twins can alter themselves for sexual recreation. '''Fucking hell.'''
- The endgame of the Atomic Heart project is to export the USSR's worker robots globally, then engineer a mass robot uprising in order to facilitate world domination - and P-3 is perfectly fine with this.
- Charles's betrayal of P-3 can be quite the shocking moment: the Virtual Sidekick traps him in Limbo, obtains a black neuropolymer body and kills Sechenov, revealing his misanthropic aim to destroy all of humanity - and that's how the story ends... at least, until the Escape from Limbo DLC.
- The MD4-5 dummy robots are incredibly uncanny and reminiscent of oversized Pinnochios.
