Atomic Heart

Intense overall intensity
Highest flag: Violence — graphic & gore
RPGSci-fiShooter

What's in it

Violence graphic & gore
High

First-person shooting and melee combat against robots and reanimated human-corpse mutants, with blood spray and heavy impact; combat is frequent and intense.

Language strong
High

Frequent strong profanity from the protagonist and other characters throughout dialogue.

Dark themes intense
Moderate

Themes include mass death, betrayal, forced human experimentation, and a mind-control conspiracy, with corpses reanimated into monsters.

Horror & psychological frightening
Moderate

Body-horror mutants, dark laboratory settings, and sudden ambushes create frightening, tense encounters.

Suicide & self-harm depicted
Moderate

A key character shoots and kills himself on-screen in front of the player.

Mutilation / body horror depicted
Moderate

Mutant and corpse enemies are visibly torn apart and dismembered during gory melee kills.

Sexual content innuendo
Moderate

An upgrade-station AI named NORA delivers overtly sexual, moaning innuendo, and dialogue throughout the game is laced with crude sexual remarks.

Nudity revealing/suggestive attire
Low

Robotic 'Ballerina Twin' enemies and other automatons appear as unclothed, doll-like nude figures.

Substances referenced
Low

Alcohol and Soviet-era intoxicants are referenced in the world and dialogue.

Torture referenced
Low

Audio logs and environmental storytelling reference cruel medical and neuro-experiments performed on facility staff.

Who can reach your kid

What it is

Atomic Heart is a single-player first-person shooter set in an alternate-history 1950s Soviet Union where an advanced robotics facility collapses into a machine uprising. You fight through robots and mutated human corpses using firearms, energy weapons, brutal melee, and a power-granting glove, exploring a retrofuturistic world full of puzzles and upgrades. Expect graphic, bloody combat with dismemberment, frightening body-horror creatures, frequent strong profanity, and overtly sexual dialogue (notably a flirtatious, moaning refrigerator character) alongside sexualized robot designs. The story deals with mass death, human experimentation, and an on-screen suicide. There are no microtransactions and no online interaction.

How it's framed

The game frames its violence as survival against rogue machines and grotesque experiments, using dark satire and camp humor (including the sexualized robots and lewd appliance dialogue) to offset a grim story about state control, exploitation, and the human cost of the facility's ambitions. Disturbing content is presented matter-of-factly through environments and audio logs rather than dwelt on for shock alone.

Details

Developer
Mundfish
Publisher
Focus Entertainment
Released
2023-02-21
Metacritic 75critic score (third-party) · out of 100

Similar games

We built this because we needed it

Balanced Play pools your kids' game time into one budget across Steam, Switch, PlayStation, Xbox and more. We're taking 100 founding families — free for life.

Claim a founding spot →

Free for life for the first 100. No card, no spam.