There’s a new trailer out for Atomic Heart, the fantastical FPS game that blends a Soviet-style retro-future with the exploration and combat of the Bioshock series. In it, we get our first look at the game’s protagonist – he’s a bearded fellow in overalls who seems to walk softly and carry a big stick.
The trailer is published on the Nvidia GeForce YouTube channel, which normally suggests a video highlighting specific hardware-enabled effects like DLSS and ray tracing. But this clip doesn’t really do any of that – instead, we get a decent look at our hero, who’s looking at himself in a mirror hanging on the wall of what appears to be a banquet area. Above, a massive marble sculpture of a ballerina hangs from the ceiling, and the upper terrace is patrolled by the barely conscious forms of workers whose bodies have apparently been inhabited by some plant-based zombie infection.
There’s some brief footage of combat in what looks like a flashback section – it’s all quite fast, but we get a look at a shotgun, as well as some kind of power that allows our hero to freeze an enemy by using a hand gesture. The music intensifies, and there’s an imperious-sounding voiceover in Russian playing throughout.
Here’s the clip:
We had YouTube translate the voiceover into English, but we can’t make out much in terms of what it all means – the machine translation can only do so much on the fly. There’s a mention of a ‘festive procession in honor of the launch’ to be held on Red Square and a ‘neural networks team’. The announcement also mentions June 12, which is the date of Russia Day, the Russian Federation’s national holiday.
Apart from the shot of the protagonist, there’s not a lot of new material in this trailer, and there’s no showcase of flashy ‘RTX On’ effects or a new boss fight. It’s simply more rough-and-tumble combat in a slightly surreal and strangely lavish environment that manages to exude a hefty amount of menace.
The Atomic Heart release date has not yet been announced, but you can wishlist it on Steam to get an alert when it becomes available.