Atomic Heart, the mysterious first-person shooter from developer Mundfish that's vaguely reminiscent of BioShock (in a good way), has cheekily revealed its release window. At the end of the new trailer (watch it above), the release window is revealed to be sometime in the final four months of 2022, as the trailer reveals "#######ber 2022," thus narrowing it to September, October, November, or December (and perhaps giving the Mundfish team some wiggle room if they're aiming for one of those earlier "-mber" months and end up needing to polish the game a bit longer). Whenever it drops, Atomic Heart will be available on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox One.
We also asked a few questions of the Russia-based Mundfish team via email.
IGN: How did Atomic Heart begin? It has been such a pleasant surprise, and Mundfish (respectfully) is not yet a name that most gamers already know.
Mundfish: The project began in early 2017. Back then, we wanted to test the waters of the VR market, started with a small project, and released it. But as the studio grew, the ambitions have also gone bigger. A year after, we realized that we had gathered an extremely talented team that was brought together by a single idea – to create a big, awesome, story-driven game. That's how it all started. When the first trailer in 2018 has gone viral, we finally understood that we have something truly special on our hands, which motivated us to give it all to this project.
IGN: What have been your inspirations for Atomic Heart? It seems to remind many folks of BioShock (in a very good way).
Mundfish: First of all, we've drawn inspiration from the Soviet sci-fi and the space discovery era in the USSR. Stanislaw Lem, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, science fiction magazine 'Tekhnika Molodezhi' – the '50s–'60s era – it is the golden age in science, arts, architecture. We at Mundfish are huge fans of science fiction and we wanted to show this world in such a way that you would start wondering – this could all turn out to be true if the history went in a different direction. If all these Soviet robots were really created in the 50s, all the technology that resembles the early Internet – this could be interesting if one of the key global superpowers pulled ahead instead of the other during the Cold War. 'Atomic Heart' has several meanings, and it's not only the machine core. It's not only about the scientific leap. It's also about the competition between the USSR and the United States at that time. But we won't say anything more than that for now!
IGN: What performance levels are you targeting on the PS5 and Xbox Series X?
Mundfish: Atomic Heart is an action-packed, dynamic shooter — so we're targeting Dynamic 4K for current-gen. This is the way the game is meant to be played.
IGN: Will Atomic Heart support ray-tracing on PC and/or the new consoles?
Mundfish: We're working on implementing ray-tracing on as many platforms as possible.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.