When it doesn’t, though, the gap between what Atomic Heart gets right and what it gets wrong looks wider than Russia itself. Like I say, it’s ambitious, and a lot of the time it all works quite well. Horror turns to open-ended action, which turns to puzzling, which turns to corridor shooting, which turns to psychological drama, and so on.

But there’s more than a hint of Half-Life 2 here as well, in the way that Atomic Heart gives each chapter a certain flavour before dropping it and moving on to the next. The stonking spectacle of Facility 3826, as the mountainous base is known, is a match for some of the best views throughout Rapture and Columbia, and the first few hours in particular lean into a similar survival horror feel to the original BioShock’s early stages. This one’s suffering from a combined robot uprising/zombifying plantlife outbreak that the brass would rather keep quiet, and they’ve deemed one bloke with some guns, improvised melee weapons and Plasmid-like glove powers enough to quell it. After a gorgeous intro aboard a flying city, the first of many BioShock series influences, irritable special agent P-3 (that’s you) and his snarking AI-powered glove (that’s your hand) are deposited into one of the massive science complexes that made this USSR even more of powerhouse than it was in reality.

It’s the debut game of just one, Mundfish, and as a first attempt it’s impressively ambitious. Of course, Atomic Heart was not made by several teams.

For a shooter set within an alternate history Soviet Union, it could perhaps have used some more central planning. It’s a fascinatingly chaotic medley of ideas, and a rare FPS that lacks even the slightest whiff of battle pass-peddling live serfdom, but those ideas so often fail to gel that it can feel like a game made by several different dev teams. I’ve played a lot of strange games, but never one that lurches between greatness and bafflement as hard or as fast as Atomic Heart. A Soviet sci-fi adventure with arresting visuals and occasionally excellent shooting, marred by uneven balancing, undercooked ideas, and an unlikeable protagonist.

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