Atomic Hearthas a slow start that weaves together on-rails cinematic set-pieces with generic gameplay, and ten hours or so in that slow start hasn’t gone away. One of the first unexpected features that doesn’t feel ripped out of a better game or copied verbatim from Triple-A 101 class is the way the game does upgrades. On a player level, you gather resources, add them to a machine, and then select which weapon or ability to tweak - we’ve seen all before that. What we haven’t seen is that this upgrade machine is an insatiable fridge of lust.
We’ve seen sex robots before. There’s nothing new under the sun, and all that. In Atomic Heart, you’ll find yourself thinking ‘oh, this is justBioShock’, ‘oh, this is just…well, it’s pretty much all BioShock’, but the upgrade fridge feels different. When you meet her, it’s exciting to come face to face with Atomic Heart’s first fresh idea.
Related:Why Are You Covering Atomic Heart When You Boycotted Hogwarts Legacy?
Unfortunately, as time goes on, that trick is repeated until it becomes stale, and Atomic Heart offers little else. It becomes like a washed up celebrity repeating old catchphrases from a show that’s gone off the air.
The only discussion of this fridge so far has been the claim that it’s proof the game isn’t ‘woke’ because otherwise there would never be a character like this. On the one hand, it feels like it’s ‘woke’ people who defend sex workers and push for sex positivity, while conservative art tends to be more repressed. On the other hand, I get it. When I wrote about Joel’s panic attacks inThe Last of Uslast week, I felt the need to get out in front of complaints thatmemeing on the shot of Pedro Pascalclutching his chestwould be taken as insensitive.
But sometimes we make up these monsters in our head - I don’t think the fridge is particularly woke or not woke, and the fact some are desperate to claim it as a victory over wokery reveals the deeper problem. Video games trail onlyMarvelmovies as the most sexless form of modern media. We’ve eliminated the misogynist and objectifying lens of the ‘90s, and have replaced it with nothing.Aside from The Last of Us Part 2, video games feel bereft of sex- even then, many proved too immature to cope with video games tackling sex in a direct and intimate fashion.
I’ve long said that, much like in music, the route back to video games being comfortable with sex may be through raunchy characters reclaiming their sexuality. Iused the example of Juliet Starling when the Lollipop Chainsaw remake was announced, as well asSaints Row’sKinzie Kensington, but the upgrade fridge fits the mould too. The only problem is it’s difficult for a fridge to reclaim agency - it is, by definition, an object. It has the exact personality gaming needs more of, but it can’t do anything with it.
This means it’s easy for the fridge to be thought of as less of a character - it’s not a person, and that’s going to place distance for some players - and as more of a joke. It’s not a woman reclaiming her sexuality, it’s a punchline. The longer you play the game, the more you start to realise that’s the intention. While the male robots are identical and nondescript, they at least have faces. They also have pretty standard bodies, slim but uninteresting. The female robots however are faceless and come with cartoonish proportions on their hips and busts.
We’re used to phallic design in architecture, something psychological about men trying to erect the biggest tower. In Atomic Heart, so much of the design is yonic, a word I just looked up, which means ‘designed to look like a vagina’. However, it feels less like a deliberate inversion of female empowerment and more objectification, a world of pleasure designed of female sex organs, where men have endless titillation at their fingertips.
As we come back to the fridge, the longer the game goes on, the more it feels part of the same old joke. Any challenge it offers to the status quo, any ‘woke’ sex positivity is all an accident. The upgrade fridge is exactly the kind of character we need in gaming, but perhaps one created for exactly the wrong reasons.
Next:Atomic Heart And The Problem With Keeping Politics Out Of Gaming
