This article contains key plot details about Atomic Heart and its endings.
From itshyper-sexualised robot twinsto its bizarre writing and spectacular vision of a robotically advanced Soviet Union,Atomic Heartis a weird old game. So it kind of stands to reason that it would have weird endings too–the kind of endings that make you scratch your head and wonder what exactly it is you’ve just witnessed, andwhy.First, you might want toget the full picture on the rest of Atomic Heart’s storyup tothe ending, but once you’re caught up there then you’re in the right place.
Atomic Heart in fact has two endings, though rather than being described as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ endings it’d probably be more appropriate to call them ‘joke/good’ and ‘true/bad’ endings instead. Neither ending really gives proper closure, nor really makes us aware whether the grand schemes talked about throughout the game likeKollektiv 2.0andAtomic Heartcome to pass, but they do raise some interesting question about what the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ endings actually are.
Here we’re going to show you how to achieve Atomic Heart’s two endings and make some sense of them.
Unlike many games with multiple endings, Atomic Heart’s endings aren’t dictated by a web of decisions you make throughout the game. Instead, how your playthrough ends comes down to literally one dialogue decision right near the end of the game, when you speak toGranny Zinabefore you head into the final boss battle.
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The Joke (But Kind Of Good) Ending
This ending is achieved by selecting the first dialogue option (“I’m not laying a finger on Sechenov”) in your chat with Granny Zina before the final battle against the twins.
When you do this, P-3 will go on a massive rant about how he’s had enough of being used by everyone, tear the Char-les implant out of his hands, and basically run off into the sunset. You don’t have the final boss fight against the twins, you don’t confront Sechenov, and you do away with Char-les (which the other ending shows us may actually be a good idea).
We can probably assume from this that Sechenov’s Kollektiv 2.0 plan goes ahead, giving him an unfathomable amount of power (which he claims he wants to relinquish by destroying theAlpha Connector), and putting him in a position to execute theAtomic Heartplan, which involves selling robots to US companies, then activating their combat mode to destroy the country from the inside out. Of course, we don’t know if that actually goes ahead, because all that the narration here tells us is that P-3 basically leaves the facility and disappears.
In some ways, this is actually the ‘good’ ending. Finally thinking for himself, P-3 asks relevant questions like why Sechenov hasn’t used the implant in P-3’s head to put him in Limbo (seeing as P-3’s heading over to kill him), and points out that the mind-control implant capable of sending people into Limbo was Zakharov’s idea, implying that maybehe’sthe real villain here.
It’s only by achieving the other ending that we realise just how right P-3 was in his suspicions…
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Choose the 2nd dialogue option with Granny Zina (“Whatever, lady… why don’t you show me…”), and you’ll proceed to the final battle against the twins. Get past that, and you get to experience the other ending of the game. Brace yourself, because it ain’t pretty.
In this ending, an angry P-3, believing that Sechenov had been manipulating him all this time, shoots Sechenov in the stomach. The moment this happens, Sechenov tells P-3 that it’s in fact his hand-implanted sidekick Char-les who had been manipulating him, even causing him to go into a ‘Limbo’ state (those surreal dream sequences you experience in the game) during which time P-3 unknowingly killed Molotov and his men, as well as Doctor Larisa.
(We learn a little earlier that Char-les is in fact the preserved consciousness of Chariton Zakharov, the supposedly “misanthropic” scientist who worked alongside Sechenov on the Polymer research. It seems that Sechenov killed Zakharov, then placed his consciousness into the implant in P-3’s hand to ‘help him carry out his mission.’ Why Sechenov would put Zakharov–or Char-les–in such a position of power when the latter clearly has motive to want him dead is beyond us).
Nevertheless, with Sechenov bleeding out, Char-les send an electrical current through P-3, disabling him. Char-les then escapes his hand implant in the form of a blob of polymeric goo. He crawls into the nearby vat ofRed Polymer, which can be used to create new life forms by absorbing existing ones, and emerges in a humanoid shape of red polymer. Chariton then kills Sechenov, and sends P-3 back into Limbo, where he’s reunited with what looks like one of the robotic twins, but most likely represents P-3’s deceased wife Katya.
We then get a voiceover outro saying that the “neuro-polymer object” consumed Sechenov, and that there’s no trace of either Sechenov, Chariton, or P3. We have no idea if Chariton activates Kollektiv, or the Atomic Heart program, though given his invention of the mind-controlling implants and general disdain for humanity, it seems reasonable to assume that he’ll attempt to go ahead and use Kollektiv to seize control of humanity.Howhe plans to do this, considering he’s a rather suspicious-looking giant human-shaped goo blob, is anyone’s guess.
So what does it all mean? Well, clearly that ending reframes just about everything your supposed sidekick Char-les was telling you throughout the whole game. It makes you question whether Sechenovreallywanted to control humanity, or if that was just what Chariton/Charleswantedyou to think. After all, it’s almost certainly Char-les who kept sending you into murderous Limbo blackouts, and it was he who invented the mind-control aspect of the neural implants.
Beyond what Char-les told us (which we now know we can’t trust), Sechenov’s goals with Kollektiv 2.0were to a) give humans more direct control over robots and b) To carry out the Atomic Heart plan and use robots to destroy America. In the context of the story, those are kind of reasonable aims.
Yes, Sechenov did wrong by P-3 by hooking him up to the Zakharov’s Voshkod implant in the first place (not to mention the weird fact that Sechenov uploaded P-3’s dead wife’s martial arts and ballet skills into his pair of robot guardians), but those aren’t exactly smoking guns for plans of world domination. Neither Sechenov nor Zakharov are good people, but the former seems like the lesser of two evils, and opting for the ending where P-3 just walks away from it all is implicitly supporting him.
But, again, we come back to the fact that Atomic Heart is a weird game, and neither of its endings really tell us whether the schemes of Sechenov (in the ‘Joke/Good’ ending) or Zakharov (in the ‘Main/Bad’ ending) come to pass. Maybe there are other hints hiding in the game that could reveal more information about everyone’s true intentions, at which point we’ll update this article, but for now it seems that developer Mundfish wants to keep those endings at least a bit ambiguous–keeping us in the dark like the game’s hero.
