Right now Atomic Heart is a kind of bigfoot in the gaming community. After an initial reveal that captured the collective imagination of the internet in 2018, we’ve seen very little of the game with new glimpses popping up now and again in the corner of our eyes.

Thankfully we’ve been drip fed slightly more from developer MundFish who has uploaded an interview with a member of the dev team in Richard Gray, sometimes known as “Levelord” for his work on Duke Nukem 3D and Quake.

Unfortunately, despite the interview being 17 minutes long, relatively little about Atomic Heart is revealed. If you’re interested in Gray and how he came to be involved with the project, then it’s a fun watch, however, and we’ll get to that in a second.

What we do get to see and learn of the game is mostly behind the scenes and development stuff. If you like seeing unfinished assets worked on by a dev in an over the shoulder view, well there’s a lot of that here mixed in with stuff like motion and sound capture.

Gray also speaks a lot about the various technology that is used in the game but none of it is particularly special as most of it is industry standard at this point. Gray makes mention of these things as he has not been involved in game development for more than a decade, so much of it is new to him.

As is stated near the beginning of the interview, so impressive was the aforementioned trailer that Gray was convinced to get back into game development after being away for so long. Sure, that’s yet another notch on the belt of that fantastic trailer, but we’re again wanting more information.

Gray does talk about parts of the game he has played, commenting on the Soviet robots that go bad and the “good” feel of the melee weapons used in combat.

The uniqueness and the strangeness of the story is touched on but nothing besides those two objectives.

And, well, that’s it really. You can watch the full trailer embedded below for an extrapolation of what we’ve written above, but there’s not much else.

Overall this is just very strange. We’re still not entirely sure what Gray’s role on the game is, if any (though he does mention “spokesperson” at one stage) but he then says that he has pre-ordered the game at the end of the interview. We have to imagine anyone involved with the game officially gets a copy, or maybe that remark is just to subtly suggest that viewers pre-order too?

With said pre-orders already open and a beta pencilled in for this year, we’re fast approaching the time when the mystery and mystique around Atomic Heart will be revealed. We can only hope that the actual game can live up to the much lauded trailers.