Mar 1, 2024
Atomic Heart - Nick_Mundfish
CREATING: LIMBO
The story of making a world where everything started Hi, everyone!
Although the world of Atomic Heart as a whole is full of mysteries, encouraging our players to ask new questions and create new fan theories, Limbo remains the most mysterious part of it.
With the release of our 2nd story DLC Atomic Heart: Trapped In Limbo, the twisted world created by visionary Artem ‘Artep’ Galeev has opened its veil of secrets even more.
But to better understand this world, we decided to trace back its origins and share the backstory behind the concept that started the Atomic Heart universe.
In the late 90s, Artem became fascinated with creating a world of the unconscious, a world of fairy tales—an alternative to technocracy. This was purely a passion project he pursued in parallel with his primary work. That's why the first concept was finally formed only in 2004-2006. And the working title for it was "Varoli’s Bridge".
The main protagonists of this world were the heroine Belka, dressed in a white fur coat with a tail, and the already well-known hero—Newton.
They traveled through a surreal world filled with towns, and villages populated by various marvelous characters. Each of these places had a different economic, political, and social structure.
The protagonists' goal was to reach the lighthouse, the Varoli’s Bridge, to find the way out of the world.
But the inhabitants enthralled the heroes with the vicissitudes of their destinies, involving and twisting their path into dead-ends and strands of endless adventures.
The world map looked like the divisions of the cortex and brainstem. The very name "Varoli’s Bridge" is a section of the brain passing through the middle of its hemispheres:
It symbolizes the social unconscious—the part of the brain where everyone is all the same in their functional abilities. This whole world was full of profound themes and ideas. Even the images of the main characters dressed in white fur coats represent the perfectionism and deification of man’s essence and the unrestrained attempt of society to bring itself to the ideal and to rise above nature.
But with the concept's further development, it became clear that it was getting too complex and the ideas it contained would be more difficult to convey in simple terms while retaining the original meaning.
So at this point, it was necessary to go back to the origins of world creation and focus on technology and science as a prologue to Limbo, which, by then, had already got its famous name. Thus, all Limbo characters were moved to a more familiar alternative real world.
For example, Sechenov was created based on Mr. Sponger's character, who lived in a sponge in the Limbo world. The current image of Granny Zina was created based on the fact that back then, in the world of Limbo, she originally had supernatural powers and personified matriarchy. And there are many similar examples!
But it wasn't just Limbo's characters who were able to find their place in the new environment—the world structure of Limbo with its political and social specifics was embodied in Facility 3826.
As Artem mentioned in his last interview on the PCGamesN portal:
“To us, everything in the world of Limbo may seem absurd, and to the inhabitants of Limbo, our real world also seems absurd. Everything became interconnected—worlds are spliced together like a DNA helix”.
Also, one of the most common questions about Limbo's visual identity is about the meaning of the polka dot pattern. Actually, it’s one of the natural fractals that can be found in cellular structure, bee honeycomb, matrix, etc. This pattern was chosen to highlight objects in Limbo that emerged from the natural world. This way, they attract the attention of insects and animals in order to be eaten for the sake of reproduction and increasing the population.
(photo by Mik Bromley)
With the release of Trapped In Limbo, our second story DLC, some players were surprised by this variation of this world. Considering all of the above, it’s the same place but a different part of it, and now it’s much easier to spot some connections: sugar carbohydrates, calories, cold fusion for energy, a jellyfish-shaped turbojet engine, bacteria, eating carbohydrates from which houses are made, and much more.
There’s also another direct quote from Artem from the last interview that is worth mentioning:
“Since the world of Limbo is strikingly different from the real world, the gameplay, its mechanics, and the overall mood are also different now. These unconventional mechanics were specifically chosen to blow minds”.
Get DLC#2 here
The music and soundscapes of Atomic Heart's world are completely different as well and have a bigger story behind them that we may be sharing in the future.
But Geoffrey Day, one of our talented music composers and a lovely human being decided to share a sneak peek. Just recently he posted a video detailing the creation process behind the “Cookie Crumbler”—one of the tracks from the Trapped In Limbo DLC#2 and OST VOL.4 as well:
Limbo is the source of the entire Atomic Heart’s universe. And it’s almost like a gift box from which new surprising details of the setting emerge each time—like a fractal generating its copy in the process of formation. And this is how this mad and colorful world in the end created itself.
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