Mundfish has also received funding from GEM Capital, a Cyprus-based investment fund established by a former chief executive of Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom. Developer Mundfish is based in Cyprus but its chief executive previously worked at the Russian communication company Mail.RU. And accusations that the publisher has covert links to Moscow. There have been claims, moreover, that it is larded with ugly slurs against Ukraine. Atomic Heart is accused of distorting history by depicting Soviet Russia as a social and technological triumph. And these winks and nods towards Stalinism are proving controversial. It’s one of dozens of references to the Soviet Union at the height of its power squirrelled into this cartoonish shooter. But its inspiration is a very real chunk of Stalinist brutalism: the 300-foot-tall Motherland Calls, which stands above the Volga River and pays shrieking tribute to the dead of Stalingrad. Call of the Motherland, the statue past which I am whizzing at speed, is constructed from nothing but code. This tableau is unfolding early in a controversial new video game, Atomic Heart. “We are now flying over the majestic Call of the Motherland monument – erected in 1949 to mark the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II,” says a soothing female voice. A statue looms through the clouds: a huge vengeful woman with a sword high in one hand, a giant atom cradled in the other. Monorails twinkle, suspension bridges shimmer, drones whirr like dystopian worker bees. I’m on top of the world looking down on a pixillated workers’s paradise.

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