Does Atomic Heart Have a Photo Mode?

Atomic Heart is full of odd things, and only some of them want to kill you. So wouldn’t it be nice to take a picture, either of the game’s strange and unusual sights or, if you prefer, to preserve Atomic Heart’s more action-packed moments? Who knows, maybe you can get protagonist P-3 to pull some ridiculous faces, like Kratos in God of War? But there’s an important question to answer first, of if Atomic Heart does or does not have a photo mode.

Atomic Heart Does Not Have a Photo Mode — Anymore

Unfortunately for any snap-happy Atomic Heart players, there is no built-in photo mode on any platform — PlayStation, Xbox, or PC. Oh well. That’s a bit disappointing, but not every single game is going to have a photo mode, right?

That’s true, but Mundfish was actually showing off a photo mode a while back, in one of its trailers. This Atomic Heart trailer, released nearly two years ago, features a beardless P-3 and, according to the description, is “showing a close-up of the game’s protagonist face running in Realtime in-game Photo Mode.”

So, assuming Mundfish wasn’t referring to a development-only feature, where’s the photo mode? It’s not the only feature that may have been dropped over the course of Atomic Heart’s development, either. Nvidia and Mundfish made a big deal of Atomic Heart’s PC ray-tracing back in 2018, but the final game has no PC ray-tracing.

Could a photo mode be added later? It’s possible — God of War Ragnarok’s photo mode wasn’t available at launch and only arrived later. However, while Mundfish has tweeted plenty about Atomic Heart, there’s been no renewed mention of a photo mode.

Is There a PC Mod to Add a Photo Mode?

If you’re on PC and wondering if there is a mod that will put photo mode back in, the answer is — not exactly, but there’s something that might help. You can download a “Free Camera” mod that will let you move the camera around at will. That mod is available at Nexus Mods.

So, if you want to take a picture of the complex, you can use ALT-Printscreen or F12 in Steam to take a picture of whatever you’re seeing. There’ll be no HUD, either. The catch is that the mod doesn’t freeze time, so this isn’t much good for action scenes. By the time you get a shot lined up, P-3 may have been murdered by a mustachioed robot.

So, no, Atomic Heart doesn’t have a photo mode, though there’s a PC mod that will help you get some good snaps.