I agree with the sentiment that the characters on the right look… not good.

But I also think that most if not all of the human characters in Atomic Heart also look… not good.

I feel that the technology is at a point where it's really easy to mess up and accidentally create an uncanny valley mess. Not that the characters are intentionally ugly because of an agenda.

The one in the bottom-left corner isn't even that bad, but the other three look like they need just a little bit more polish in order to avoid the uncanny valley. Considering how the average game releases these days, with bugs, missing features and the ubiquitous day-one patches, I'm placing my money on the real problem being either the devs not giving a shit or the devs being crunched to the point that they have to put out a janky-looking character model to meet deadlines.

Yeah, no, I don't think there's anything deeper to it than aesthetic preference.

Something along these lines has already been discussed on KYM in regards to robot fetishism; that less detail is better, essentially:


This can likely be applied to humans, too, to some degree, and provide an argument for stylization in general.