We’ve all seen our fair share of battle arenas, but a battle arena in the form of a floating, rotating, basically shape-shifting block? That’s new. It’s called (what else?) The Cube, and it’s a massive multiplayer shooter from Atomic Heart developer Mundfish.
Of all the 2025 Summer Game Fest announcements, The Cube struck me, thanks to its ambitious hexahedronic design. To learn more, I recently sat down for a remote video interview with Robert Bagratuni, CEO of Mundfish, who was accompanied by communications director Christina Omelchenko, who translated between Russian and English for the duration of our conversation.
All the world is a cube
For a game this centered around a specific shape, there can be but one opening question: Why a cube? The answer is unexpected: “Why not a triangle, or a pyramid, or a sphere? We want to troll the guys who believe our Earth is a plane,” Bagratuni explained.
Aside from the tongue-in-cheek intention to “troll flat-earthers,” there’s a more serious rationale behind the design as well.
“Originally, with most of the things in the universe, if you think of a perfect shape, it’s typically considered something aspheric, like the stars, the planets, and so on,” Bagratuni said. “My cube is a very different entity as it’s lit up from the top by the sun, where it’s very bright in the middle of the day. On the bottom face of the cube, it’s dark, and on the side faces of the cube, there’s a twilight zone.”
“This concept gives so much variability of what you see, how the settings change, and how the lighting changes,” Bagratuni added. “Plus, it really plays with your brain; how you perceive the experience. You can be standing on the side tile of the cube and have a vertical horizon. It just gives such a different experience.”
As if navigating a static floating cube doesn’t sound nauseating enough, The Cube will consist of rotating planes that constantly shift the lay of the land. Imagine running and gunning across a levitating Rubik’s Cube while some invisible power is twisting its tiles — such a complex design naturally comes with quite a few development challenges.
Bagratuni said that The Cube’s concept poses a monumental technological task for his team: “It’s a challenge for the developers to create a system that allows thousands of objects to move simultaneously online, in real time. Millions, millions, millions of objects.”
But The Cube’s development team came up with a complex system to deal with the problem. “We call it a split-rendering system that allows for a smooth rotation,” Bagratuni said. “This is our own technology that we developed and are super proud of. It was one and a half years of hard tech work to deliver that experience.”
Atomic at heart
But enough about twisting planes. What actually happens on those planes?
As shown in The Cube’s reveal trailer from Summer Game Fest, the die-shaped world is frequented by your fellow players as well as unfriendly monstrosities in all shapes and sizes: a massive tumor-shaped creature with claws, something that looks like a living tree with a birdhouse stuck on its head, and — let’s hope they’re on our side — lovely humanoid robots.
Although some gameplay details remain a mystery for now, Bagratuni said that The Cube entails more than just fighting and surviving; RPG elements, such as a storyline and character progression, will shape your adventure.
“The experience of The Cube will definitely be story-driven and not just raids, grinds, and things like that,” he said. “We want to make sure that there is deep character progression and you can develop your character in different directions, thus creating a character build that is super tailored to how you want to experience The Cube.”
Set in the same universe as Atomic Heart, you should expect a sci-fi world full of anomalies and absurdities, with mind-blowing technological advancements and perhaps a shady laboratory or two. Based on the trailer, some old Atomic Heart acquaintances are likely to make an appearance — hello there, Granny Zina!
Despite this strong connection, “It is not necessary or super important to play Atomic Heart to understand what The Cube is,” Bagratuni explained. “Though of course, narratively speaking, The Cube is a very important part of Atomic Heart’s world and it’s very interconnected with its events.”
“I guess playing Atomic Heart would be enriching if you want to dig deeper into the lore. But what we want to do is make sure it’s easy to jump into The Cube and not get frustrated by not understanding what’s going on.”
I tried to prod a little for more intel on character builds and class systems, but Bagratuni declined to elaborate. “As we move forward with preparation for the launch, we’re going to be revealing more and more,” he said. “The first trailer announcement was only a glimpse of what we are going to show you.”
But based on what I’ve seen and heard about so far — from its head-spinning physics to its engrossing narrative trappings — The Cube seems to be a creative twist on the MMO genre. As Bagratuni said in our call, “Crazy things are happening there.”
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