Tristan Ogilvie
When I emerged from a quarantine zone bunker into the lush green surrounds of England’s Lake District during Atomfall’s opening moments, my mind didn’t immediately go to Bethesda’s Fallout series like I had expected. Instead, I thought of Elden Ring. That’s because, while not nearly as enormous in scale, this survival-action adventure takes a similar approach to FromSoftware’s 2022 masterpiece in the way it drops you into a foreign land with no clear idea of who you are and only cryptic clues as to which direction to go in, trusting you to find your own fun and unearth its many mysteries organically as you carve a path through its varied and often intimidating terrain. It’s a freeform storytelling structure that succeeded in keeping me completely engrossed and consistently surprised for the 15 hours it took to roll the credits, despite some occasional struggles along the way due to inconsistent combat encounters with enemies as brutish as they were British.
Inspired by the real-world Windscale nuclear disaster that occurred in Northern England in 1957, Atomfall’s story takes place five years later within a fictionalised and meticulously crafted quarantine zone that has been walled off around the ruined reactor site and its neighbouring village, woodland, and farmland areas. Cut off from the outside world, rifts have formed amidst the surviving populace, pitting an occupying military presence against a number of rival factions, and thus conflicting moral quandaries are posed as you choose which quirky quest givers to align with and which to betray in a flexible system that felt more inspired by Fallout: New Vegas’ ambiguity than Fallout 4’s more rigid ethical options.
Further heightening the sense of paranoia around each tough decision I made were regular communications from an unidentified voice in one of the many red phone booths found throughout the world, routinely ordering me to “trust no one” as though I was accepting repeat prank calls from Agent Fox Mulder.
In addition to your main efforts to uncover the truth behind the Windscale accident, there are a number of mini-mysteries to solve along the way that can be picked up in conversations and found in discarded documents inside the many unique structures to explore around Atomfall’s five interconnected maps. Within the opening hours I quickly found myself sidetracked with enticing distractions like investigating the murder of the vicar’s assistant in the Wyndham Village church, or trying to determine who or what was locked up in the residence above the local bakery. Sometimes I solved these leads with diplomacy, while other times they ended in violence, and the various leads and conspiracies only grew more tantalising and morally murky from there.
Where it truly feels different from the status quo is that instead of the compass at the top of the screen telling you exactly where you need to go next, Atomfall does a great job of directing you more organically by teasing out subtle hints instead. It largely allows you to piece these puzzles together yourself by actually measuring out longitude and latitude coordinates on its map, deciphering the vague description of a certain location, or catching your eye with plumes of chimney smoke rising from a distant farmhouse, and that kept me grounded in the world and had me poring over every detail in my surroundings in a way that few other games do. It felt refreshing to have a game map clear of typical open-world clutter, and to be allowed to use my own curiosity as a compass rather than being immediately grabbed and steered around by an obnoxious series of waypoints like in so many other open-world adventures. (Having said that, there are options in Atomfall’s menu that can provide a more guided experience if you’d prefer – something I ended up doing briefly on the one occasion a particular quest item’s location seemed a bit too obscure – but here they default to off instead of on.)
Reactor Core Blimey
It’s also quite novel to experience a survival-action game that is so endearingly British. Atomfall is an adventure that introduces one eccentric side character who sounds like the Major from Fawlty Towers, and another that’s the spitting image of Queen Elizabeth II. It allows you to craft a poison bomb using a pint glass you nicked from its local pub, or replenish health by tucking into a Cornish pasty, or reduce your heart rate by sipping on a warm cup of Earl Grey. Although it admittedly comes in the wake of the Fallout: London total conversion mod that incorporates that same flavor, Atomfall’s detailed slice of Northern England still feels like a wonderfully unique place to set a sandbox shooter, and as an Aussie who grew up on a diet of imported BBC television shows it results in a personality-packed world that feels both foreign and strangely familiar at the same time.
The contents of its mysterious quarantine zone are also shaped by the best of British sci-fi and folk horror. There are the more overt examples, like the deadly flowers that bloom to intimidating heights in its woodland areas and look as though they’ve been replanted straight out of The Day of the Triffids, as well as the towering wooden statues that are obvious nods to The Wicker Man. But there are also less conspicuous allusions that had me second guessing my own senses. At one point I could have sworn that I saw the outline of the familiar blue phone booth belonging to a certain British doctor on a distant hilltop, only to find that when I climbed up for a closer look it had apparently shifted itself to another space or time.
Pretty much the only thing about it that isn’t very British is the weather. With no weather system or day/night cycle, it’s nothing but sunshine in Atomfall’s quarantine zone. This not only results in one of the least dreary post-apocalyptic game worlds I’ve ever explored, but it also makes for a startling contrast every time you transition into the dark depths of one of its many subterranean bunkers and caves.
Keep Calm and Carry Guns
It’s within these underworld installations that the bulk of Atomfall’s combat takes place, against marauding outlaws, druid fanatics, feral mutants, and lumbering killbot sentries, each likely to mercilessly snuff you out in an instant should you storm into their turf unprepared. It very quickly became apparent that despite its similar sandbox structure and facilities with multiple entry points, Atomfall is a far cry from a Far Cry in which you can single-handedly gun down an army from fairly early on. Your character is more of an everyman who’s popped out of a bunker five years after a disaster, so it makes sense that your melee swings are desperate and deliberate, you’re slow to chamber each fresh round into your rusted shotgun or rifle, and your heart rate redlines with too much physical exertion and loosens weapon stability, challenging you to keep your cool when the heat is on. By design, you’re less of a well-oiled killing machine and more like a shopping kart with one wonky wheel.
Therefore Atomfall demands careful preparation and execution in order to survive each encounter, and that resulted in a reasonably steep and satisfying learning curve on its recommended Survivor difficulty level as I learned what I could handle and what I couldn’t – often the hard way. Thus, I quickly settled into a slower and steadier stealth approach, particularly once I got my hands on a bow during my battles with the druids in the Casterfell Woods zone. Archery is effectively silent, so it doesn’t easily draw an enemy’s attention to your whereabouts as you’re thinning their numbers, and more often than not you can retrieve the arrows lodged in your victims so I rarely found myself running low – unlike when I was relying on the hard-earned and quickly spent shells of my shotgun.
I enjoyed consistently sniping from the shadows, although it must be said that Atomfall’s stealth system doesn’t feel quite as adaptable as that of developer Rebellion’s own Sniper Elite series. You can creep up behind an enemy to quietly snap their necks or crouch in long grass to stay hidden from detection, but despite the fact that almost every bandit camp or bunker is littered with whisky bottles to collect for the purposes of item crafting, you can’t simply throw one of them in order to create a diversion, for example. Nor can you craft a smoke bomb to mask your escape from an area, as far as I can tell – although admittedly I can’t be completely sure about that. Given how much Atomfall loves to tuck secrets into almost every dark corner of its world, there’s every chance that there’s a smoke bomb recipe clenched in a corpse’s hand at the bottom of a mineshaft somewhere that I haven’t stumbled upon yet after over a dozen hours.
When my cover was blown and things did get loud, I found Atomfall’s fighting to be exhilaratingly rough and tumble for the most part, but also noticeably inconsistent. Sometimes it’s frustratingly unfair, like when I’d be squeezing under a half-closed roller door and get ambushed by a series of life-sapping shotgun blasts before I’d barely come out of my crawl animation, and in a couple of instances I was burnt to a crisp by a robot sentry’s flamethrower that seemingly passed through a concrete wall. Conversely, there were other times when its enemies were comically inept, like when I’d lure a group of them around a corner or up a ladder like a line of Lake District lemmings and smack each British bandit squarely in their stiff upper lip with my cricket bat. I was never completely sure if the fight I was getting into was going to be fierce or a total farce – it seems like you can’t take some inspiration from Fallout without also adopting some of its jank.
What I do appreciate, though, is that should you encounter patrolling enemies away from their home bases and you give them a wide enough berth, the only thing that’s at risk of getting hurt are your feelings after they tell you to “sod off.” It’s nice that they don’t shoot on sight because your only method of travel in Atomfall is on foot, so getting from one corner of its sizeable world to the other would have been quite cumbersome if I had been constantly getting dragged into firefights every few steps. That said, although it may have been detrimental to its commitment to immersion I still would have appreciated the inclusion of a fast travel system of some sort, since there’s a fair bit of backtracking in the story’s second half that’s only mildly mitigated by the secret sewer access points and smugglers tunnels I discovered along the way that provide welcome shortcuts between areas.
Skilling Me Softly
Atomfall’s skill tree is quite streamlined, but to be fair it probably didn’t really need to be overly elaborate given the story’s short and sweet 15-hour length. There are four main categories – ranged combat, melee combat, survival, and conditioning – each with nine unique perks to choose from, and I pretty much invested most of the stimulants I gathered into unlocking slow-motion aiming for my bow and making my sneak attacks even more silent. However, if you’re more melee-focussed than I am you might opt for the buff that increases damage output with each melee-inflicted kill, or enhancing the power of the kick attack to stagger enemies for longer, for example. There are no major surprises here, but there’s enough to suit a number of different playstyles, and after playing through Atomfall concurrently with Assassin’s Creed Shadows – which by comparison features a skill tree with more branches than an untouched bonsai – I came to appreciate the unfussy nature of Atomfall’s setup.
Crafting is equally straightforward, with every piece of discard scrap metal, glass, or liquid you scavenge throughout the environment thrown into the same pool of resources to create everything from bandages to nail bombs and eventually pristine and more powerful versions of the junkyard pistols and rifles, which were invaluable to use against the more formidable foes encountered during the pointy end of the story. Thankfully these can all be done on the fly, rather than having to stop what you’re doing in order to seek out a workbench.
Still, by far the most satisfying thing to craft in Atomfall was my own fate. While I managed to keep several of the main factions onside right up to the story’s climax, in the end I was forced to make a decision that had a satisfying outcome for my character but severe consequences for others I had taken as allies. From what I can work out there must be at least five different potential outcomes to arrive at, and from what I’ve seen so far I’m invested enough that I plan to revisit an earlier save point to try and unlock them all. That should involve visiting a number of different areas I neglected to explore during my initial playthrough, including the lower reaches of a shuttered medical facility that’s glowing a fairly sinister shade of blue and is just begging to be investigated.
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