Answer the phone. It starts with the telephone booths, really. Not chronologically, mind you. That starts when I wake up in a tunnel. The questions. Why are these telephone booths everywhere in Atomfall, from the middle of nowhere to the formerly-idyllic-now-occupied-by-a-military group-village. They ring when I get close to them, and the voice on the other end whispers to me and tells me things. Who to trust. What to watch for. That the woods are dangerous. That I shouldn’t trust Mother Jago. To watch out for Captain Sims. He tells me that a man named Oberon must die.
Who is this voice on the other end of the phone? How does he know where I am, what I’m doing? Can I trust him? Who is Oberon? And why does the voice on the other end of the phone want him dead? I didn’t have the answers to any of these questions by the time my demo ended, but the questions drive us. Atomfall is a mystery. But plumbing its depths may get you more than you bargained for.
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Atomfall, developed and published by Rebellion Developments, is set in an alternate post-war Britain. To be precise, the year is 1962, five years after the real-world Windscale fire, the worst nuclear disaster in British history. This version of history, though, is a little more sinister. The world inside the quarantine zone is wrong, the kind that subs off on the people in odd ways. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stranger.
My demo started me out in a tunnel. I was reasonably heavily armed—a revolver, a shotgun, and a bolt-action rifle, along with some improvised explosives and firestarters—but this game takes place in Britain, not the US, so there aren’t more guns than people and weapons themselves are both limited in variety.
You’ll find a family shotgun or a hunting rifle when you’re scavenging, not AR-15s. The guns you do have access to are covered in rust, and ammo is scarce. Between my three guns, I had maybe 20 rounds of ammunition. Every shot had to count, and anything I didn’t have, whether it was ammo or melee weapons or the reagents to make a bandage, I’d need to scavenge.
Atomfall drops you into a big world with little guidance.
I didn’t have much guiding me as I stepped out of that tunnel. I didn’t even know who I was. I had amnesia, that old classic. I had a lead on a woman named Mother Jago, an herbalist who also, and not much else. So, I picked a direction. I took a small set of stone steps up to my right, where I ran into a couple of weirdo druids who would have been decidedly unfriendly had they seen me.
Remember what I said about the things that don’t kill you making you stranger? Apparently, after the whole “worst nuclear disaster in the history of the nation of Britain” thing, some of the locals started hearing the Voice coming from the soil and walked into the woods to do… weird pagan Druid stuff? Anyway, they won’t bother you if you keep your distance, but if you get up in their business, they get real hostile real fast.
Instead of dealing with that noise, I snuck up behind one of them and broke their neck and then beat the other one to death with a cricket bat when she, to her credit, noticed I’d just murdered her friend in cold blood and wasn’t happy about it. And let me tell you, it feels good to beat someone to death with a cricket bat.
There’s this real loud “crack,” and I kinda liked the sound in that sick, demented way you like the sound of a heavy object slamming into a human skull when it feels good (but still imprecise and unwieldy, in a good way) to commit violence in a video game. I don’t know what that says about me. It’s probably best not to think about it too hard.
After looting them and crafting and applying a bandage (they got their hits in, I’ll grant you), I decided violence wasn’t really the answer and tried to sneak around our tree-hugging friends in the future. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, Atomfall has a rather limited inventory, and I was already having to make decisions about what to pick up. Secondly, I was beginning to feel a little bad about the whole “killing random people for fun and profit” thing, and amnesiac or not, that wasn’t really who I wanted to be.
With no other leads, I decided to head toward Mother Jago and get some information. And that’s when I came across the downed helicopter, and everything changed. Half of Atomfall is discovery, following one lead until you come across one that’s more interesting, seeing something in the distance and going, “Ooh, what’s that?”
Inventory management, exploration, and combat that thrives on intentions help make Atomfall stand out.
It’s not every day that you come across a downed helicopter in the middle of the woods, and this one came complete with a Cracker Jack prize: a recording left by a Dr. Diane Garrow, the crash’s only survivor. She’s heading to a nearby village to look for survivors. A helicopter crash beats a strange lady living in the woods on the scale of “things that excite Will Borger,” so I headed that way.
Along the way, I got to really enjoy exploring Atomfall’s world. I just kinda let myself wander, in the words of Annie Dillard, “open to time and death, painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.” As I got closer to the village, a few interesting things happened. First, I stumbled upon a buried cache. See, you have a metal detector, and when you get close to something, it beeps. Then it’s a game of “follow the flashing lights” until you can dig for a cache. All right, cool, I like that.
Secondly, I ran into some ferals hiding in a cave. Ferals have been hit by the fallout really hard and are basically mutated humans. They like dark places, and they look like more jacked versions of the kid who turns into a blueberry in Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory. Still, I mostly figured it was a case of “Don’t worry, he just looks big, and anyway, I have a gun” right up until one of them conjured some kind of energy ball out of his chest and murdered the ever-loving bejesus out of me.
See, combat in Atomfall is deliberate. It takes a second to reload, and like I said, you’re not walking around with automatic weapons, at least initially. So, between the whole “firing my shotgun, ejecting the spent shell, loading a new one, and firing again” phase, he wasted me. But I, being brave and stupid, went back for seconds, which worked out about as well as the first time. Fool me twice. Maybe it’s time to do something else.
And that’s what I like about Atomfall’s combat. Even when you’re armed, combat is risky. I got into a shooting match with some druids, and even though I had firearms and they were working with bows, it was close. A little later on, I ran into a group of outlaws who were patrolling an area I needed to get through. There was also a huge, mutated wasps’ nest nearby; I’d tangled with those guys before; nasty buggers.
Rebellion Developments makes sure that combat is always risky in Atomfall, and that’s the point.
See, when I said that the fight against the druids was close, what I meant was, “I was losing until I noticed that there was a wasps’ nest near the tree one of them was using for cover, and having accidentally disturbed it and spent the next couple minutes running for my life,” I took a chance and shot it. And the wasps, well, they didn’t much care who shot their nest, but they knew the druids were right there, and they chose violence. Thanks, wasps.
I tell you this to set up the conundrum I mentioned earlier. I was caught between outlaws and the wasps, so I did the smartest thing I could think of: I shot one of the outlaws with my rifle, and while the rest of them were figuring out what had happened, I ran past them (and the wasps’ nest) like I was All-State track and field. I didn’t have a plan, but something remarkable happened: one of the outlaws primed a Molotov cocktail, but when they threw it at me, it hit the wasps.
I turned around expecting to have a fight on my hands and instead watched the outlaws, half on fire from the Molotov cocktail, exploding in their faces, fighting for their lives against a seemingly never-ending wave of pissed-off, also-on-fire wasps. Just the fact that stuff like this can happen is cool, and I’m interested to see what other interactions I can stumble across.
After that, I made a brief pit-stop to meet Mother Jago: she was helpful and ready to barter (nobody’s really interested in the pound around these parts anymore), but I didn’t have anything I wanted to trade. The cool part was how many choices I had to interact with her. I could be desperate, wary, friendly, or curious, and each conversation option felt pretty natural.
I kept it polite but didn’t offer up more than I had to, and got some useful information. Then she asked me for a favor; it seemed the Druids had stolen an herbalism book from her, and she wanted it back. She didn’t want me to kill anyone, though, and I hadn’t had much luck with that, so I decided to stick with the original plan: find a good doctor.
I headed to the village of Wyndham under the “protection” of a military group called Protocol. Wyndham is huge, but it was under martial law, and it felt like it. Soldiers patrolled the streets, loitered, armed, on every street corner, and massive robots of the British Atomic Research Division were there to deal with anyone who stepped out of line. The whole thing feels oppressive, though it makes for a really funny moment when I walked past two dudes coming out of the village pub, and one of them swore up and down that he could take one of those 12-15 foot robots in a dustup.
After a little exploration, I stumbled across Captain Grant Sims, the most British man who ever lived and the guy who’s in charge now that the village is under martial law. He asked me to help look in on the baker, who he thought was up to something. In return, he’d give me access to the prison facility where they were keeping Dr. Garrow, who has the ability to disable the B.A.R.D. robots, and nobody’s quite sure how.
And yes, Atomfall has robots.
Normally, I wouldn’t go along with a military force ruling through fear, but I was on a timer, and that makes all of us into bad people. Or maybe it’s just me. Either way, I investigated the baker, who, it turns out, was hiding her infected husband on the second floor of the bakery. I didn’t mean to hurt him, but he came at me, and I had a cricket bat, and you know how I get with that cricket bat. I didn’t mean to hurt the baker, either, who heard what I did to her husband and came running, but… yeah.
Anyway, that got me in with Sims, and I was ready to go talk to Garrow, but I wasn’t sure where she was being kept exactly, and again, I was on a timer. However, Sims had let slip that there was a B.A.R.D. facility called the Exchange nearby. He’d warned me not to go, but I’d had enough of doing what I was told. So I made for that facility.
There were bodies on the floor when I got there—broken down machinery. Infected rats. It was foreboding. I was never sure what I would run into, but one thing was clear. I wasn’t supposed to be here. But I was compelled to see; I just knew I probably wouldn’t like what I would find.
I worked my way to the central processor, found an atomic battery next to a dead body in a HAZMAT suit, and plugged it back into the machine. As the power came back on, the phone began to ring. The raspy voice on the other end told me two things: that everything depended on the Exchange. It had to live again, and Oberon must die.
My demo ended shortly thereafter, but I’d seen enough to be intrigued. Atomfall’s got an interesting premise, a thoughtful gameplay loop, and a lot of choices. It rewards you for being thoughtful and taking chances but never loses the sense of mystery and weirdness that makes finding the next thing or answering that phone compelling. All I know is that Oberon must die. And I’ve gotta figure out why.
Atomfall releases March 27, 2025 on Xbox Series X|S, Playstation 5, and PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store from Rebellion Developments.
