Atomfall, the new game from Sniper Elite developer (and 2000 AD owner) Rebellion, is set in the Lake District in northwestern England in an imagined version of the 1960s. It’s a world of stark mountains, creepy moorland, homely village pubs, and eccentric country folk. It’s also a quarantine zone where clanking, retrofuturistic mechs patrol a militarized town after a disaster at a local nuclear plant. Nearby, the remote forest is overrun by a lawless faction of druidic cultists. In other words, it’s Fallout, U.K. style.
Rebellion, always a cheerfully unpretentious studio, is happy to own up to this influence — among many others. According to head of design Ben Fisher, a soft-spoken Scot, the initial idea for Atomfall came from Jason Kingsley, who co-founded Rebellion with his brother Chris in 1992 and who is still its CEO. Kingsley — a history nut with a popular YouTube channel about medieval life, where he’s often found in full plate armor on horseback — wondered what it would look like to combine a popular strand of gaming with a dark footnote in postwar British history: a fire that ravaged the Windscale nuclear plant, situated on the edge of the Lake District National Park, in 1957.
“[Jason] noticed that there’s a lot of games set in nuclear quarantine zones. It’s almost like a micro-genre,” Fisher told Polygon at a preview event for the game in London. “There’s Fallout, STALKER, Metro as three big obvious examples, but then none set around the world’s first major nuclear disaster at the Windscale plant.”
Image: Rebellion
In Atomfall, the player wakes up in the zone with no knowledge of who they are, what’s happened in the zone, or how to survive. What follows is a first-person investigation of sorts in which you explore a series of contained, open areas and follow a breadcrumb trail of loosely defined leads, chatting with colorful characters and brawling with hostile factions using improvised melee weapons and rusty guns for which ammo is scarce.
The landscape is dotted with the U.K.’s ubiquitous red telephone kiosks, which ring every time you pass; answer the phone and a distorted voice will make gnomic comments about the plot. It’s a shameless bit of Brit iconography that’s also, apparently, based on one of Kingsley’s anecdotes. “Jason was hill walking in the Lake District, I think, and he walked past a red phone box and it just started ringing,” Fisher said. “Because you find them out in the middle of nowhere, these weird phone boxes. So we turned that into a plot thread in the game.”
I played a couple of hours from the early stages of Atomfall at the event. Like most Rebellion games, it’s a little scrappy; Fisher describes it as “AA punching up.” The studio’s in-house Asura engine, which impresses in Sniper Elite’s free-form assassination missions, occasionally shows its limitations when asked to accommodate something more narratively ambitious. (I was shocked to see a loading screen when opening the door to a village pub.) But — again, like most Rebellion games — it makes up for this with an enjoyably unrefined sense of personality.
Image: Rebellion
There’s a specific tone to Atomfall that might feel familiar, especially to Anglophiles: surreal, unsettling, but also kind of unserious, as if it might tip into comedy or satire at any moment. This is no accident. “We adopted the storytelling style of 1960s Britain in order to match the narrative location of the game,” Fisher said. “We looked at things like early Doctor Who, The Quatermass Experiment, The Wicker Man, The Prisoner even. So there’s a tone range there, but there’s a kind of moral ambiguity.” It seems likely that the cynical sci-fi of 2000 AD, a Brit comics institution, is another influence.
This storytelling approach helped Rebellion settle on Atomfall’s unusual narrative structure, which has players pick up and follow “leads” that send them across the map to investigate new areas. These leads can be taken in any order, although they all ultimately connect to each other, and come without traditional questing infrastructure, like waypoints. (More narrative guidance is available in the accessibility menu.)
Fisher said the game originally had a normal quest structure, but it felt too “guiding,” and didn’t work with the game’s story because it didn’t allow the player to choose which characters to trust. “We didn’t want you to feel like you were being told what to do by other people, but that you were in this situation and poking your face in places it wasn’t welcome,” he said. “So you’re more like a detective. You know, film noir detectives always go where they’re not welcome and make situations worse. And arguably, from a certain perspective, the police officer in The Wicker Man sort of does the same thing.” For similar reasons, there’s no morality meter in Atomfall; it’s up to the player to decide which route through the game’s “difficult, murky situation” is the most reasonable.
Image: Rebellion
Although it could be frustrating at times, I enjoyed the relative lack of guidance in my short time with Atomfall; it felt in character, and it encouraged me to explore the environment carefully and attentively. So did the combat, which is rough-and-ready, and can be punishing, especially at close quarters. Scavenging for materials to make bandages and Molotov cocktails is key, and in true Sniper Elite style, it’s often better to find a good vantage point and pick off enemies from a distance with a rifle or, even better, a bow — or just to sneak past, unnoticed.
Fisher says the game intentionally has the “observe, plan, execute cycle” familiar from other Rebellion games, but also mentions another, much less expected influence. “There’s more of a sense of desperation to the combat; that’s what we wanted. So a non-game reference would actually be something like the movie Children of Men, because of that desperation, that desire to survive in a hostile location and not fully understanding the story that you’re dropped into the middle of.”
Based on my time with the game, Atomfall successfully fuses its many influences into something distinctive. It’s definitely not a sprawling role-playing game like Fallout; it’s not an all-out shooter or a sandbox sim game, either. It plays, perhaps, like a more narratively curious and stealthy Dead Island game set in an episode of The League of Gentlemen. It’s a departure of sorts for Rebellion, yet instantly recognizable as a Rebellion game. Perhaps most refreshingly, it’s a game with a strong sense of self but no delusions of grandeur and a carefully defined scope. It will make a perfect addition to Game Pass, where it will be a day-one launch on March 27. “AA punching up” is about right, and games of that caliber feel like a rarity these days.
I asked Fisher how Rebellion reliably managed to make a success of a kind of game the industry seems to have turned its back on. He seemed politely nonplussed by the question, as if he couldn’t imagine any other way to make games, or any other kind of game to make. “Rebellion just has an appetite for making those games that are kind of 15 hours long, plus or minus five hours maybe, and having that compelling experience of a broad, pulpy sandbox,” he said. “That’s just the sort of game we like to make. We just keep doing it and people seem to like them, so we’re happy to continue.”
Atomfall will be released on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, and included in Game Pass, on March 27.
