Not long after I’d started college I found myself accidentally walking into an ongoing lesson. I can’t remember what was being taught, but I do remember the faces of 20-odd near-adults turning to look at me as I casually strolled into the room. “Can I help you?” the teacher asked safely behind the scowls. I mumbled something about being sorry like a charisma-less Hugh Grant, then backed out sheepishly wishing to never return and perhaps combust on the spot. Everyone has been in a slightly uncomfortable and perhaps aggro environment that you wanted to nope out of, so we all know the feeling. When I tell you, then, that Atomfall, a quaint-looking English-countryside-set first-person sci-fi survival adventure features the most hostile environment I’ve ever encountered, let it be a warning. The people here are carrying a lot worse than angry faces in this tale of a locked down community and a struggle over what to do about the mystery at the centre of it.
Within the span of about 10 minutes Atomfall had both delivered a wonderful first impression and made me wonder if I was even going to be able to see the game through to its conclusion. After a brief “Who am I and why am I here?” opening inside a bunker of some sort, a now classic ‘step out into the world’ moment showcases the game’s quite beautiful sprawling, lush green rural world, a red phone booth on a hill and a dishevelled home a little further down. A nice old man is playing a guitar. This is lovely, I think to myself. I wander a hundred metres down the road into what appears to be an abandoned mine. A group of people emerge, all with strong regional accents, and I’m dead in seconds – their northern tones don’t kill me, but their guns do. I try again, hiding in some grass for a while, but ultimately I’m still dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. With a more considered (cowardly) approach I make my way through, but this is largely just sneaking around slowly before legging it through a door into a new area.
Two hours into Atomfall and I wasn’t having a good time. Everything felt like a slog and progress was slow, owing to all those deaths. The game felt unfair, not challenging. To make matters more frustrating, I wasn’t even sure what I was meant to be doing, let alone how I’m meant to survive these violent attacks while carrying a weapon that’d struggle to open a can of beans (even one with a ring pull lid). Rather than point you directly where to go, Atomfall uses a leads system, wherein you get some information and use it to work out what to do – “someone told me they’d heard a rumour about its location, around where I’ve circled on your map,” rather than simply placing a marker and drawing a Google Maps-style route for you. It’s not as [insert the name of a famous detective relevant to where you live] as it initially seems, but it was a lot to deal with on top of the frustrating combat encounters. Thankfully you can do something about this.
Judge me all you want, but I made the decision to go against developer Rebellion’s wishes, choosing to knock down the difficulty somewhat from the miserable default it recommends. There are plenty of options here to tailor the experience, but essentially you can tweak how challenging combat, survival, and exploration are independently. I dabbled a bit, in the end opting to make combat and survival far less challenging while keeping the exploration settings untouched. Honestly, it felt as if I was playing an entirely different game. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure some people might enjoy the grind, but these little alterations allowed me to finally get into an intriguing plot that manages to weave multiple disparate points together before finally asking you to make some tricky choices. I still died a lot, if you are wondering, which I think is needed for the world to feel dangerous. I just tweaked it enough to go from shouting rather rude words at the game (rhymes with DUCK WHO YOU CLUCKING DUCK!) to being miffed at being careless while sneaking up to a hidden pack passage.
It’s hard to talk about Atomfall without feeling like you’re not painting a true picture of what it’s like to play. It’s at its best, I think, when you’re exploring and figuring things out. Broadly, you end up doing jobs for people who know more than they are letting on about why the area is like it is, and what the deal is with the region’s slightly out of character blue glowing plants. In turn this takes you all over a number of zones that are large enough to feel big without overwhelming. The world looks rather glorious at points, with rolling English countryside and imposing structures – some classic post-war defensive buildings, others more mysterious and slightly out of time, and oh, are those massive robots? There are plenty of key locations to investigate, too, often with hidden away locations to navigate, and the various main characters you interact with are full of intrigue. One faction in the game, the Druids, are hauled up in an old castle, for example, but this striking fortress hides some rather more interesting secrets if you go looking. The sense of discovery here is top notch, with every new area and person you find taking you one step closer to finding out just what’s going on and why so many people are seemingly pushing you in different directions over what their ultimate solution is.
Melee and ranged combat play a significant part in the moment to moment gameplay, which is perfectly solid if rather unspectacular, in keeping with the grounded feel of the whole experience. I became more competent as I went on, but a key part of my strategy remained running away from angry mobs that wanted me dead – although it’s worth noting that your chosen settings will determine how much hard work you can do without stopping to give your heart a chance to slow down, another mechanic that compounds the sense of tension. Crafting plays its part, with tonics, supplies, and upgrades all possible if you have the right unlocks and blueprints. Coming from Rebellion, makers of the Sniper Elite series, you might expect some gratuitous slowmotion exploding private part shots, but there’s none of that here – although the rural England setting does mean you might hear someone shouting about them.
Atomfall has been compared to Fallout, and I won’t argue with that, although Rebellion’s effort is more streamlined and focused, like you’d expect of a game set in an English village (complete with shops, church, and town hall) and its surrounding areas rather than a large US city. I saw one of the endings after 11 hours, but I expect you could spend at least double that if you want to go down different paths. Those of you keen to test yourselves and stick with the suggested difficulty settings (there’s even one notch higher if you’re that way inclined) are likely to take a good deal longer – good job you can pour yourself a nice calming tea in the high street bakery if things get a little too much to handle.
The ending you’ll get will depend on who you choose to believe over the course of the story. Atomfall has five (to my count) people trying to get you to do things their way, offering you some form of escape from this hostile world in exchange. This central storyline, who to do jobs for and ultimately side with, drives you forward, and I was pleasantly surprised to see how various threads came together and were closed off by my actions. You’ll also have to determine what you are comfortable doing to make your life easier in the game even if that’s bad news for certain NPCs you’ve met who you previously made promises to about keeping a secret (shhh, someone was murdered in the church, shhh, keep it hush hush). Some of these threads see you doing similar things, such as accessing a computer terminal, but you’ll frequently have different options aligned with the key players, each of whom has nothing nice to say about any of the others.
No doubt, Atomfall has issues with gameplay balance. If there weren’t options to fine-tune the difficulty I don’t think I’d be able to be very positive about what I played. On top of that, there’s an awful lot of trudging around the various maps, too, with the game often sending you from one farthest point to the other, and there’s no fast travel as an option. By the end I found myself guessing where I had to go next simply by looking at where the most distant point on the map was, and usually I was right. Quest design, too, is quite basic when broken down, regularly asking you to go somewhere, only to be told you can’t do the thing you went there to do until you go somewhere else to find a required item, and then return. The fairly breezy story and lovely sights let Atomfall get away with most of this, and the slightly deranged Midsomer Murders Englishness of it all will help you gloss over a lot of these problems.
It’s rare I swing so wildly on a game as I did with Atomfall. From thinking it’s a borderline dud to being keen to talk to other players about what they did and dive back in to see more, I’m now firmly in the “you should play this” camp. Atomfall is largely competent in a lot of areas rather than being unique or genre-leading, but I really enjoyed the world that Rebellion created, the duplicitous main characters, and the post-war sci-fi story. I could do with playing a game where everyone isn’t giving me a proper scowl now, though. It’s unnerving.
A copy of Atomfall was provided for review by Rebellion.
