I think it’s fair to say that England, on the whole, is under-represented in video games. I mean, yes, we had Watch Dogs: Legion, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Vampyr, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate and Valhalla – but these either missed the present day by several hundred years or presented a view of England through a distinctly un-English lens. And I’m talking about England specifically here, not necessarily Britain as a nation or the Kingdom as a whole, but England, this green and verdant land, this little pocket of ancient history, of folded dales and rolling hills, of hamlets tucked away in the shadow of forests that have seen countless ages come and go, of steepled churches, weather that can run the spectrum of all four seasons in a single afternoon, and that ever-so English ability to simply get on with it, no matter what’s going on. I think Atomfall might be the first and only game to not simply set a game in England but to get England right.
Atomfall is set in an alternate 1960’s Cumbria, in a fictionalised version of the Lake District. It takes place in several open zones that surround the village of Wyndham, where a squad of soldiers known as the Protocol attempt to keep order by often brutal means. These game areas make up the Quarantine Zone, cordoned off from the rest of the world after a mysterious disaster at the Windscale Atom-Plant, a top secret scientific research facility masquerading as a power station. After meddling with elements they couldn’t possibly understand, an organisation called B.A.R.D unleashed a terrifying force on the land, leading to the British Government closing it off. The Protocol were the soldiers sent in to assess and evacuate the disaster, but who ended up trapped with everyone else.
Your character remains nameless, faceless, and voiceless throughout. After waking up in a mysterious bunker and being handed a key card by an unidentified scientist, you’re told to find “the Interchange”, a network of underground facilities where B.A.R.D conducted their experiments. Primarily they involved work on advanced robotics and enhanced learning, using a mysterious substance to generate a power source that could also be distilled into various stimulants, chief of which enabled people to learn skills in seconds – which is handy for you, as a video game protagonist.
What Rebellion have done with the story of Atomfall is easily the most impressive element. Once you exit the bunker, the world is more or less open to you. Problem is you’ll have no weapons, no healing items, and a simple map with nothing marked on it. What you will have is a “lead”, and it’s by assigning you leads that Atomfall tells its story and pulls you through the campaign. Each lead is part of a grander investigation; you can choose to follow whichever you want at a given time, and there are usually multiple ways to solve them.
For example, if you manage to fight your way through the hills of Slatten Dale and reach Wyndham Village, you’ll be presented with your first set of major decisions when Captain Sims, leader of the Protocol, takes a liking to you as someone who might possibly be able to help him finally escape the Zone. He wants you to investigate a local citizen who has been acting weird, while said citizen just wants the soldiers to leave them alone. Looking a little deeper, I soon found out why, and through a fairly clumsy series of events, the citizen ended up dead, I ended up with blood on my hands, and I’d made quite a mess in the upstairs bedroom. Returning to Sims expecting to be reprimanded, he instead entreated me to help him further.
Atomfall does this a lot. In a similar vein to Fallout, it’s quite hard to completely scupper the story, even if you choose to kill most people just to see what they’re carrying. Before long you’ll have (by my count) three main paths to walk, detailed by three primary NPCs who want your help. Everything centres on the Interchange, and each open zone has an entrance into it somewhere. Ultimately your goal is to find enough atomic batteries to restart the Interchange and put an end to the quarantine.
How you walk these paths is entirely up to you. While I finished the campaign in 12 hours but only explored a handful of side concerns, you could be done in less than that if you mainline the story, while being thorough could easily stretch this to 25 hours or more. I can’t stress enough how much there is to find in this world. The lack of fast travel means you have to walk everywhere, but you won’t mind, as wandering off any path yields rewards or new mysteries. And Easter Eggs? Boy howdy does this game have some Easter Eggs. I won’t even spoil them, as some of them are truly, truly cool.
It’s hard to overstate how integral exploration is to this game. It rarely holds your hand, rarely even points you in the right direction unless you adjust the difficulty sliders to tell it to. Characters sketch points of interest on your map, while simply wandering off the road might yield anything from a downed helicopter to an entire sodding castle. And going into any of these places is just as atmospheric, as mutated rats, bats, crows or leeches attack you, and enemies stalk the darkness dishing out threats in North Country accents. Every room is worth searching, every path worth investigating. The characters you meet, too, are all so incredibly British – with regional dialects and slang terms that sound real and used, not like someone is doing an accent and trying to sound the part. You won’t hear many strong Scouse accents in video games, but Atomfall has one – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
But before I had discovered the joys of just existing in its world, Atomfall nearly lost me very early with its combat. The guns are OK, considering they’re all rusty until you unlock the late-game ability to upgrade them. And on the standard setting enemies are very tough. Maybe too tough, as I soon dropped the difficulty – not because it was too hard, but because I found the melee combat awkward, cumbersome, imprecise, and a little frustrating. You take so long to swing a bat or fire axe that enemies will just hit you first, so you need to kick them to stagger them, which is great but can’t be spammed. So if you find yourself facing more than one enemy you’ll need to back-peddle like mad while kicking anyone who gets close.
And at no point in the game did I ever have an abundance of ammo for long. Granted, you’re probably meant to use stealth – but stealth kills aren’t quiet unless you unlock another late-game perk; you can’t move bodies, and enemies will spot you from half a mile away through trees and shrubbery unless you crouch down in a very specific type of grass. Admittedly Atomfall has AI that gets bored and wanders off after a few minutes of searching, declaring that it must have been a strong wind that snapped Arthur’s neck and riddled Sharon with rusty SMG rounds.
By the end of the game you might have found enough skill manuals to bypass many of these issues, which you learn by using Training Stimulants, a rare resource found in B.A.R.D facilities which acts like skill points in any other game. And you could argue that there’s something to be said for treating Atomfall like a survival crafting game without the hunger meter (though you can scarf Cornish pasties, cans of spam, and slices of cake to refill your health), creeping up on enemies, preserving bullets, crafting bandages from dirty rags. But this works in a survival game when there’s barely any story; in Atomfall the story is cool, it makes you want to know the answers, and wanting to know the answers isn’t conducive to snapping necks patiently like a good little psycho.
The only time combat feels both challenging and fun is when there are robots involved, but there are few variants of these and most can be tackled by keeping your distance and hurling homemade explosives at them until they fall over, at which point you get behind them and remove the atomic battery to shut them down. Oh, and there are some other enemies in the very end of the game that require a good 4 or 5 headshots to put down and they can get in the bloody sea, frankly. I should have known they were coming when Atomfall saw fit to load me with ammo for the first time in the entire game.
Thankfully, though, Atomfall is bereft of any meaningless filler. There are side objectives, sure, which usually feed into the grander investigations, but there are no time-wasting mini games or self-indulgent character moments that simply don’t need to exist. And the open areas are exactly as big as they need to be to contain what they contain and still feel real – these aren’t huge open maps that Rebellion have littered with random shit to keep you occupied. Yes, you can use a metal detector to find buried caches and vintage lunchboxes, and there are comics and tourist pamphlets to collect – but they don’t feel intrusive to the main story. You might stumble upon them, and you might not. Much of Atomfall’s structure relies on the player stumbling into things and uses your own curiosity to pull you forward, spurred on only by a mysterious and disturbing voice that contacts you through red phone boxes dotted around the world.
I do quite like the way you trade for goods, as well. Each vendor you find has a certain amount of gear for sale, but you have no currency and must simply weigh what you’re willing to part with against what you want. If the scales tip in your favour, they’ll allow the transaction. Different vendors prefer different goods, while things like skill manuals and crafting recipes are always sought after. Tonics and Stimulants are often worth crafting if only to bargain with, though be aware that your inventory is severely limited. You can make use of a pneumatic tube system to store excess items (and I would advise you to store spare guns as you’ll need them for upgrades later), but these are only found inside B.A.R.D facilities.
At times, Atomfall feels like a game of two halves (which every game is, I suppose). On one hand it’s one of the most interesting open zone games I’ve played, absolutely bursting with things to find and do, and willing to let you do it in whatever order and at whatever pace. On the other, it’s a not-very-satisfying first person action game that struggles with inconsistent enemy AI, a weirdly imbalanced ammo economy, and clunky melee combat. The weirdest thing is that the first half is so, so good that it made me not worry too much about the second. I just dropped the combat difficulty and played for the exploration, story, and investigations and had a much, much better time. Your mileage, of course, may vary, and you may well prefer the challenge of it all.
Either way you play, one thing is certain: this is the best representation of England I have ever seen in a game. It made me wistful for a childhood long since buried under day jobs and responsibilities, when a disused quarry became an alien landscape, when any abandoned old shack in any random field was a treasure trove of imagination, when we’d craft forts from bits of wood and forge swords and bows from twigs and stones. It captures the gentle rolling waves of wind across a meadow, that distinctly, unashamedly English feeling of accepting that things could be better but knowing that they could also be way, way worse without such glorious skies above our heads and glittering summer grass between our toes. Atomfall might not get everything right, but by St. George it gets England right – and that might be enough.
