‘What if the Chornobyl disaster happened in the UK?” is the question Atomfall asks. The answer, according to developer Rebellion, is that it would be considerably more picturesque and feature loads of pasties. Aping the nuclear catastrophe fiction of series such as Fallout and Stalker, Atomfall offers a mildly diverting scientific whodunit. But it struggles to muster the same clear identity of the games that inspired it.
Using the 1957 Windscale fire as its launchpad, Atomfall thrusts you into a postwar Britain where that accident was dramatically worse, prompting the government to send in the army before walling off a large portion of the Lake District, sealing everybody inside. Your character, an archetypal video game amnesiac, awakes inside the exclusion zone several years later. To escape, they must unravel the mystery behind what caused the disaster, who is responsible and how to fix it.
This mystery, and how it unfolds, are by far the most interesting parts of Atomfall. The story reframes conventional quests as “leads”, where points of interest are revealed by collecting documents such as letters and military reports, and speaking to the surviving locals in the zone. At the heart of the enigma is a vast underground research facility, which you must reactivate by unlocking its entrances and locating atomic batteries to power its various sectors, ultimately unlocking the heart of Windscale and the dark secret kept inside.
It’s a tale that offers plenty of intrigue. The characters that assist you on your journey, including soldiers, scientists and a publican, have their own motivations for doing so, which you’ll only uncover by cross-referencing them with other players in Atomfall’s unspoken game of zones. These will often relate to diversions you’ll find along the way, such as infiltrating a castle occupied by Wicker Man-style druids to retrieve a special medicine and solving a quintessentially British murder in a church.
Unpicking these threads is fun, and the tale benefits from a tighter focus and better pacing than most open-world adventures. Unfortunately, the accompanying game mechanics feel as if they turn up more from obligation than enthusiasm. Combat lets you choose between guns that are serviceable but unremarkable, and melee fighting that will make you appreciate every rusty firearm you collect. There is a rudimentary crafting system you’ll mostly use to make bandages and the occasional molotov cocktail. A stealth system exists in theory, but perhaps fittingly I never saw it function in any meaningful fashion. Enemies can spot you from half the map away and seem telepathically connected to nearby allies, which makes sneaking around awkward and unrewarding.
It probably doesn’t help that it’s always a bright sunny day in Atomfall’s exclusion zone, which would be unusual for any part of the UK, let alone the Lake District. On the whole, it could make better use of its Cumbrian setting. Although Atomfall’s four maps are lavish and fun to explore, including craggy valleys filled with shells of dry-stone buildings, and the most meticulously recreated English village since Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, the world is not especially atmospheric.
Moreover, the enemy factions, druids and crazed marauders clad in cricket gear, feel like vague attempts to anglicise the kooky gangs of Fallout. Where are the feral ramblers, the roving bands of literati fighting over whether Wordsworth or Coleridge was the better poet? Why are pasties so abundant, while Kendal mint cake and Grasmere gingerbread are absent? This may seem flippant, but given we have recently seen such a brilliant lampoon of northern life in Thank Goodness You’re Here!, Atomfall’s own depiction of the north, and indeed Britain in general, feels superficial and haphazard, a jumbled assemblage of cultural touchstones.
To use another example, one of Atomfall’s key inspirations is Stalker, a series whose strength lies in how it is so specifically, uncompromisingly Ukrainian. Stalker and its sequels are completely unafraid to be weird, bold, challenging and bleak, to wholly envelop the player in its nation’s radioactive trauma. The UK simply doesn’t share that trauma in the same way, so Rebellion’s “what if” scenario can only ever be a shadow of Chornobyl.
