Atomfall review: "This isn't British Fallout – it's something much better than that"

The first few minutes of Atomfall rapidly convey the kind of game this is. You wake up with no memory of who or where you are, and you're immediately greeted by an injured scientist. He offers you a keycard that you need in order to leave the bunker you find yourself in – and access something called The Interchange – in exchange for a bandage. Do you grab the nearby materials, craft a bandage, and exchange it for the keycard? Do you immediately murder him and loot it from his corpse? Do you craft the bandage, swap it for the keycard, then kill him anyway? It's up to you.

"It's up to you" is the philosophy at the heart of Atomfall. Once you exit the bunker, leaving a grateful/dead scientist behind you (but not a Grateful Dead scientist), you have no guidance on what to do next. No on-screen text providing instruction, no waypoint telling you where to go, and no NPC imploring you to follow them. This is an alternate-reality 1960s rural England, where the (very real) 1957 Windscale nuclear accident was something much, much worse that necessitated a quarantine zone, trapping hundreds of people inside. Eventually, you might be able to piece together exactly what happened, and why. For now, all you can do is pick a direction and start walking.

Atom and Eve

You might have seen Atomfall described as a brutal experience with a complete lack of hand-holding, and it is – if you want it to be. There's a wealth of accessibility settings on offer – a welcome sign of a game that is happy for you to blur the edges of its strong artistic vision, if that helps to make you feel welcome – and by choosing from one of the pre-baked difficulties or tweaking individual gameplay modifiers, you can mold things to your liking.

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If you find that resources are too rare or too plentiful, that combat is too harsh or too easy, or that map navigation is frustratingly obtuse or provides too much guidance, you can adjust all, some, or none of these elements as you please. I don't mind admitting that my sweet spot includes waypoints for quest objectives, because even with this element, actually finding quests still requires some work on my part.

There is no chain of quests to follow until you hit the credits. That NPC with a funny mustache, that note on a corpse, or that bit of paper nailed to a tree might provide a lead. Follow that lead, and you'll soon find yourself on a quest, although 'quest' may not feel like the right word. Sometimes, the greatest compliment you can give a game is that it doesn't feel like a game, and this is often true of Atomfall.

So long as you're not trespassing on their territory, enemies will tend to warn you off getting too close before attacking. It's possible – likely, in fact – that you will stumble on places and objects relevant to a lead you haven't discovered yet due to the open nature of the environment. You're exploring, and existing in, a place with plenty to discover; but how and when you make sense of much of it is down to a combination of coincidence and investigation. Curiosity is very much encouraged. It may have killed the cat, but felines' lack of opposable thumbs mean they can't wield maces and an array of other brutal weapons quite like we can. Your nosiness drives everything forward.

The interconnected open world maps, taken as a whole, make up an area significantly smaller than most open world games of recent years. But this 'less is more' philosophy works to the game's benefit. There's no sense of filler. Sure, there are fields with little or nothing in them, but they're always small and close to something new to be discovered. Similarly, the mutated 'ferals' are used sparingly. Rather than being thrown at you regularly, these creatures are rare and only present in dark areas, making their appearances meaningful and cause for genuine caution.

UK, hun?

You may take a look at this and say 'So it's British Fallout'. A reasonable assumption, but no, in large part because Atomfall does so many things differently from Bethesda's franchise (and many other games). There's no XP for example, and no linear skill tree. Skill points are collectibles identified as Training Stimulants, and they're almost never given as a reward for quest completion. Like everything else in Atomfall it's all about following what interests you rather than grinding anything out – skills, crafting recipes, they're all collectibles you have to uncover and then have to actually use to properly 'learn' them.

The freedom gifted to you in terms of where you can go and what you can do means that everybody will have a unique experience. The freeform approach feels incredibly unique, like little else I've played. Moreover, while Atomfall doesn't consistently lean heavily into humor, you'll have plenty of laughs before the end. This might be when you see a handwritten sign telling you to "piss off", or when an outlaw says "let's not have a barney". Mostly though, it's when you put together pieces that the developers have mischievously left out for you to play with, or when you create your own headcanon.

The village near your starting point is a goldmine for this stuff (I stole all of the toilet rolls from the pub for crafting materials, and I consider it the most evil thing I've done in any playthrough). One of my favourite examples is the murder investigation I embarked upon when stumbling onto a body. When I uncovered the murderer, I was asked to 'take care' of him. Instead, I decided to spare his life for a new lead and extra goodies… then I killed him anyway so I could double-dip on rewards from the original quest-giver. Later, I performed a triple cross by revealing the murder to somebody I'd been begged to hide it from for yet more benefits.

In truth, this is the lead with the most complex possibilities (that I've found, at least), but there are plenty of opportunities to work with two competing leads or characters simultaneously before committing to one. You can kill anybody - anybody - in this game, and things have been carefully designed so that there are often multiple ways to achieve objectives or discover leads. I appreciate that, but I also appreciate the fact that I was able to kill a bunch of enemies guarding some greenhouses and then eat all of their tomatoes just because.

Fission for compliments

It took me 15 hours to see my first ending. Thanks to the magic of multiple save files, after 22 hours, I'd seen five of the possible six (and I'm still trying to work out how to get that final one). That may sound swift for an open world game, but there are some important things to consider.

Firstly, the relatively brief playtime is absolutely to Atomfall's benefit, and ensures that things never become tedious. Secondly, I didn't lean into the most hardcore elements of combat and exploration, which could probably double those figures if going Stalker 2 mode is something that appeals to you. Thirdly, I've started a fresh playthrough, and already discovered plenty of fresh threads to pull at that tease a whole other route I could use to make it through the game.

Once my original playtime was marching comfortably into double figures, I was starting to wish for fast travel (or at least, a bicycle), given the amount I was travelling backwards and forwards across the maps. The heartbeat management aspect didn't help. The more you physically exert yourself through running, climbing, or prolonged combat, the more your heart rate goes up.

Weapons become more difficult to handle, and eventually there's the threat of blacking out. This was never actually a problem in combat for me – I managed it quite well – but it did mean that I couldn't run everywhere at top speed on my way to the next objective (come on, admit it, you do it too). An occasional annoyance, but never something that stopped me enjoying myself.

Although Atomfall's marketing uses the word 'survival', this is slightly misleading. You restore health through found and crafted items, you'll find yourself grabbing every random item you find for materials, ammo can be scarce, and weapons can be upgraded. But there's no base building, no hunger or thirst meters, no need to sleep, and no weapons that break if an enemy stares at them too hard. And that's exactly the way it should be, because it gives the world of Atomfall an edge while allowing it to remain a joy to explore.

Atomfall is a hard game to pin down. For the devs, "we like to think of it as X-Files in the Cold War Lake District"