Atomfall

My first hour in Atomfall felt like someone had jury-rigged a Fallout game inside a BBC Sunday-night drama and left it out in the Lake District drizzle. You wake up in a bunker with no memory, step outside into the Cumbrian countryside, and almost immediately a red telephone box starts ringing with a voice telling you someone named Oberon must die. No quest markers by default, no hand-holding, no explanation of who you are. That opening either hooks you completely or sends you straight back to the main menu, and that tension runs through the whole game. The world is the best thing here, full stop. Rebellion have recreated a warped, alternate-1962 version of the Lake District, with dry-stone walls, crumbling farmhouses, and eerie underground facilities connected through an area called the Interchange. The setting draws on classic British sci-fi touchstones including The Prisoner and The Wicker Man, and it shows. You will bump into Druids lurking in woodland, rogue government agents, a creeping folk-horror atmosphere, and the odd mutated creature called a Thrall that is genuinely unsettling. The countryside looks stunning outdoors, even if character models and lighting betray that the game was built to run on older hardware too, and lacks upscaling options like DLSS or FSR. Combat is functional rather than inspired. Gunplay is smooth and Rebellion's Sniper Elite roots show in the satisfying marksmanship, but the melee, stealth, and a threadbare perk system all feel undercooked. Stealth in particular is wildly inconsistent, enemies spotting you from implausible distances. The inventory system is a genuine pain point too: slots are severely limited, split between weapons, healing items, throwables, and quest items, and the upgrade loop of combining duplicate weapons makes the already tight space worse. A post-launch update did add a Rapid Travel Network, which addresses the backtracking complaints that plagued the launch version, so the version on shelves now plays better than what critics reviewed in March 2025. What carries the game is its non-linear narrative structure. Instead of traditional quest markers, you collect leads, scraps of information from conversations, notes, and exploration that fill a notebook and let you piece together what really happened at Windscale. Two players going through at the same time can have genuinely different journeys and land on different endings, of which there are six. The dialogue trees are Fallout-style but the actual choice architecture feels a little closer to a Souls-like approach to lore: the world tells its story, you put it together. It works better than it has any right to for a studio making its first real attempt at this kind of design. The runtime sits somewhere between 15 and 40 hours depending on how much you explore, and two story expansion packs have since added more content to the zone. Atomfall is the rare game where the setting does enough heavy lifting to paper over the rough edges elsewhere. If you want tight combat or deep mechanics, this will frustrate you. If you want a genuinely strange, distinctly British mystery to wander through at your own pace, with the freedom to solve problems through conversation, stealth, or brute force, it delivers something few other games in 2025 attempted.

Alex · Scout Team

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