What would you do if you awoke amidst a uniquely British apocalypse, without memory and any true sense of purpose? Perhaps you would wander the wildlands, settling into life as an outcast of this green and unpleasant land. Or maybe you’d follow the command of the bleeding man, blood dripping from their hazmat suit as they urge you out of your slumber and into a quarantine zone in search of The Interchange – a mysterious facility linked to the Windscale fire, one of the first nuclear accidents in recorded human history. Whatever you choose to do, Atomfall is willing to try and support it.
“Right from the outset, you can do whatever you want. You can follow whatever lines of investigation that you want. Now, given that you’ll be poorly equipped, some choices may lead to bad results,” says Ryan Greene, art director at Rebellion Developments. “Eventually, maybe you’ll understand what the cause of the accident was, and why it may have been hushed up. You’ll meet a lot of characters along the way who will have their own angles on that too, and you’re free to believe them if you want to. Even though we don’t feed it to you in a nice, sequential way, our setup makes for a really rich story. It’s kind of like one of those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books we read as kids.”
Into the wilds
Atomfall doesn’t have a traditional quest system. It’s one of the largest differentiators between this new Rebellion IP and Bethesda’s Fallout. The studio – known for its Sniper Elite series, as well as its production of 2000 AD comic books – has been influenced by serialized storytelling which underpinned classic science-fiction. “We like to think of it as the X-Files in the Cold War Lake District,” Greene laughs. “It can be difficult to wrap your head around what this game is. There are RPG-ish elements, but it’s definitely not an RPG. Atomfall is a detective game. It’s a survival game. There’s weird stuff happening and you have to adapt to it. You have to talk, you have to research, and you might have to do violence.”
There are no quests, only leads. Put another way, there are questions – a lot of questions, and few distinct answers. You awake in 1962, five years after the historic Windscale disaster, without any memory of who you are or where you came from. Leads intersect with one another, contest with, and ricochet off from one another; there’s friction inherent to the storytelling as every character you encounter offers their own perspective on the world around them, and present their own leads that you can pursue, leading to different outcomes. Follow the leads you want to, disregard the rest – maybe you’ll form a perspective of your own, and get some sense of how this radioactive quarantine zone came to be.
Rebellion has gone out of its way to remove all unconscious bias from Atomfall’s story. There’s no indication of your character’s race, gender, or age; you’re a true blank slate by design, an amnesic detective in search of answers. Leads don’t cast judgment on a situation, only provide context, allowing you to follow your intuition and form a moral compass. As for how characters around you respond to your actions, well, results can vary. “There’s a giant spider web of leads. There are situations where you might do something that befriends one person or upsets another, and there’s loads of that happening all the time,” says Ben Fisher, creative director for Atomfall. “We signpost that you’ve found a lead, but we don’t tell you if you’ve lost a lead.”
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A journal full of lines of potential investigation, dead ends, and perceived misinformation is a key detail in Atomfall, particularly as no inhabitant of this world is safe. “Theoretically, you could play through the game by killing every single character and still find enough leads to uncover a route through the game and understand what’s happening,” teases Fisher. Greene tells me that there are around “five or six” core ending permeations within Atomfall, and that it’s how you choose to pursue leads that will bring each into focus. “You can kill people at certain times of the game that will potentially sever a line to complete an ending,” he says, with Fisher adding: “but there are also routes to reconfigure some of them by talking to certain characters, making smart choices, or bartering with traders for different information.”
“We want players to question everything, to not trust anyone. We want players to make their own decisions, to adapt to their surroundings, and follow whichever leads they want to,” says Greene. Atomfall is open-ended by design, then. Your ability to move through conversation routes isn’t defined by underlying character stats, as it may be in a game like Fallout, but is as open-ended as the mission system. Atomfall has more in common with L.A. Noire in this respect, with responses categorized by emotional markers such as ‘curious’, ‘angry’, or ‘desperate’ – giving you the space to play up (or conceal) certain pieces of information or pursue specific lines of investigation based on leads you have accrued so far. The demeanor of characters will change over time the further you submerge yourself within the world, so too can the populations of villages and towns depending on your aggression or apathy.
Follow your intuition
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There’s a lot to praise about Atomfall’s world design. The Lake District in Cumbria setting is visually distinct from your typical American post-apocalyptic setting, with arid expanses swapped out for lush rolling hills and verdant horizons. It’s a picturesque scene captured in the aftermath of an atomic incident. The setting has allowed Rebellion to indulge in some traditionally British high-strangeness, best evidenced by the decaying red telephone boxes strewn across the landscape. You’ll hear the distinctive ringing tone from afar, a voice on the other end typically offering some sort of cryptic clue once the receiver is brought to your ear: “Oberon must die,” the voice may say, before the line clicks dead, a new lead added to your journal.
“Part of the idea for this whole thing was this one time Jason had been out walking in some natural area,” says Greene, recalling a story about Jason Kingsley, one of the enigmatic (and somewhat eccentric) co-founders of Rebellion who spends his spare time living as a medieval knight. “He heard this ringing, and there really was a phone box out there in the most unexpected of places. He thought it was the eeriest, weirdest thing, so we knew it would be super fun to get that into Atomfall, because it speaks to that whole English Weirdness vibe.”
Atomfall has been in production for around six years, and the decision was made early on to set it within a series of sprawling, interconnected sandboxes rather than a true open-world. “That decision was partially made based on our existing technology at the time,” says Greene. “It was going to be a little bit of a heavy tech investment, so we decided to go with this linked sandbox approach.” This means that you’ll have lushly decorated spaces to explore before encountering a loading screen to the next area, although Greene maintains that Rebellion is going out of its way to make the world feel consistent. “We really tried to make it feel like you’re still part of a bigger world. Even if you’re in one sandbox you can actually see the neighboring sandboxes around it.”
Greene says that there’s a whole “network of connections” linking these spaces to one another, encouraging exploration as you wander the wasteland following visual points of interest, and venture below the surface to explore mysterious, deadly military bunkers. Some ways may be blocked by locked doors, the keys accessed by locating it as part of a lead you’re following or bartering for the key with a trader. “They might give you a bit of information on the side, or they might have a lead that they will literally trade with you,” says Fisher.
As contact in the quarantine zone is cut off from the wider world, there is no currency in place. You’ll need to barter with anything and everything you have in your small backpack; weapons and scrap, ammunition, and resources. Although you’ll need to be conscious of a trader’s predispositions – there are a variety of factions within the world, from pagan cults to military forces, and not everyone will be as willing to part with what they’re holding as others might: a pacifist isn’t going to see value in an old rusty shotgun, but a member of Protocol might. “We wanted this game to be multidimensional,” Greene teases.
Tread carefully
The non-linear approach to mission and narrative design also applies towards combat. Like Sniper Elite before it, Atomfall gives you multiple routes to approach an objective, and circumvent danger should you want to. Rebellion may be best known for creating first-person shooters, but the barrel of a gun is just one point of interaction within this world. You’ll find weapons strewn across the landscape, and wielding a knife or cricket bat could be preferred given how scarce ammunition is – the cascading noise created by gunfire attracting a mass of unwanted attention, a challenge in a game world where even three or four enemies can prove to be insurmountable. “It’s more like a bar brawl than a warzone,” says Fisher.
You can only quickslot up to four weapons at any one time, and scouring the environment for crafting materials and ammunition will be a constant concern. Rebellion has engineered a light skill system, where military and survival manuals can be unearthed – and combined with a rare Training Stimulant material – to help improve core proficiencies in conditioning, melee, ranged, and survival. That said, the studio is taking a somewhat open approach to difficulty as well. “We don’t have traditional difficulty settings, but play style settings instead,” says Greene, explaining that the team is keen to support players in the ways that they want to play Atomfall. Fisher adds: “Because the game isn’t just about combat we allow the player to choose different play styles that influence the amount of resource scarcity, the intensity of combat, and the amount of guidance for their exploration.”
“We want players to make their own decisions, to adapt to their surroundings, and follow whichever leads they want to.”
Ryan Greene, art director
Rebellion believes that the most interesting way to engage with Atomfall is to accept the fine-tunings where “combat is brutal and intense, where exploration is open and unguided, and where resources are scarce. But we don’t want to dictate that for people,” says Fisher, “we want as many people as possible to play the game.” That even extends to the way you can interact with perceived enemies; it’s possible to disengage or avoid combat entirely, a small window of opportunity to walk away from a confrontation before blood is spilled, and you’ll even see other characters attempt to back away from you too. “You are meeting characters who are doing their best to survive this situation,” Fisher adds. “Nobody’s right or wrong, they’ve just got different perspectives on what’s happening. It’s up to you to decide who you trust. We didn’t want the world to feel like a gung-ho warzone, we want it to feel as if everyone is just as desperate for resources as you are.”
Atomfall isn’t what I was expecting it to be. Rebellion has struggled to separate itself from this idea that it’s creating ‘Fallout: Cumbria’ but the truth is that the studio has set its sights on something far more creatively ambitious. The open-ended approach to combat and world navigation shares DNA with the Sniper Elite series, but the wider scale presented by Atomfall means that there’s potential here for something quite transformative – unlike anything we’ve seen from Rebellion in its 32 year history. Layer the non-linear approach to progression, the potential for something quite special suddenly emerges onto the radar for 2025. “It’s all about player choice,” says Greene. “You’re going to have a lot of options for things to do and see, and then you can piece them together in any order you want to make the story that you end up with. We’re so excited to see how players engage with Atomfall.”
Atomfall is coming to PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, and Xbox One on March 27, 2025. It will also be available on day one as part of the Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass subscription services
