Atomfall review: making the postapocalypse quintessentially British

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You awake in a dimly lit bunker with little recollection of yourself or your surroundings. A few moments later, having learned the basics of survival (throwing a punch; crafting a bandage), you emerge blinking into the light. But wait: something is different. You see not a frontier expanse a la Fallout or the painterly wilderness of Breath of the Wild but the windswept uplands of England: ancient dry stone walls snake about rolling hills, enclosing the vivid greens of clipped grass, ferns, and gnarled oak trees.

The next few hours are both brilliantly disorienting and mercilessly punishing. Immediately, Atomfall, whose maker, Rebellion, is behind the cult Sniper Elite series, lets you wander in any direction. Within minutes, you encounter hard-nosed foes speaking in broad British accents who would love nothing more than to turn your skull into cornflakes with a cricket bat. You snoop about ruined farm buildings to scavenge resources before discovering a note from a long-deceased person, containing a set of coordinates that you must mark manually on your map. Lo, the adventure begins proper, with only the lightest-touch guidance.

Through its mix of freeform stealth and semi-open-world survival, Atomfall most closely evokes the Dying Light and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchises. But the game quickly asserts its own personality. Partly, this is because of the world: the year is 1962, five years on from the real-world Windscale atomic reactor fire (the worst nuclear disaster the UK ever experienced). In Atomfall’s alt-history fiction, that event turned out to be even more strange and severe, causing a composite of a region called Cumbria to enter quarantine, essentially becoming its own sci-fi Zone. Fittingly, you do lots of traipsing about evocatively named regions like Skethermoor and Slatten Dale. You wind through paths carved out of flinty slate and pallid limestone, skulking through sun-dappled groves of native deciduous trees and hiding behind crooked walls lined with bright pinky-purple foxgloves.

Stealth survival makes up only half of Atomfall; the other half is solving the mystery of this picturesque nuclear nightmare and how the hell you escape it. You have investigations rather than quests. These are open-ended, able to be started (and, very often, resolved) in multiple ways. Don’t take an immediate liking to an NPC or can’t be bothered to go through the rigmarole of doing them a favor to get something in return? You can always just kill them, as I did with the poor vicar who I was certain would be carrying a certain key. (He wasn’t!)

If you’re able to exercise enough self-restraint not to bash your investigative leads on their heads, then Atomfall does a wonderful job of making you feel like a detective as you slowly unpick this craggy, contested land, hunting down evidence in a way that naturally chimes with exploration. Just beware of the gigantic, fire-spewing robots.

The overall experience, which can last anywhere between 10 and 20 hours, is undeniably absorbing, if a little uneven. Survivalist crafting is streamlined; stealth is serviceable rather than spectacular. The atmosphere is mostly rich and dread-filled. In one chilling emergent moment that could be straight out of a Ben Wheatley movie, a group of forest-dwelling pagans loom out of the woodland mist. I feel a spike of real-world cortisol because rabbles of their size usually mean swift, gruesome death. But in densely populated areas, the mood can be undone by the repetition of a limited pool of enemy barks delivered by an even smaller group of voice actors.

In searching for answers, the game inevitably pushes you below ground into dank government facilities populated by killer rats, human squatters, and strange bioluminescent figures who seem to have an odd relationship with the local fungi. These conspiracies are compelling enough, taking place in a grand labyrinth whose gigantic, interconnected form is gradually unveiled as you power it back up with atomic batteries. But it pales a little in comparison to the people-made horrors that are occurring aboveground — the power grabs and creeping sense of insanity.

For all the toodle-pip quaintness of the writing and visuals, Atomfall is deeply serious about its depiction of an England gone fascistic rogue. An armed force known as Protocol imposes what is essentially lockdown-like martial law. The soldiers, almost without exception, are malicious young men keen to assert their violent will on the unarmed populace while simultaneously preaching a message of civility. In Wyndham village, buildings are festooned with British flags, as if a royal coronation is happening on the same day as a World War II memorial. Out in Casterfell Woods, a pagan group eyes you suspiciously. “What… are you?” they ask while brandishing lethal weaponry, unable to fit you into some kind of imaginary, perfectly definable box. Everyone here seems to value conformity — even the weirdos in the woods.

One of the game’s masterstrokes is how you interact with such ostensibly hostile factions. If you’re unarmed, they will spot you from afar without immediately engaging in combat. Approach and an icon turns yellow, indicating the situation could turn violent. But back off, giving these people a wide enough berth, and the icon will slowly turn white, indicating, at least for now, a mutual desire to avoid hostilities. These moments, especially in the early portion of the game, when you’re less well armed, are brilliantly tense and paranoid. They evoke something of the distrustful, fearing atmosphere that simmers just below actual Britain currently. The social contract is threadbare; in sardonic style, Atomfall hints at the cruelty that might be unleashed when it finally breaks.

That’s the crux of Atomfall: it doesn’t get everything right, but by George, it does get England right. This is a rich, crisis-laden tapestry of the famously green and pleasant land. There is abundant, familiar beauty here: gurgling brooks; stone packhorse bridges; cozy pubs serving real cask ale. The familiarity enhances the horror while also being a change from the usual postapocalyptic video game worlds. As you sprint through this rugged countryside, desperately looking behind at the pack of murderous foes in pursuit, all while leaping over turnstiles, the sense of doom is palpable.

_{Atomfall launches on March 27th on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.}