Join me on a violent journey through the English countryside, AKA: 90 minutes with Atomfall, the new survival-action game from Sniper Elite developer, Rebellion. I recently visited a pub in North London to have a pint and some hands-on playtime, and came away intrigued by Atomfall’s open-ended approach to mission design and eerie tone. I also may have lost my mind and decided to attack everyone I saw, including an old lady who likely didn’t deserve it, with a cricket bat. Let me explain why.
Every NPC in Atomfall can be killed, from the lowliest grunt to the most important quest-giver. As I sit down to start the demo, I decide that my mission is to test that design. I’ll admit that my approach is inelegant; barely two minutes into my exploration of this digital Cumbria, I clumsily activate a tripwire alarm that results in me having to end the lives of three alerted guards. I do so with the blunt face of a cricket bat, a hefty chunk of wood that’s Christened as my murder partner with a liberal splash of claret.
I later loot a bow and arrow, and being the glutton for archery in games that I am, I quickly equip it. Now I’m set for long and short-range encounters, and so can let Mr. Cricket Bat take a well-earned rest. Nearby, I spot a hulking wicker man, towering over me and waiting to be set alight. I’m not going near that. I’ve seen how that story ends. Sights like this nod to the folk horror undertones that serve as the bedrock for this region of Atomfall’s segmented world, which is made up of multiple “open zones”. It generates a convincingly uneasy atmosphere that only feeds into the larger mystery I’m trying to crack: what exactly happened here in this sleepy, now irradiated corner of England?
My thoughts about such a mystery are interrupted by a rabble of druids, who presumably have something to do with that wicker man. They prove the perfect range finders for my newly-acquired bow. One. Two. Three. They all fall down. “I’M ROBIN BLOODY HOOD”, my brain shouts to itself, before I snap out of it and back into my London pub surroundings. I haven’t had a drink yet, I promise. It’s only 10am.
The bow feels good to fire. But I’m more interested in Atomfall’s smart approach to stamina. A traditional depleting and regenerating bar is nowhere to be found, instead replaced by a heart rate monitor that increases the more you perform physically taxing actions. Sprinting for an extended period will push you well over 140 bpm, for example, making it harder for you to aim steadily and accurately if you suddenly have to stop and fight. Later, I find a Bow Mastery skill manual that unlocks a perk that negates the impact a heightened heartbeat has on drawing the bowstring back. It’s not exactly the most exciting perk, and a browse through the menus suggests Atomfall doesn’t boast the most complex skill tree suite. However, it does seem malleable enough to tailor your character’s skills to a gameplay style of your choosing if, for example, you’d prefer to specialise in stealth over gunplay.
With my only achievement so far being a bunch of dead druids, you may rightfully be wondering what my overall goal is here. And, to an extent, so was I. Aimless exploration of the Casterfall Woods region had yet to unearth anything significant, so I follow my only quest lead: a note pointing me in the direction of a herbalist, Mother Jago, who lives near an old mine. Along the way I spot allusions to the greater story at play, as a shimmering, oily swirl of blues and purples hovers over a power plant – the apparent cause of Britain’s descent into the post-apocalypse. Nearby, a phone box rings and a creepy voice warns me to stay out of the woods. It’s too late for that, but thanks for the call anyway.
The path is littered with similar small environmental story touches, such as an old boathouse rigged with an unsettling alarm system, the words “get lost” painted across it – a warning the nearby mound of skulls and bones seemingly didn’t heed. There’s an enjoyably uneasy vibe around every corner of Atomfall, with sleepy, leafy forests giving way to creepy zones of terror. Plenty of Fallout comparisons have been made ever since its reveal, but I think Stalker and its recent sequel is a far more apt touchstone, both in terms of tone and game design.
Following another druid massacre in which I butcher them and loot their garden center home for herbs (a quick-thyme event, if you will) I meet Mother Jago at her quaint allotment retreat. Dressed in a plum-coloured coat and animal skull and rose-laden hat, she resembles Angela Lansbury if she’d got big into black magic aromatherapy instead of crime solving. But my hopes that she could make Atomfall’s opaque mystery any clearer are immediately dashed – she gives only vague answers to my questions, despite exhausting every dialogue option as I dig for clues as to where to go next. This reminds me of classic point-and-click adventures in the way you’re encouraged to explore every corner of conversation in search of a hint. Eventually, a door is opened: Jago offers what she promises to be valuable information in exchange for the safe return of her herbalism book. A book that is, of course, not in a library, but held hostage at the druids’ fortified castle. So, with a new lead in my notebook, I traipse back across the map in search of recipes and the druid blood protecting it.
Atomfall’s freeform design means I’m able to approach from any angle, and so I decide to attack the castle from the side. As I make my way there I encounter a druid patrol near an abandoned petrol station. The surely soon-to-be-considered historic Battle of the Forecourt kicks off as I lob my only grenade into the middle of them. The enemy AI isn’t the most reactive, rarely darting for cover or really engaging in any evasive maneuvers, but the satisfying eruption of blood and bits of bone does alert a couple of archers from further down the road. I put a halt to their advance with a nail bomb and then proceed to slalom their arrows, quickly closing the distance so that I can snap one’s neck before getting my trusty bat out for another round of head-smashing. There’s definitely fun to be had playing around with these enemies, but from the small sample I’ve had so far, I wouldn’t go into Atomfall looking for top-tier combat. Instead, it seems wise to treat enemy encounters more like a fun sideshow to the main event of discovering the world’s secrets.
After sniping a couple of axe-wielding brutes I make it inside the castle’s outer walls. There I stumble across a locked hut. A note printed with a set of map coordinates pinned to its door suggests that the keys are far away to the southeast. Atomfall doesn’t believe in objective markers, instead leaving it up to you to study your map and place down markers on points of interest yourself. Could this locked hut be where the book is hidden? Do I need to go on a quest for this key? My hunch tells me no, and I instead walk up to the central keep’s big front doors.
Once inside, I find a few more druids to club, but no sign of the book. I hunt around its dank hallways, finding nothing but cloth and alcohol to craft healing bandages with. I spend a good ten minutes searching every corner, but no luck. It’s a further example of Atomfall’s obtuse approach to mission design. You won’t have your hand held here, and the book won’t glow gold with a big “pick me up” sign attached. While it can lead to moments of frustration, I find myself ultimately encouraged by Rebellion’s approach to make something that challenges the player and sticks stubbornly to its explorative, almost detective-like vision.
So, with the book nowhere in sight, I decide to follow the paper trail and head to those map coordinates in search of the keys I previously read about. Perhaps this would unlock my path forward? The coordinates lead me into the den of a poison plant monster… thing that seems to boil my brain if I spend too long near it. Rifle bullets make minimal impact, and there’s little I can do to prevent my quick death. I reload my save and use my Skyrim bunny-hopping muscle memory to bypass the beast, leaping down a rock face to collect the keys from one of the creature’s earlier victims. I head back to the hut, where I find a shiny new perk point and a smattering of ammo. As you’ll no doubt be aware, none of these items resemble the herbalism book that I’m trying to find.
Forlorn and slightly lost, I venture under the castle and deep into its bowels, where the druids concoct their rituals and chemical-fuelled practices. I kill the High Priestess and about a dozen of her lackeys, find an SMG, a recipe for crafting poison bombs, and an atomic battery which seemingly opens up a whole new questline that I simply don’t have time to look into before my demo time runs out. Again, the observant among you will notice that none of these items are the book I’m looking for.
After my play session ends, I’m told the book was in the castle, just lying on a table I must have walked past several times. Before that revelation, though, I start to believe the book simply doesn’t exist. That it is a ruse. A lie. I decide to go back to the herbalist and see if she has anything to say for herself. She doesn’t, of course, because the book is real and the quest to acquire it is legitimate. But my own confusion manifests as fully buying into my character’s descent into violence, and so I kill her. She becomes one with her plants in the soil. Searching her body for some kind of hidden “truth”, I find a recipe for something that would appear to help combat the poison swamp monster I encountered earlier. It’s too late for that, but I assume this is the valuable information she was going to exchange her book for. We could have saved a lot of time here, it seems.
Not that you can shave a huge amount of time off Atomfall’s runtime. I’m told by the developers at Rebellion that you’d struggle to finish the story in “less than four or five hours”, and that most players will take around 25 hours. Quite what will happen within those 25 hours could be quite varied, though. I spoke to someone else at the demo session who went on an entirely different adventure to mine during their time playing, one that started with a crashed helicopter I never encountered and led to a whole new region filled with killer robots and mutants. It appears that even by just skimming the surface of Atomfall, there are many depths, secrets, and mysteries to be found.
I do wonder if some of the objectives may be too obtuse for some, though. The lack of direction could certainly be offputting, but Atomfall feels like a game that rewards you the more you indulge in its obfuscated quest design. The blurred lines between the side and main objectives add a real peril to every action, with its malleable plot design encouraging each player to tell their own tale and find their own ending and explanation for what has happened here in the irradiated English countryside. I’ll still see the end of the story, despite killing off poor old Mother Jago, it may just be wildly different from yours.
But, that’s all that I have time to see today. For now, my hands bloodied from the undeserved demise of a herbalist and the warpath I’ve left behind, I decide to engage in full-British mode: take my cricket bat, head to the pub, and wait for this all to blow over.
Simon Cardy is a Senior Editorial Producer who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.
