Atomfall: A Very British Nuclear Disaster
I’m in a pub right off of Muswell Hill, about a mile from where Ray and Dave Davies grew up, and I’m getting killed repeatedly by a group of nuclear druids spouting mystic mumbo jumbo. They keep talking about my intentions, saying they’re unclear and that they don’t know them, and apparently that gives them permission to preemptively bash my head in or skewer me with arrows. The sideroom of the pub I’m sitting in has a bed of purple flowers on its ceiling and a series of 1960s-style radio alerts broadcasting on a loop, regularly blending in with the ambient sound within the game. It might be 2025 in the real world, but within the world of Atomfall, the nuclear disaster survival game I’m playing inside The Woodman pub, it’s 1962, and everything about this game has me feeling like a 20th century man.
As an open world action RPG that doesn’t force players into any specific direction, Atomfall will draw a lot of comparisons to Fallout. Rebellion Developments’ game is based on a real incident, though: 1957’s Windscale accident, a level 5 nuclear event in northern England that remains the UK’s worst such disaster. The real Windscale fire had no immediate fatalities, but was connected to the long term cancer deaths of between 100 and 240 unfortunate souls. In Atomfall, the disaster resulted in the creation of a sizable quarantine zone, and those who live within it are clearly paying the price. The cult of druids roam the countryside, talking about “the voice of the soil” and attacking anybody they don’t recognize. At least two kindly old British women that I meet during my 90 minute demo show obvious signs of dementia. Everybody I encounter suffers from some kind of acute schizophrenia or paranoia.
Basing a game on the Windscale disaster, a well-known incident in England that is largely unknown in the rest of the world, grew out of Rebellion’s interest in using games to explore British culture. As Head of Design Ben Fisher told me, the idea of using Windscale as a backdrop came from Rebellion co-founder Jason Kingsley. “There are a lot of games based in post nuclear disaster quarantine zones. It’s almost like a genre within itself,” Fisher noted. “But there haven’t been any based around that first disaster. So that was the inkling of saying, what would a British version of this kind of genre look like? And over time, the specifics of the game that you see now kind of developed. We followed what was most interesting about the setting. We chose mechanics that supported that setting, and it kind of developed from there.”
Looking to Windscale for inspiration also let Rebellion dig into the England of the ‘50s and ‘60s. “A lot of the world building that we did was looking back into ‘50s / ‘60s British storytelling, as well as looking even further back into British history itself,” Fisher explained. “That really helped us build an environment that felt consistent and rich, and there’s a lot of flavor from that era in the audio that you hear, and the way some of the people who are more mentally there talk.”
It’s all in keeping with Rebellion’s longrunning interest in the country it calls home and its culture. Known for its World War II-set Sniper Elite series and for publishing the legendary British comic anthology 2000 AD, Rebellion is poised to take the Britishness of its work to a new level with Atomfall. “Over time it’s developed that we typically do broad, pulpy British rip-roaring adventures,” Fisher, a native Scotsman, admitted. “And it seems like a good, natural fit for us. There’s a lot of cultural richness there that other people aren’t pulling from, because maybe they don’t know the cultural reference point. And it just seems like a deep well to pull from.”
It’s veddy British
Back in Atomfall, I’m following a number of leads telling me to find the druids’ headquarters, which is inside some kind of castle. There’s a huge dam nearby, and for a while I think maybe that’s the castle. I approach the dam slowly, deliberately, trying to make sure I don’t encounter multiple enemies at once; the game’s brutal, heavy combat is manageable when you’re facing somebody one-on-one, but facing even two enemies at once can be a challenge. Perhaps that’s because I stick to melee the entire time, bludgeoning those druids with a small hatchet that offers a good combination of speed and power. For a while I try using a larger, two-handed axe, and although it deals a mighty wallop, it’s also so slow and cumbersome that I routinely die against faster enemies. And despite having a rifle and a pistol on my person, and a handful of bullets for both of them, my deeply ingrained fear of wasting ammo in games where it’s extremely scarce prevents me from ever even equipping a gun.
I prowl the grounds surrounding the dam, picking off druids one at a time. The easiest way to do that is crawling up behind them and landing a stealth instant kill. Failing that, I just have to duck and weave and hope I land more hits with my weapon of choice than they do.
