Atomfall hands-on: A beautiful world populated by terrible people
3.7.2025
By Dave Tach, Contributor
Atomfall takes place five years after the Windscale nuclear disaster, a real-life event that occurred in 1957 when a fire swept through a nuclear power plant. Atomfall’s alt-history setting imagines a scenario where things went quite a bit worse than they did in our reality. You take on the role of a sort-of amnesiac, awoken in this world where things have gone very wrong.
“When you start the game, it is as an empty vessel,” said Head of Design Ben Fisher. “You wake up in a bunker, and you've got no idea of who you are, how you fit into the game world. Someone rushes towards you and asks for help. As you explore through the game world, you might develop a perspective on how you fit into the story.”
I began my Atomfall playthrough some time after that awakening, standing in what looked like a large drainage tunnel. This was part of the quarantine zone outside of Windscale. I was every bit as confused as an amnesiac should be, but I heard someone calling out in the distance. I am nothing if not naive, so I followed the voice—and discovered that this was a terrible idea when several angry, leather-clad people surrounded me. I swung my well-worn cricket bat more like I was trying to cool them down than hurt them, and the group promptly bashed my head in.
I restarted back in the drainage tunnel, wiser.
I checked my inventory and discovered—at least if we're grading on a post-apocalyptic curve—a decent loadout. I had a shotgun, a rifle, and an axe, along with a few other amenities. Most of these were rusty junk, but rusty junk can still be effective in a pinch. I equipped my weapon and trudged back to the voices, ready to take my revenge on these druids.
The Atomfall math goes like this: One rusty shotgun and a handful of shells against a swarm of enemies equals death. For me.
I restarted back in the drainage tunnel, wiser.
I didn’t need to fight these feral jerks. I’m a cypher! I’m whomever I want to be! That’s what Atomfall is all about, really: doing whatever you want in a big sandbox. And what I suddenly wanted to be was away from these people. I equipped my cricket bat just in case, crouched down and decided that stealth was a better option.
A few minutes later, I’d ambled my way past the angry people and down to a creek bed. Water gurgled pleasantly beneath my feet, and I felt at least safe enough to spare a moment and look around, trying to figure out my next move. What I saw was beautiful. Lush green trees swayed in the wind underneath a sunny sky. Moss grew on nearby rocks. If I hadn’t already been murdered a couple of times by lunatics yammering about the divinity of soil, it could’ve felt like a walk in the park.
Still, it was a pleasant—borderline shocking—setting for a game set in the wake of nuclear disaster. Every other game I could think of with a similar setup had conditioned me to associate a fallen world with drab brown wasteland. Atomfall takes a different path, trading desert hardpan for the pasture of the pastoral Lake District in the English countryside. It felt not just authentic but somehow real.
That’s Atomfall’s design philosophy on display, according to Ryan Green, Art Director at Rebellion. In fact, some of the rocks that I stopped to admire are, in a sense, very much real.
“We have a photogrammetry team, a team of photographers that go and take photos of real-world objects, which we then process and make into 3D objects that we drop in the game,” Green said during a recent Q&A. “It’s really cool for us because it gives us a nice grounding of things that actually got grabbed from reality, and then we obviously can build the fictional stuff around that and establish a nice quality bar.”
I moved up into the shade to plan my next move under a bit more cover. I’d awoken with a note in my inventory. It alluded to a location in the far north of the map, which I accessed from the main menu. It showed one of Atomfall’s several connected, open-world areas, without much (if anything) in the way of direction.
“The map was an interesting problem to solve as well because it ties back to the questions about open-world tropes,” Head of Design Ben Fisher said. “We definitely didn't want to have a map at the end of the game which was covered in icons telling you to go here, to go here, to go here, because that sort of cognitive overload is one of the things that makes those games almost wearing, if that's the right word.”
I set a waypoint based on the note's text and spent the next several minutes avoiding those druid psychos, who seemed to be everywhere in the woods. That simple journey put Atomfall’s choose-your-own-adventure philosophy on display. Rebellion wants players to go their own way.
“It's that need to look at the map and work out where you need to go based on the landmarks around you,” Fisher said. “It's something I was always really, really keen on having. It's that focus on experiencing the world around you—not just following icons—that we were desperately trying to cling to, I suppose.”
Near an abandoned mine, I met a kindly old woman in a billowing purple dress and a large, flowery hat. She didn’t want to kill me, which made me love Mother Jago instantly. She told me that those druids had stolen something of hers. I had no trouble believing her, and I vowed to find and infiltrate their castle to recover my new video game grandma’s item.
A few minutes later, as I was making my way to the castle, I answered a random phone ringing in an iconic red phone booth. The unidentified, garbled voice on the other line suggested that it might not be the best idea to instantly believe woodland grannies.
We learn the hard lessons learned in the hard times, and Atomfall seems to be full of them. Atomfall is a game that values player freedom more than checkpoint progression, and at least in the area where I played, there were dozens of things that I wanted to investigate and explore. Fisher used a phrase several times that both encapsulates my time with the game and the developer’s guiding philosophy: observe, plan and execute are what he calls their “creative principles.”
“We want the player to actually take in the scene in front of them and make judgments about the smartest call,” he said. “Some of the unusual features in the game emerged from the setting itself and the environment, and that made sense. Some of it came from Rebellion's design and creative principles. What we found is if you give the player too much guidance, they stop observing. They start just looking at the compass marker—and, you know, then multiply it across every game system.”
That’s really how it felt for me as I played Atomfall for the first time. I implicitly trusted the druids until the whole murder thing. I wanted to love purple grandma in the ruins, but then a disembodied phone voice told me otherwise. But why would I trust him?
The simple truth is that I was on my own. I’d been on my own since the beginning. It just took me a while to realize that. I strongly suspect that one of the most interesting things about Atomfall will be deciding who you are, as the protagonist. That seems like an emergent exercise—and it’s not a bad parallel for Atomfall’s development.
Turns out, this wasn’t always the plan. Atomfall was a more guided experience in the early days, according to Fisher—but it didn’t quite work.
“It was a great challenge to get into, but it kind of emerged by itself,” Fisher said. “We got to a point in development where you could play through the game and the narrative was a bit more guided. To use the metaphor of a TV mini-series, you would go through a sequence of quests, each of which felt like an episode in the series. But then it felt less like you were having the adventure, and more like you were stumbling across someone else's, and piecing together, like a detective, what had happened to someone else. So we wanted to flip that and make you more in control.”
As a result, Atomfall doesn’t have a traditional quests system. It has what they call a Leads system, in which you get to choose what to investigate.
And that’s what’s most intriguing about Atomfall to me. My weird path emerged from the decisions I made. Yours will, too. I suspect it’ll be mostly different than mine. Heck, I suspect that my next path through the woods will be significantly different than my last one, too. That’s no accident, according to Fisher.
“It's all designed to be a big kind of messy, complicated sandbox,” he said. “If you watch a couple of different people play the game, they'll have a very different experience.”
Atomfall is set to release March 27 on the Epic Games Store, and you can pre-purchase it now.