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.
Eventually I find a door into the dam. I walk cautiously through an entry hallway that has a mid-century industrial look similar to Fallout’s vaults and come into a large, open room with a computer terminal sitting prominently beneath a bank of lights. I don’t see any druids anywhere, so I run towards it. And that’s when I notice the giant robot stomping around the other side of the room. When it sees me frantically running back to the front door it sounds a loud alarm and quickly sprays fire throughout the whole building, a napalm-ish fiery mist that almost immediately kills me—making the sixth or so death during my 40 minutes with the game so far.
So I know to leave the robot alone. After my previous save reloads I find myself right outside the dam again. I head around the side of the dam to a patch of grass I haven’t explored yet. There I find the body of a man named Jenks, who’s carrying a letter about the woman he serves in a manor house not far from the dam. Atomfall doesn’t point me towards that house, and it’s not even on my map at the moment. The letter gives me vague directions, though, so I decide to skip out on the dam and go check out some of the local real estate.
Some of Atomfall’s inspirations are obvious: Fallout, the Metro series, even Dark Souls and the way it doesn’t give the player clear directions. Fisher is clearly a big fan of that kind of soft touch. “It puts a lot of trust into players’ hands,” he explained. “It drastically changed how we approach building a game. At one point, we experimented with having a more traditional quest structure, and it felt too guided. Using something like leads means that you can give the player more of a sense of agency and ownership on their exploration through the game, because they can be opening and closing options for themselves and not even realize it. It also encouraged us to interconnect every bit of narrative in the game into this bigger picture. So no matter where you interact with the leads, you’ll eventually find your way back to the Windscale plant.”
Just as important as its videogame influences are the various British films and TV shows that inspired Atomfall. Fisher pointed out that “a lot of the world building is pulled from British narrative reference points like early Doctor Who or The Quartermass Experiment.” He also credited the classic conspiracy thriller series The Prisoner, the pivotal folk horror film The Wicker Man, and the general sense of paranoia that suffused thrillers and spy movies throughout the Cold War.
The Wicker Man’s influence doesn’t just lie in the neo-pagan cult that killed me so often during my demo. One thing Fisher loves about Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s movie is that it doesn’t have clearly defined “goodies and baddies.” “There’s a murky pagan situation that a character sticks their face into where it’s not welcome,” Fisher noted. “And you know, the player fills that role to some extent in the game.”
When it comes to the influence of The Prisoner, Rebellion avoided the most obvious reference points. The quarantine zone is not a garishly colored enclave right out of Swinging London designed to confuse and psychologically entrap its unwilling residents. (It’s mostly just kind of green and pastoral.) What Atomfall draws from The Prisoner, Fisher explained, is how “characters might have hidden motivations” and that there’s “a kind of put-upon protagonist trying to uncover pieces of a greater conspiracy, a greater mystery, to try and understand their place in the world. As you try and make your way towards the Windscale plant, you’ll find your way into a location called the Interchange, which is a kind of mystery location that I won’t spoil just now, but it has that similar sort of resonance with those psy-op elements of The Prisoner.”
Playing Atomfall in The Woodman can almost feel like a psy-op of its own. A loud, brightly lit pub at daytime might not be the best environment to play an RPG with immersive ambitions, and those game-style radio messages on the bar’s speakers are really distracting when playing the game; every time one plays I think it’s happening within Atomfall and not The Woodman. Still, during my hour-and-a-half holiday in Atomfall I uncovered a game with a rich and unique cultural heritage—one that distinguishes it from any of the games it might evoke. This world and its ragtag nuclear survivors, all skin and bone and complicated lives, are very British, and could never be found in, say, Oklahoma, U.S.A. When Atomfall comes out later this month I look forward to having a cup of tea (maybe with or without some alcohol) and diving back into the Windscale contamination zone in a more controlled environment. That would definitely help work out the few kinks encountered during my preview.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.