I've Finished Atomfall Four Times: It's Not British Fallout and It's Better for it — Atomfall review
157I've Finished Atomfall Four Times: It's Not British Fallout and It's Better for it
Code was provided by the publisher for critique purposes
Unless you’re really well informed on what exactly the game is, there’s a good chance Atomfall is a very different experience from what you expect. From its aesthetic, to its marketing material, to the the conversation around it, Atomfall has been perceived as a Fallout but with like Warburtons bread and a local Sainsbury’s. The reality is more small in scope, more unique, and frankly much more exciting to me than that. There’s something very special here. You just have to let it show you.
I think a lot of people will dislike Atomfall, and frankly, that’s for a good reason. Many of the elements I'll get into here will be the exact things people dislike and those elements either aren't quite as important to me, or the restrictions they make to the game are part of why I found this game to be special. I love Stalker, Vampire: The Masquerade, and a whole host of very flawed PC classics, and Atomfall gives me a similar feeling as I play.
Waking up in a bunker with no memory of why you are there, your slumber is interrupted by a scientist who is bleeding out, who offers you a keycard to your escape if you can patch him up. A very basic setup that also teaches you crafting, you can help him or kill him to get ahold of that card and this gets you out into the surface. It's no better out there than in the bunker as this is where you find out you are, unfortunately, .. stuck In England. An England in the middle of a quarantined zone after a fictionalised take on the real-life Windscale nuclear accident, but England nonetheless. Spooky stuff.
This accident sees the rise of bands of wandering outlaws, a Wickerman-style cult known as the druids, and mutated animals and people who have succumbed to a growing fungus-like infection stemming from the glowing reactor you see in the distance. This isn't all you'll see, of course, but these are some of the main enemies you will come across. When I say Atomfall isn't like Fallout, I mean it. The game is so much smaller in scope, there's only a handful of locations you move back and forth between and you can technically finish it in about five hours if you know what you're doing ahead of time. Without any skips, glitches or technical knowledge of how the game works on a mechanical level, it is intended to be small and the main quest is mostly just you trying to escape, teaming up with whoever you can to do so. I think the game compares better to a mixture of Stalker, Deathloop, or even a survival horror like Resident Evil at parts. We'll get a little more into those comparisons later but it's important to note that scope allows it to tell fewer stories and therefore let them breathe. It can pepper notes and layers throughout locations without having to neatly end everything, lest you get lost in pages of journals and quest logs. I liked almost every story told to some degree and combed through the notes it throws at you, reading pretty much every one. See, the likes of a Skyrim is often so big that:
A) it's narrative structure becomes a tad inconsistent for me
and
B) There's so much to do that I often end up tuning out.
Stories in Atomfall are less grand, less overarching and, though notes of that melody is carried on the wind, and you get to hear the drums pounding from a distance, the full song is only a few minutes long. It thrashes and rages, then resides as you continue through the album. A baker trying to keep the lights on after the end of her world, as her husband succumbs to the rot that is currently spreading across quarantine. A woman who lost her mental faculties before all of this who can't seem to comprehend what's going on and the trail of sadness around her that makes you kinda glad she doesn’t understand what’s truly going on. A church with a dead body, and the deals you make to hide it from the implied corruption and authority of the militia that is now "protecting" the town. It has all these strands of stories and you can effectively pick them up anywhere via the lead system. It's an effective way of getting to the heart of what makes Atomfall's best stories work, and makes them rather fun to run through one more time.