In all my years of playing video games, I’ve always felt that open-world RPGs are a particularly special niche. They can provide players with some of the most immersive and unforgettable experiences that leave lasting impressions and forge legacies in the industry. Creating one is an ambitious feat, to be sure, but it’s something I always like to see more of.
As it turns out, those attempts can come from some of the most unexpected of places, and the team at Rebellion chose to step up to the plate with Atomfall. The mere announcement of this singleplayer, post-apocalyptic RPG had many of us singing from the rooftops, myself included. I was anxious about what to expect upon taking the plunge, and what followed was one of the most intriguing and bittersweet gaming experiences I’ve had in a while.
Disclaimer: The following review contains certain story-related spoilers, so read ahead with discretion.
A Nuclear Fallout Adventure That Isn’t Fallout
It’s hard to deny that at least some of us who were singing on those rooftops at Atomfall‘s announcement got flashback glimpses of our days with the golden era of the Fallout franchise. A mysterious new lone wanderer dropped into the English countryside while a (sadly historically accurate) nuclear catastrophe wreaks havoc on civilized society. Humanity is reduced to morally questionable factions that clash for power while the player struggles to survive, traverse unforgiving and surreal landscapes, and seek out the truth behind everything.
From a broader scope, that’s a relatively accurate description of Atomfall. You wake up in a strange underground bunker and get confronted by a wounded hazmat scientist who pleads for you to find a place called The Interchange and reveal the truth about something called “Oberon” to the world. The brief exchange acts as a pseudo-tutorial for the game’s dialogue/choice system, where you can decide how to handle situations with NPCs. There’s no reputation system to worry about regarding consequences, ironically, because your protagonist is entirely shrouded in mystery and remains that way.
This is where the game already starts to deviate from notions of a legitimate Fallout spiritual successor, and from a number of traditional features typically found in open-world RPGs. There is no character customization, no finding out or giving them a name, no backstory, no family ties, nothing. Everyone you encounter throughout the game has no idea who you are, to the point that you feel like little more than a ghost in this strange, wounded land. Your only true purpose is to be a courier for corrupt government secrets.
Exploration is also a distinctly different experience this time around. You have lush, vibrantly green countryside hills to wander through, a stark contrast to the barren, brown-tinted Capital Wasteland or the dry Mojave desert. Not to say that other beloved post-apocalyptic adventures like The Last of Us haven’t done the same. Catastrophes don’t always have to leave naught in their wake but dirt and desolation, and if anything, it’s more intriguing when nature thrives amongst it. The simplest elements can tell their own stories if done correctly.
Fallout compromised its desolate settings with unique monuments that stood out against the horizon, plenty of hidden secrets beneath the surface, charming cultural influences, and a miles-deep trove of fascinating lore. While exploring the different regions of Atomfall, I noticed a good amount of that same inspiration present. Aside from the Windscale Disaster itself, the development team sought to include various influential staples of 1950s British sci-fi and folklore culture in the game. They may not always be obvious to players outside of the UK, but certain ones like the giant Wicker Man statues in the Casterfell Woods definitely stand out.
That said, I do think there could have been opportunities to express cultural influences in more universally understood ways, such as through music. Fallout became synonymous with already-famous singers like Frank Sinatra, The Ink Spots, Cole Porter, and more. You could hear it no matter where you went in the wasteland, which not only added to the game’s unique charm but also grounded it with songs we know all too well in our own world.
The comparisons to Fallout aren’t meant to diminish what Atomfall has accomplished in its own right whatsoever. Rather, it’s to help establish how the game intends to stand on its own despite those inevitable comparisons from myself and other players. Through my experience with the gameplay, it’s clear that it wants to leave its own mark while still paying certain respects to its genre forebears.
A Streamlined RPG With Strange Flexibility
To continue on the tangent of where Atomfall differs from other post-apocalyptic predecessors, the biggest example is its staggering degree of flexibility. Even most open-world RPGs give you some guidance in regards to the main story that drives your character and certain gatekeeping measures to keep you from going literally everywhere, particularly locations that would otherwise throw the sequence of events off-balance.
Rather than worry about that or much of anything else, Atomfall gives you unfettered free reign to decide how you deal with Oberon in the depths of The Interchange, as well as how you decide to get there. From the moment you leave that bunker at the start of the game, any choices henceforth are entirely in your hands. For players who like a sense of complete freedom in this type of sandbox setting, it’s a golden opportunity seldom seen in such games. The map is noticeably more streamlined and segmented rather than one giant open map, but you’re free to go to any of them within the first minute.
However, for those who like at least a semblance of narrative structure, especially for a heavy subject like a nuclear disaster, it can seem a little discombobulating. On top of your protagonist being essentially faceless, a sense of where to go feels almost too lost. Atomfall evidently has a compelling story, somewhat grounded in reality with a hint of fantasy (Oberon), but the journey to get there and truly experience it is narratively murky.
There’s an irony when you’re left to make all the decisions and tell your own story within a story, but what happens when you don’t really have your own story and the story beyond that isn’t given the structure it does need?
This makes Atomfall a bit of a polarizing experience overall. Some will wholly embrace the liberty it gives, and that’s totally fine. However, others may find themselves confused and even a bit frustrated at the lack of direction or clarity where it’s needed.
Certain other elements of its gameplay also sadly feel a bit hypocritical to its message of complete freedom. You may be able to go wherever you wish, and do whatever you need to survive, but you must do so with a limited inventory space and even a limit on the amount of ammo you can carry, regardless of space you have otherwise. I will admit, not being allowed to hoard even a semi-decent amount of ammunition in a game that prioritizes ranged weapons felt a bit disingenuous.
On top of it all, Atomfall surprisingly refrains from providing Fast Travel as a means to navigate its open world more easily. Considering that the game lavishes you with a pile of intriguing Leads (i.e. – quests) to explore in each region, having to manually backtrack countless times around the map to resolve them leaves the game’s sense of adventure and exploration feeling a bit more sluggish than it should.
So Many Interesting Plot Points That Remain Unresolved
Despite criticisms about its gameplay and other creative choices, Atomfall‘s world is still one of great intrigue to me. Despite its smaller scale and scattered overarching narrative, I still feel compelled to explore everything and truly understand the history of this region in northern England and why things happened the way they did. There’s so much potential in what Rebellion has cooked up with this ambitious new IP, but its overall execution unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally to a degree) left quite a few loose ends that don’t give the story as a whole the resolution it deserves.
For a nuclear incident of such magnitude, and the importance of Oberon and what it meant to the country’s nuclear capabilities, where was the British government in all of this? After building a wall around the site and sending in Protocol to enforce martial law over poor citizens still living in the area, they seemed content to leave it alone.
On that note, what exactly is Oberon besides the sparse bit of information we get throughout the entire game? It serves as the story’s endgame, its supposed villain behind the villain, the focal point of every phone call you get from the ominous voice who tells you it “must die”. Depending on your choices with certain NPCs, Oberon’s true purpose and fate are left shrouded in mystery, in an underwhelming fashion.
Why do the pristine red telephone booths exist at all? They stick out prominently against the landscapes as an all-too-recognizable facet of British culture and serve to connect you with the ominous “Voice on the Telephone”. However, that voice never manifests as an actual person, even by the end of the story. There’s no Atlas revealing a grand betrayal at the story’s biggest plot twist in the depths of Rapture, or Mr. House’s face appearing on a gigantic screen in New Vegas’s tallest tower. So what was the point of the Voice’s so-called existence to begin with in Atomfall? If nothing else, why not use the booths as a unique fast travel mechanism?
Overall, much like the focus of its story in the depths of the Interchange, Atomfall is a fascinating experiment that definitely has merits for what it’s accomplished in helping push the singleplayer RPG genre forward. It may not grant all of the 2010s nostalgia some of us want, and certain creative choices behind its structure and gameplay may sooner divide its playerbase, but it’s one you may not want to leave the phone ringing on.
Published: Mar 27, 2025 5:50 AM UTC