I made a video essay about Atomfall, these are my thoughts after multiple playthroughs to get through the different endings. When Atomfall was first revealed, the pitch sounded like someone had taken Fallout, fed it a full English breakfast, and sent it off to the Lake District with a cricket bat. And sure enough that’s more or less what we got. A post-nuclear survival game where the british countryside is full of cultists, irradiated flora, hostile militia patrols, and robots that look like they wandered in from the set of Doctor Who.
It’s set in an alternate 1960s Britain, five years after a fictionalised version of the Windscale disaster and from the moment you leave your bunker, the game feels like you're investigating Chernobyl while sipping tea. The dry-stone walls, red phone boxes, eerie woodland footpaths and stoic villagers give Atomfall a sense of place that most post-apocalyptic games would kill for and it manages to do this without being grimey, derelict and grey. It is aggressively British, in a way that’s charming and occasionally bleak enough to qualify as heritage art. As a brit, it made me feel right at home.
Now let’s get this out of the way, Atomfall isn’t quite “British Fallout”. The dialogue and interaction system is quite flexible for a survival-leaning game. Almost every character can be killed, lied to, betrayed, helped or ignored and if you do decide to massacre half of Cumbria, the story mostly shrugs and carries on. Sometimes that freedom leads to genuinely interesting narrative detours. Other times it feels like the world’s politely pretending your actions didn’t happen, sort of like Brexit but with more druids.
Gameplay, meanwhile, is where Atomfall starts to resemble one of those British B-movies that your nan swears is “a classic.” It looks great, the atmosphere is thick but the mechanics underneath do leave a bit to be desired. Combat is serviceable but rarely thrilling. Guns and bows feel era-appropriate; the shotgun, though, absolutely slaps when you’re up against feral Thralls but stiff aiming and occasionally janky melee drag it back down to Earth very fast. With the exception of the kick, kicking an enemy feels very satisfying.
Stealth is theoretical. On paper, you’re creeping through tall grass, planning ambushes like some post-apocalyptic fox in a hedge. In practice, enemies spot you from distances that imply telescopic vision, then immediately shout at you 'Oi who's that there?' like you’ve just parked on their driveway. Half the time sneaking just delays the inevitable brawl, the other half it works beautifully, which makes it feel less like strategy and more like a coin toss.
Quests don’t behave like typical RPG errands either. Instead of tidy yellow objective markers, Atomfall gives you leads, little investigative breadcrumbs that you follow across villages, bunkers, woodland trails and ruined farmhouses. It’s more Agatha Christie than Bethesda. You piece together clues, interview sometimes anxious survivors, and poke around suspicious cottages like a nosy neighbour.
But when it works, it really works. Finding a hidden bunker behind an abandoned shop feels like stumbling into a secret chapter of the story. Entire questlines branch or close depending on your choices whether you side with the authoritarian Protocol troops, the eerie mud-whispering druid cultists or simply lie to everyone like a civil servant with no moral compass.
But this structure also means you’ll occasionally wander the countryside looking like a confused tourist who got off at the wrong stop on the way to the lake district. Leads loop back on themselves, objectives drift off quietly and sometimes the payoff just doesn't land.
Characters are one of Atomfall’s highlights. Thick Cumbrian accents, Welsh burrs, blunt humour and villagers who sound like they’ve seen things the government would absolutely deny. Some NPCs react meaningfully to your choices, others forget you exist the moment you turn away, like a sitcom extra between takes. A few story arcs fizzle before they’ve even warmed up, but the cultural flavour carries a lot of the experience on its shoulders.
Then there’s the inventor, four weapon slots and a painfully small number of general item spaces, meaning you’ll constantly juggle scrap, food, ammo and mission items like you're playing tetris.
Still, Atomfall isn’t all frustration, some encounters shine. The Thralls with glowing blue veins are unsettling in a way most survival games rarely pull off. The environmental storytelling, derelict farmhouses, quarantined villages, creepy woodland shrines and Cold War bunkers, sometimes delivers more tension and intrigue than the main plot beats. And not every enemy instantly goes feral when you exist near them, outlaws might shout at you, warn you off, then maybe stab you; which, if nothing else, is reassuringly British escalation.
Underneath the jank, there’s a sincere charm. The world is fun to explore, even when the mechanics wobble. The ideas behind the branching leads system are genuinely strong, even if their consequences don’t always land as hard as they should. It’s a game that feels like it wanted to be great and landed somewhere closer to imaginative and slightly clunky.
And that fits Rebellion, the developers, rather well. Best known for Sniper Elite and Zombie Army, this is them stepping out of their comfort zone. Although I did miss slow-motion bullets entering Nazi skulls.
So in the end, Atomfall feels like a very British apocalypse, atmospheric, eccentric, sometimes frustrating and full of potential. It’s not the sprawling epic I expected, it's more like a cosy, slightly haunted murder mystery you pick up between bigger games. And that’s fine by me. Not every apocalypse needs to change your life. Not every open world needs to be a collectathon.