Atomfall is a new survival game with a very British twist.
The game opens like many titles of this stripe: You awaken—a nondescript, average Joe—in a dimly lit bunker with no memory of who you are or how you got there.
A moment later, a badly bleeding scientist staggers in wrapped in full hazmat-suit protection. You can bop him in the face and steal his keycard to this mysterious place. Or you can bind his wounds, and he’ll give it to you.
That’s your first choice of many that will reflect your moral predisposition while teaching you survival basics. Within moments you figure out how to search for every collectable scrap around you and craft a bandage, or you’ll discover how to throw a punch. Your choices and lessons stretch on from there.
As you step outside, blinking in the bright light of the rolling upland hills of England, a cryptic call comes in via a strangely positioned, iconically red British phone booth. And so your journey begins in earnest. All you know is what the game’s opening narration told you: It’s 1962. And you’re somehow smack dab in a quarantined area surrounding the Windscale atomic reactor.
It’s up to you to make your way through sun-dappled groves; abandoned buildings and farms; and locked-up science instillations and small towns run by military forces to figure out what happened. Of course, there’s also the question of what you can do about the disaster at hand and how you can get away from it. You gather rusty weapons, food and medicine, crafting supplies and harvesting whatever information you can in this wide-open world.
Of course, a lot of that info comes from residents with broad British accents—some who want to help you, some who want to use you, and some who’d rather cave in your skull with a cricket bat. Oh, and there are also swarms of killer rats, mad religious cultists, bioluminescent zombies and other beasties that want you dead.
One other note is that Atomfall doesn’t hold your hand through any of this. The game will point you in a good direction when you find a discarded journal note or take on a quest from a local, but otherwise your choices are your own.
Atomfall is a single-player-only game with multiple (good and bad) endings based on your choices. The game does not require an online connection to play.
Depending on your choices, players can be heroic individuals who take brave steps to save others. And the surrounding world is a colorful place filled with hidden clues and information at every turn.
Those who enjoy independent discovery and gluing together the pieces of a generally nondescript puzzle in a perilous world will likely enjoy the game journey …
… However, it should be noted that this is a tense and often bloody survival horror game. Some of those darker elements can feel a bit “softened” by the gurgling brooks and friendly parts of the English countryside, but the fearful atmosphere is always close at hand.
Players are often on the run, using knives, hatchets, bats, clubs, along with a variety of pistols, bow and arrows, shotguns, explosives and rifles (with very limited ammo) to attack their many, many foes. Battles spatter blood and involve fiery explosions. Gamers can also kill innocent civilians by stabbing them or snapping their necks.
Language, for the most part, is rather reserved for an M-rated game. But you still encounter uses of the s-word, “pr–k” and the British crudity “bugger.” There is a group of masked religious cultists who worship “the voice in the soil.” And when players are infected by a radioactive virus, they begin to hear the voices, too.
There’s a certain enjoyment to be had with Atomfall, especially for those who love exploration and large-scale mystery solving without having their hand held. But there’s still a lot of rabid and deadly blood-splattering that’ll cling to players, too. Despite the game’s occasional pastoral moments, it’s still an M-rated game.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
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