"We wanted it to feel big" – playing Atomfall from an art director’s perspective

Rebellion's Atomfall is a bit eccentric, a little odd, but very, very interesting. The game is being developed by Oxford-based Rebellion, which made the excellent Sniper Elite: Resistance, and it mines a similar vein of quintessentially British and generally nostalgic word-building.

This first-person action-adventure game mixes in survival elements, a tinge of horror and an open-world feel for exploration, but it's the unique and period-perfect setting of an alternate 1957 that captures the imagination. Based on the real life fire at the Windscale nuclear reactor in Cumbria, Rebellion uses this as a jumping off point for an alt-history wheeze that suggests this was actually merely the visible result of sinister government experimentation.

After two hours of hands-on with Atomfall, at a fairly early stage in the game, I can confirm that it is both great fun to play in the classic survival-horror style, and gloriously atmospheric, set in a quarantined world stuck in the late 1950s that yields its secrets in a pleasingly non-linear manner.

The fact that I started the demo armed with a cricket bat seemed appropriate: Atomfall instantly transports one back to a time of warm beer and Bakelite, its The Avengers (UK), Doctor Who and The Prisoner piped through a take on Fallout. So it was slightly startling to discover that its art director, Ryan Greene, is an American. But Greene provided fine insight into the key part his team played in creating Atomfall’s weird but convincing and inviting world.

Defining a 1950s England in a ruined future

Greene detailed the considerations involved in art-directing a period-piece: “Atomfall is set in 1962, but the area was quarantined as of 1957, so when you pop in there, it and everyone in it has been cut off for a while. So we’re trying to hit those mid-50s-era notes. I’m American and things are different over here versus in the States, but the funny thing is, a lot of things haven’t changed: if you go up to rural Cumbria now, it almost could still be the 1950s in spots.

“For me it was about the vehicles and technology of the era, so you’ll see old phonographs, and things like signage and fonts are pretty different there. We tried to layer it enough so that even in rural areas, you get visual hints. A tree is a tree, whether it’s the 1950s or now, but it’s about hitting those key moments, where you’re looking at a crossroads, and you see a distinctive sign from the period, say.”

Another striking element of Atomfall is its environmental design: the preview gameplay took place mainly in a huge forest called Casterfell Woods, which was lushly vegetated and had a striking level of verticality – at times, I had to more or less solve puzzles in order to traverse my way to specific areas.

Greene fleshed out his approach to creating such an open-world area in which the environment plays into the gameplay: “We were going for a lot of density, so rather than just having miles and miles to traverse, which is a bit boring, we’d rather build in moment-to-moment decision-making on the player’s part. It just keeps you, as a player, a lot more entertained – even doing something mundane, like getting from point A to point B, it makes it more fun.”

As for the open-world areas in general (there are also indoor environments): “We wanted it to feel big, but we needed to keep it manageable. And then we wanted to always encourage people to explore and find things, because we’re a survival game, kind of an action game, with a little bit of horror on top. Obviously we’ve got shooters in our DNA at Rebellion, but it’s also kind of a detective game – you’re figuring things out, trying to use your eyes, and trying to use the leads the narrative gives you to make decisions. There are a load of options for ways in which you can play the game.”

In other words, Atomfall is a non-linear game – something that immediately became obvious in the play-through, when a little bit of exploration tended to open up all manner of side-missions.

Greene talked about the challenges that non-linearity poses in game-design: “On the visual side, in particular, it’s tricky, because if you’ve got a linear game, you can set up your composition and everything else to look good from the angle you know everyone is going to see it from. But you can attack Atomfall from any point – you can come in backwards, forwards, whatever. So you have to make sure everything holds up, feels grounded in the world and doesn’t feel disconnected from the other elements around it.”

Atomfall is refreshingly non-linear

Story-wise, Atomfall continues the non-linear theme – I barely saw a cut-scene in the entire two-hour play-through, which was refreshing. Personally, I love a game with an emergent narrative, and Greene confirmed that was something that Rebellion strove to achieve.

“We wanted to make sure we had these interconnected, entwined strands of story that lead you to the bigger mystery and the answers that could happen," he says. "Obviously, there are things like different notes and bits of lore you can pick up along the way that might form a lead. But then there are also some good characters that you can talk to and get information from, and either ally with or not. You’re always challenged with that question of: ‘Do I trust them?’”

Atomfall’s narrative is clearly layered, with everything feeding into the bigger conspiracy-story that dominates it – which I started getting a sense of when I made it through Casterfell Woods and into a bunker-like area called the Interchange, where 50s-style nuclear machinery coexisted with weird, glowing, almost organic radioactive deposits.

Greene explains, “As you play more, you’ll figure out what that actually is. We were riffing on that whole thing with the Windscale accident, which was a real-life thing, and the government maybe kept it a little quiet. But our whole thing was that maybe it wasn’t just a nuclear accident, and they were hiding something. As you dig down into the story, you’ll find more and more out about what truly happened.”

Unusually and impressively for a developer, Rebellion uses its own game-engine, Asura, which first surfaced in 1999 powering Aliens Vs Predator, and has been steadily improved and scaled up since. Unsurprisingly, Greene happily sang Asura’s praises, and offered insight into its strengths.

He tells me: “Asura really does outdoor daytime environments very, very nicely: the lighting setup works really well, and it’s pretty well optimised. Casterfell Woods has a lot of trees, and a lot of games would struggle with that, but our engine can crunch it pretty nicely, so we can get this high-quality, dense, lush area, which makes it a different look to your typical apocalyptic game. And then interior spaces we’ve always been strong at."

He adds: “It seems like Asura is going to age really well. We’re still developing new things. We’re looking at what runs smoothly, and we’re looking at areas where we can make things easier for ourselves. The good thing is that we always have a few projects going at a time, so we’re trying to ally project leads, so if it’s a Sniper [Elite] game or a Zombie [Army] game – any of our known IPs that need something from the tech guys – they talk to us. And we’re like: 'Yeah, we could use that too'. So that gets front-loaded and the feature is added.”

The Asura engine still delivers

Asura’s longevity also clearly comes in handy, since Atomfall will run on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One – surely one of the last games to be made for that generation with a new round of consoles waiting in the wings?

“Yes, PS4, Xbox One, we’re still supporting those, and it runs well: it’s not a big graphical compromise. We were concerned about that: we were a little worried about the limitations of slightly older hardware, knowing that we wanted to push those top-band bits of hardware pretty hard. But we’ve got some pretty good optimisation techniques we can use. We made the business decision to continue to support those consoles. I guess it’s good for us, that we’ve got it done, but probably the days are coming close where we won’t support them.”

The vast majority of Rebellion’s games take a third-person perspective, but Atomfall, strikingly, is a first-person game, and I felt that from the moment the play-through began, it was the right perspective for it to take. Greene agreed, but revealed that initially, some debates took place on that front.

“We were really focused on a first-person perspective," says Greene, "which was a little scary for us, but we just felt it was going to suit the story better, and make the feeling of tension and threat and all that just feel a lot more intimate, so I was happy when we made that decision.

He adds: “Originally, we were thinking maybe we’d let the player switch back and forth, but we just thought that we’d have to compromise a little too much, so we made the call on first-person. It was a little scary on our side, because all of a sudden, you see things much closer. We had pretty good rules on textural density and fidelity levels, and we knew we were going to do big things, so we made sure our quality bar was pretty high.”

Atomfall releases 27 March for Game Pass, as well as for purchase on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, Windows PC and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store. Visit the Atomfall website for more details.