Atomfall PS5 review: kitsch design and a playful nod to British folk horror

Atomfall has been touted as the British Fallout, and it’s true that it has a similar irradiated, retro-technological vibe to Fallout. But the resemblance ends there. It would be much more accurate to describe it as a deliciously unholy mash-up of Stalker, The Wicker Man and The Quatermass Experiment.

Like Stalker, and as I touched on in my Atomfall hands-on, the game takes place in an exclusion zone around a failed nuclear reactor: in this case Windscale in Cumbria, which suffered a fire in 1957 that proved to be Britain’s worst nuclear disaster. While the real-life Windscale was subsequently renamed Sellafield and continues to operate, Atomfall posits an alternative history in which sinister and mysterious factors led the authorities to quarantine the surrounding area, policed by a military force calling itself The Protocol, and chronicles events that took place in 1962.

Also like Stalker, Atomfall is at heart a survival game – featuring a nameless protagonist who wakes up in the zone with a bad case of amnesia and a burning desire to make it back to the real world beyond. While firearms become an increasingly important factor as the game progresses, initially it’s far more biased towards melee weaponry.

And the fact that by far the best of those weapons – both responsive to wield and heavy in its impact – is a cricket bat speaks volumes about Atomfall. Whereas Stalker’s vibe was hard-bitten and bleak, Atomfall’s is tongue-in-cheek and gloriously British, extracting plenty of humour from the era it portrays’ propensity towards maintaining a stiff upper lip.

Atomfall walks an original path

One striking area in which Atomfall innovates lies in the way its story is constructed – to be precise in its lack of structure. It eschews cut-scenes almost entirely, preferring to let the story emerge as you explore its three main open-world areas – Casterfell Woods, occupied by Druids who bring strong Wicker Man energy; Skethermore, patrolled by the military, complete with 50s-style battle-robots and automatic turrets; and Slatten Dale, full of outlaws who often rock Clockwork Orange-style outfits.

Linking the areas and the abandoned nuclear reactor is The Interchange, a vast underground facility to which you must restore power. And there’s a hub, Wyndham Village, which miraculously maintains a veneer of normal life amid all the chaos, although all manner of intrigue and skullduggery seethes beneath its surface.

You begin in Slatten Dale, with just a melee weapon, a keycard and – the first of a number of pleasingly archaic gadgets – a metal detector, and as you explore, you find things and meet characters who give you leads to pursue. Thus the story unfolds in an organic manner, and the more you explore, the more you find, until exploring every inch of every map becomes an obsession.

One of Atomfall’s biggest strengths is its melee engine. It adopts a first-person perspective which works perfectly, and you’re armed with a powerful kick that can stagger enemies – crucially, for example, if they have guns and you don’t. In such situations, I developed a technique of waiting for them to reload, disrupting them with a kick and then subjecting them to a flurry of blows.

A crafting engine provided me with an ever-expanding roster of throwables like improvised grenades and Molotov cocktails, as well as stims, which provide buffs to things like melee damage or a resistance to melee attacks, or give added resistance to poison or radiation. The presence of mutated plants and once-human thralls and ferals confirm that there’s more going on than mere radioactive contamination.

At first, I often encountered seemingly impossible situations, in which groups of enemies made light work of me – although Atomfall also has a decent stealth engine, which proved invaluable. But I soon started to find training stims, which yield points I could use to upgrade various character attributes, and while I never reached the point at which I felt superhuman, that element of RPG-style character development eventually gave me the confidence to prevail in situations that once seemed insurmountable. As did the realisation that taking down some Protocol soldiers allowed me to loot some decent weaponry, such as multiple-shot shotguns and SMGs.

Eventually, I even worked out how to deal with the heavily armed, 10-foot-high robots, and how to hack turrets. But it proved essential to follow all the major leads I uncovered before pursuing Atomfall’s end-game, which was satisfyingly tricky and required meticulous preparation in terms of equipment.

Kitsch visual design

Cute period touches abound: vacuum-tube machines provided storage for extraneous kit I had collected, for extraction when I needed it, and red telephone boxes offered dialogue with a mysterious voice who may or may not actually have been helping me. Finding the best kit – and some crucial objects without which I wouldn’t have been able to progress – often involved some decent puzzle-solving.

Impressively, all that diverse gameplay congeals into a fun, satisfying and surprisingly coherent whole, and the emergent nature of the storyline adds a bizarre sense of believability to a situation which is very much in the realms of fantasy.

And on top of that sits the sheer – at times satirically explored – Britishness of proceedings. Atomfall presents the sort of warm-beer-and-cricket vision of England for which the average Reform Party member would wax nostalgic, but also does a great job of exposing the cynicism and viciousness that resides beneath its genteel surface. And in the process of doing so, it offers gameplay that evolves cleverly and seemingly organically, which can be tackled in a number of different ways. Nostalgia has rarely felt so fresh and original.