Atomfall

Rebellion

In 1957, a nuclear reactor at Windscale on the remote northwest coast of England caught fire. Only the shrewd foresight of the project head to install filters into the chimneys prevented a serious disaster from becoming a catastrophic one; nevertheless, it's still considered UK's worst nuclear accident and one of the worst in the world, equivalent in severity to Three Mile Island. While Windscale moved on and expanded, the original plant, built for creating weapons-grade plutonium, has remained sealed for nearly 70 years for fear that re-opening it would reignite the unstable material within. The site awaits decommissioning.

Rebellion Developments are a pretty well-known name in the UK video game scene; while they long had a dubious reputation for mediocre tie-in games (with a few genuine hits here and there), they've spent years slowly trying to rebuild their image with their flagship series Sniper Elite and they've seemingly succeeded. Flush with cash from the success of their semi-casual sniper sim, they looked to the Windscale fire and asked a question only fans of games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. could ask: what if the disaster had been worse than anyone could have imagined in 1957? The result was Atomfall.

Atomfall was a pleasant surprise. I didn't even know it existed until this month; I was looking for more games that took place in the 1960s beyond the obvious ones like BioShock or No One Lives Forever; Atomfall by all accounts was something of a sleeper hit, flying under the radar with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 taking up most of the oxygen. If I had to describe Atomfall, I would say it's functionally a AA (or maybe AAA) version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. It's sort of occupying the same ambiguous space as BioShock in that there's clearly a lot of immersive sim in it, but it's questionable whether it actually counts as one or not. And like BioShock, I think it qualifies, but somewhat in spite of itself: while there are points where the design seems to want a particular playstyle, the otherwise open-ended nature of the game allows for a great deal of player choice. I wouldn't say that Atomfall is a perfect game, but it's definitely the kind of game I like.

The setting should be familiar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R. fans, and indeed aesthetically speaking it's sometimes indistinguishable. Only sometimes, though; for the most part, it's a quintessentially British take on S.T.A.L.K.E.R., set amidst a large region of forests, countryside and old mining sites. There's no large cities like Pripyat to explore; instead, the core of the game revolves around the Interchange, a massive underground installation that links much of the area. Windscale barely figures into the plot; in the game's fiction, the Windscale plant, while serving legitimate uses, was largely a cover for a much bigger government project: the study of something found deep beneath the earth, code-named "Oberon." Oberon is the source of both the fantastic technology relied upon by the Interchange (and its neighboring installation, Site Moriah, seen in the DLC) as well as toxic fungal growths that lure people into a kind of thrall; they hear voices and often tend to do what the voices say. The worst cases fall completely under Oberon's control, or mutate into subhuman "ferals." The 1957 disaster was actually caused by Oberon; the game picks up in 1962, five years into a ruthlessly efficient quarantine that has trapped the ordinary people living in the region with all the horrors unleashed by the accident. Most of them either became bandits or joined the Oberon-worshipping cult living in the woods; the rest try to stick it out in the little village, but chafe under military occupation.

Like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you play a nameless, amnesiac character, with one primary goal: escape the zone. While there are several ways you can do this provided you follow the right questlines (with the two DLC, there are a whopping ten possible endings) they're mostly mutually-exclusive and in some cases can outright be cut off by your actions. It's possible to kill every major NPC in the Zone; escape, nevertheless, is possible, through the Operator, a mysterious voice that calls you on payphones scattered throughout the zone. It's unclear if these phones actually exist or not, but nevertheless, the Operator will always point the way. The identity of the Operator, and indeed that of the player, are mysteries the game rather pointedly does not answer, but we can make some inferences based on observations.

While the deep milsim aspects of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are absent here (outside of a few toggle-able gameplay options in the difficulty menu) there's still some interesting complexity in the combat system. Frustratingly, ammunition is semi-universal with four different types of ammunition spread across a dozen or so different guns; but this is England, and melee weapons are just as valid, and sometimes just the better option. But guns can do more than shoot things; in certain situations, especially early on when combat is inadvisable, it's possible to bypass an encounter by pointing your gun at someone, especially if nobody else is packing. My main gripe with the weapon system is, to some extent, an aesthetic one: guns are available in three tiers, that being rusty, stock and pristine. Rusty weapons are the most common, and Rebellion made the odd choice to make them really rusty to the point that any real world firearm that looked like that often would just not fire. Most stock weapons also don't look great, either. I don't have an issue with the tier system per se, I just don't understand their choice of how to express it.

As you progress through the game, you'll come upon "training stimulants," ampoules full of some kind of mystery juice that serve as skill points. You'll spend these skill points on a variety of abilities, most of which must be unlocked before you can purchase them, usually by finding the appropriate guidebook but some are only available after certain events. These skills range from the mundane like boosting your resistances or being able to sneak more quietly to the very useful like being able to see NPCs through walls for a short time. With the Red Strain DLC, you'll be able to use the game's robust crafting system to make your own training stimulants.

Speaking of the crafting system, you'll need to find guides for them but you'll be able to craft almost every common item in the game, from home-made grenades to radiation resistance juice. These items are made from a variety of component types laying around the game world, from alcohol to scrap metal to weird Oberon spores. Luckily, these components (and ammunition, for that matter) take no room in your inventory, with the exception of certain things like samples from infected creatures (probably because you can also just eat them — ewww!) It's a good thing, too, because you have limited inventory slots, plus an additional four long slots for any weapon longer than a handgun or hatchet. The good news is that scattered around the zone are pneumatic tubes that serve as a sort of universal storage (think the chests from Resident Evil.)

Flaws in the game... while the game provides you with a flashlight, there is no dedicated flashlight key; instead, it runs off the same key that lets you automatically switch to your metal detector and your signal redirector (an illegal little doodad that lets you fiddle with electric routing boxes.) It's annoying because sometimes I want to use my flashlight, but the key instead will bring up the redirector; worse, the flashlight is typically not even that useful as even the darkest places in the Zone are usually just kinda dim at best. (As an aside, this to me is one of the biggest indicators that a game is AAA or at least runs on AAA sensibilities; it's similar to how Hollywood films so rarely are willing to truly engage with darkness as an on-screen element anymore. There's just a total lack of respect for effective lighting in the entertainment industry today, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.) I also can't say I'm the biggest fan of the lack of a gas mask. It seems illogical to go without one; the Zone is rife with environmental hazards, and while radioactive zones are surprisingly uncommon (I can only think of one, a room with several broken atomic batteries) there are plenty of areas with poisonous gas or Oberon infections. I suppose hazard masks didn't do much for the thralls that stand silent watch in the deepest parts of the Interchange, but still... There were some parts where the world design just kinda fell down, and it's here that the best arguments against the game being an immersive sim really emerge. One example is the castle occupied by the cultists; while it's entirely possible to sneak to the entrance to the castle (or the caves beneath it) undetected, combat is inevitable once inside. This seems to fly in the face of good immersive sim design.

Still, though, I really liked Atomfall, and if you're any fan of immersive sims, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or even the 3D Fallout games, you'll appreciate Atomfall. It's suffuse with North English charm and 1950s-60s sci-fi aesthetics, and the DLC in particular offer some seriously sinister additional material. The Red Strain expansion in particular offers a monstrous, red variant on the Oberon corruption called the Contamination, which renders its victims hairless, red-skinned, and violently enthralled to some sort of hive mind — shades of the Scorched in Fallout 76. The other DLC, Wicked Isle, digs into the history of Oberon's presence in the region, with plenty of ghosts and other gothic spookies to give the game another flavor.

Rebellion also added quite a lot of accessibility options. The difficulty menu is surprisingly granular, allowing you to adjust everything from the in-game economy (such as it is, being entirely bartering) to the colors the various UI elements use. In an industry that seems to be getting less interested in accessibility, not more, this is a welcome sight. 

Atomfall has a lot going on in it, and a lot going for it; I think it's destined to be a cult classic.

-june❤