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In Atomfall, you play as a total unknown, risen from a bunker and confronted by a bleeding scientist begging for help. Whether you assist them or not is up to you, but what’s important to know is that you’re in the Windscale Atom Zone, you shouldn’t be here, and ‘it’s all gone wrong’.
One more thing, actually, is that the only way out is through the ‘Interchange’… whatever that is. Armed with a keycard and literally nothing else, you emerge from the dingy, dilapidated bunker into a gorgeous world flush with as many blooming flowers as there are gun-toting lunatics.
From this point on, the choice of where you go is entirely up to you, the only obstacle in your way being how long you can stay alive. Decisions make up most of Atomfall, an intriguing role-playing game (RPG) that takes cues from Bethesda’s beloved Fallout series. It dances between enthralling and frustrating, but all told, Atomfall is a hilarious jaunt through rural Britain that begs the question – why aren’t more survival games set in the north?
Review info
Platform reviewed: PS5
Available on: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC
Release date: March 24, 2025
On my journey out of the bunker, I opted for a conflict-averse route, trailing past a ringing telephone booth and down toward the central plot point on the horizon: a dangerous-looking power plant featuring a plume of swirling purple around it. Down the country lane, I came upon a ginger bearded straggler, Nat, who generously caught me up on the town gossip.
Between bouts of endearing slang, Nat explains that the ‘boffins’ are all gone after an incident at the plant and that all that remains are loons and outlaws. Before taking my leave, Nat offered me one more piece of information: there’s a trader down the way who could help me find some survival goods.
Chasing leads is a major part of Atomfall‘s semi-apocalyptic gameplay loop. In place of specific missions or levels, your job is to chinwag with as many willing non-player characters (NPCs) as possible to find clues about what is happening and who you could be.
The other half of your time is spent managing your heart rate as you bludgeon strangers and loot as much ammunition, bandages, and cornish pasties as your inventory will allow. It’s a simple set-up that’s surprisingly challenging, with essential items like cloth and gunpowder appearing sparsely across the map, limiting your ammo and healing supplies.
Thankfully, if you did want to make things slightly more beginner-friendly, Atomfall’s comprehensively customizable difficulty options allow you to tweak specific gameplay aspects like item drop rates and NPC aggro into a specific ‘playstyle’.
Knackered and afraid
There is a series of central districts to explore as you wander across Atomfall’s approachably sized map, with pathways connecting each area. Some are clear to find and appear as menacing metal doors, while others are obscured and hidden within cave systems, or behind enemy lines.
You can crawl under broken doors, vault over fences and windows, and squeeze between cracked cement blocks in search of new spots, and I was impressed by how vulnerable I felt while trying to navigate the claustrophobic housing clusters, ruins, and mines. I certainly didn’t explore every nook and cranny in my campaign, but the shortcuts I earned soon became a blessing, aiding with the fatigue of sprinting between one district to get to another.
On its recommended difficulty setting, Atomfall’s map doesn’t add specific waypoints when you pick up leads to follow and instead requires you to discern your next move with the information at hand. Some folks will help you orienteer, but for the most part, it’s you and your sense of direction.
At first, this fed into my decision anxiety, and I wasn’t sure where to turn, though soon enough, I let my intuition take the wheel, dashing through fields, flashing my sickle at anyone who looked at me the wrong way and getting into a few heavy-handed scraps. It’s a refreshing approach to exploration that leads to many thrilling encounters, far from the typical hand-holding we’ve come to expect in contemporary RPGs.
As you chart Atomfall’s major districts you’ll come face-to-face with the factions that ultimately come to define your experience in this morally-murky playground. There’s the brutish British infantry known as Protocol, the heretic-hating Druids, and vicious, Droog-like Outlaws. In the wild, you can also find curious outliers like trapped scientists, rogue traders, stately poshos and infected monsters who all have their own prerogatives, the last one being your brains.
Unfortunately, Atomfall’s narrative isn’t nearly as thorough as Fallout: New Vegas and the questions it lays up don’t all have satisfying answers. But there are still tough — if not a little predictable – decisions to be made in its endgame. Best of all, the lead ensemble of NPCs is a memorable bunch who approach this imagination-stoking situation with challenging perspectives, colored in with witty dialogue.
Best bit: Not elementary, my dear Watson
Progressing in Atomfall isn’t just about firepower. To move forward, you’ll also have to dust off your best deerstalker and investigate the motivations behind the various factions that litter the broken British landscape. Alongside conversing with the straight-faced locals, you can pilfer their belongings and find secret notes that allude to their true feelings, summoning campaign-changing leads that are worth following up on. You can also shoot first and ask questions later, of course – just be sure not to take everything at face value.
Atomfall hides a creative post-currency trading system between its complex moral figureheads. Instead of trawling the dales for pounds and pennies, the items you collect accrue a ‘weight’ that can be counterbalanced with another trader’s goods.
Bread isn’t as valuable as a gun, and you’ll need quite a few baker’s dozens to Earn one. While personally, I think bread is more valuable than a weapon, the process helped to push me into the wilds in search of better bits and bobs — and inevitably into mysterious, illuminating outposts, I would have never found otherwise.
Alas, if bartering doesn’t tickle your fancy, there’s also a crafting system where you can turn the objects you find into functional parts and subsist that way. With plenty of systems at play and a small-but-handy skill tree, I soon felt as if I was tailoring my playthrough as I went, and would find it hard to replicate in another playthrough. Ultimately, Atomfall’s greatest strength is how it makes following your nose so consistently alluring.
Fighting words
Yet despite all the engaging interactions with leaders and citizens, Atomfall’s more limited gameplay suite can shatter some of the immersion. For example, I could go into the pub and chat with the owner about trading. Then, walk behind him, steal his stuff, and sell it back to him, no questions asked.
Certain areas are restricted, signified by a ‘Trespassing’ graphic at the top of the screen. However, the distinction felt at odds with my actions—Why was I more likely to get punished for robbing an empty house than a town hall in front of a military captain?
At one point, I tested the boundaries by killing a soldier in the light of day. With no comrades around, I silently took him out and fled the scene briefly. Upon my return, it appeared nothing had changed, with soldiers spouting the same few lines as if one of them hadn’t been murdered.
The captain didn’t seem bothered, either. Beyond the major and often-material impact of major decisions (as well as a few tannoy announcements), I didn’t get the moment-to-moment sense that anyone was all that aware of my plots and schemes, or who I was planning to betray for the narrative I wanted.
And while Atomfall’s combat is appropriately desperate, it’s also a bit janky and lethargic, lacking a few conventional coats of polish. Particularly, the enemy AI is aberrant, and will often react in an unusual manner that can shut down your dreams of a rewarding stealthy infiltration. Lacklustre platforming also takes the wind out of the game’s sails, with what may feel like simple maneuvers often taking a few tries.
Despite these limitations, Atomfall does well to keep you on your toes with enemy-shaped speedbumps (read: massive robots) and some slick side quests. There were also plenty of instances where I felt frustrated enough to want to put down the controller before I realized the solution could be much simpler if I approached it from a different angle.
At its best, there are shades of a deeper RPG here, but it doesn’t quite have the mechanical backing to fulfill this proposal. Even so, while the systemic scope of Atomfall isn’t massive, the small world it conjures feels rich and full all the way to its atmospheric finale – or at least the atmospheric finale I chose.
Should you play Atomfall?
Play it if…
Don’t play it if…
Accessibility
You can alter your accessibility settings from the pause menu anytime while playing Atomfall. There are multiple options to tweak your playstyle including combat, survival, and exploration. Each option can be toggled between Assisted, Casual, Challenging, and Intense. Combat impacts the enemy aggression and spawn numbers, Survival affects how frequently loot drops and how generous trading is, and Exploration affects your map and traversal options.
You can toggle how frequently you would like the game to autosave, as well as manually save at any point from the pause menu. From the Gameplay submenu in settings, you can also toggle on Pause Game in Menus to ensure you won’t get into trouble when looking at your inventory or the map.
Where combat is concerned, players can toggle on Melee and Aim Assist, Snap Aiming, and Automatic Fire and Reload. There are also sliders to control Aim, Look, and Hip Fire sensitivity from the Control submenu of the setting. From here you can also switch the controller vibration and adaptive triggers on or off.
For audio, there are multiple sliders to control specific streams of audio such as background SFX and Music. Plus for subtitles, you can change the subtitle color, speaker color, and subtitle box opacity to suit your preferences.
How I reviewed Atomfall
I completed Atomfall’s main story on PlayStation 5 in approximately sixteen hours and experienced two of its multiple endings. I teamed my PS5 console with an AOC 27-inch QHD VA 144Hz gaming monitor, a regular DualSense controller, and external Creative Pebble V2 computer speakers.
First reviewed March 2025