Atomfall flips typical RPG conventions on their head, then nukes them

Even the best RPGs fall into mechanical and stylistic conventions of their genres.

Avowed is fantastic thanks to its captivating world and expertly written, timely narrative. At the same time, it was constructed upon the worldbuilding and art direction of Pillars of Eternity, and its gameplay isn’t much more ambitious than something like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was over 14 years ago. If you like games that feel immersed within their genre but aren’t afraid to take bolder swings, then Atomfall should be on your radar.

Atomfall is a new first-person survival RPG from Sniper Elite studio Rebellion Developments, and I can’t stop thinking about it after playing a pre-release build of it at a preview event in London. Narratively, the decision to set the game around the Windscale Disaster gives its world a distinct flair not found in nuclear RPG peers like Fallout or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Mechanically, it swaps the typical RPG quest structure of a “lead” system that makes finding and completing story beats feel more natural.

On top of that, it plays into the survival fantasy with gameplay elements like a heart rate that affects the player’s accuracy, minimal ammo scattered around the world, and a bartering system that’s not about cash. It’s the kind of innovative thinking I’d expect from a studio tackling a new genre for the first time, and why Atomfall could be a surprise hit when it launches later this month.

Reimagining the Windscale Fires

Rebellion’s Head of Design Ben Fisher tells Digital Trends that the idea for Atomfall emerged from the studio’s co-founder Jason Kingsley, who “noticed that there are a lot of games set in post-nuclear disaster quarantine zones, but none set around the world’s first major nuclear disaster: The Windscale Fire.” After ideating on this concept, Rebellion began to understand that this setting could give them a unique hook and feel with their nuclear survival niche of RPGs.

Atomfall sees the player, a voiceless-faceless protagonist, awaken with amnesia in a quarantined zone of the United Kingdom following the Windscale disaster. It imagines a world where the Windscale Fires were catastrophic (and possibly influenced by the supernatural), creating a Chornobyl-like exclusion zone in the UK. From a narrative perspective, Fisher believes Rebellion gave Atomfall an authentic British feel.

Some developers who worked on the game grew up around where the Windscale Fire took place. Rebellion also had no problem taking inspiration from the characters and stories from the earlier seasons of Doctor Who, The Quatermass Experiment, and The Wicker Man. From there, the setting took form and informed Rebellion Developments of the kind of game it’d be best as.

“We didn’t want it to be a run-and-gun shooter because that didn’t seem appropriate to the Lake District in the UK. There are not a lot of guns around, but this location is occupied by a military force. What we found through a lot of the worldbuilding and development of the game was to let the setting tell us what mechanics it needed to balance the game.”

Leading the player on

According to Fisher, Atomfall ultimately took the form of an RPG, but that’s not how the game’s structure started. “Earlier in development, we had a more traditional quest system. The game was structured more like a Metroidvania, actually, as you would gradually unlock a series of sandbox maps and explore dungeons within them,” Fisher revealed. “The game felt very linear, so we looked at what we had and asked what would happen if we unlocked all the doors and let the player go anywhere they wanted. We don’t tell the player what to do and allow them to explore the game world as they see fit.”

As soon as I started playing Atomfall, I proved the decision to switch the structure to that was the right one. Initially, I was directed to investigate a herbalist called Mother Jago in the mines near an irradiated forest. Before long, I encountered a cashed helicopter with an audio log by Dr. Harrow, a scientist who’d crashlanded in the quarantine zone. From here, I got a new lead I spent the rest of my Atomfall playtime pursuing. Atomfall does not have quests; instead, story objectives are split into individual leads that players can encounter and complete at their own pace.

“What we did was flip quests on their head,” Fisher says. “Quests tell you what to do as you explore. We thought, ‘How about we just log for the player what they’ve uncovered, their understanding of the game world, and treat them more like a detective?”  It’s more like a case briefing; as you explore and uncover things in the world, you start to understand how the world fits together. The game helps you organize them, but there’s a sense over time that you’re piecing together clues as a detective to help you understand the game world.  It means that you can open and close routes through the game through your actions at all times.”

Atomfall is the kind of game that does not hold the player’s hand, and the popularity of titles like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 shows there’s a real demand for RPGs like that. It almost gave my personal journey a procedurally generated feel, even though all of the content was hand-crafted by Rebellion. When I spoke to the other journalists demoing the game alongside me, I found they all had completely different experiences pursuing different leads.

Some continued the Mother Jago storyline I’d immediately abandoned. Others played into the detective-like fantasy Fisher outlined by looking for a murderer who killed someone in the church. Atomfall can potentially be quite the buzzworthy game when it releases, solely because players will want to discover content they might completely overlook in their own playthrough.

Fighting to survive

Atomfall continued to set itself apart more as I continued to play it. I’m used to RPGs littering my map with quest objectives, but Atomfall doesn’t do that. Instead, when I learned that Dr. Harrow had gone to a city after crash landing, I had to intuit where one was on my map and start heading in that direction. As I strolled up to the town, I noticed that the militarized faction there would be aggressive and start fighting me if I had a weapon drawn or sprinted, but would stay cool if I unequipped what I was using and strolled through.

I did minimal fighting in Atomfall because it’s tough. Ammo for guns is sparse, so a lot of my fights were up close and personal as I whacked enemies with cricket bats or my fists. I had to monitor my character’s heart rate to ensure my attacks were accurate, something Fisher says was carried over from Sniper Elite as a “consistent design line between games.” When I eventually found a vendor in the village, I discovered there was no in-game currency, and I instead had to barter with items I picked up.

Fisher said he wanted players to feel like “they might not survive as much as the other person” and that the game’s setting lent itself to this RPG not being a run-and-gun experience. Ultimately, Fisher says that “all of these details came from this pressure cooker environment,” referring to the quarantine zone players explore in Atomfall. “We wanted to encourage the players to be observant and to reward them for paying attention to conversations with characters, the environment, and the storytelling.”

Throughout the rest of my playtime, I sided with that militarized faction, ratted out a baker resisting their authority to get access to the prison where they were keeping Dr. Harrow, strolled right in there without trouble to speak with her, and learned she knew a way out of the quarantine zone. While my play session ended there, I’m looking forward to hopping back in and seeing how my playthrough of the entire game shakes out differently. I’ll always love an RPG like Avowed that executes genre conventions at their best, but games like Atomfall that test the waters of what an RPG can excite me just as much.

Atomfall launches for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on March 27. It will be part of the Xbox Game Pass catalog from day one.