As a Stalker sicko, the 2 hours I just spent with Atomfall have made it one of my most-anticipated games this year

For over a decade, Atomfall has been Rebellion CEO Jason Kingsley’s “dream game,” one he was dropping coy, detail-free allusions to in chats with PCG all the way back in 2018.

Set in the heart of most barbaric Cumbria in the aftermath of a nuclear disaster, it feels like someone armed a Hovis advert, and it’s part of a proud lineage of pain-in-the-ass games that includes beloved classics like Stalker, Morrowind, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. No quest markers here, sir. You’ll find your own way or die in the attempt. Perhaps both.

It’s grim up north

Atomfall is a throwback in more ways than one. In the grand tradition of 2005’s finest videogames, you’re an amnesiac, waking up in a walled-off section of the UK’s Lake District in the aftermath of the 1957 Windscale fire, the worst nuclear accident in the country’s history.

The fallout’s sent Cumbria a bit weird, filled with ooky-spooky monsters, roving bandits, and a population that’s responded to the crisis by embracing its inner Wicker Man. Meanwhile, Her Majesty’s Government has sent in the army—a crack force of pip-pip-tally-ho officers and calloused tommies—to keep order.

My demo dropped me at the edge of all this and pointed me, well, nowhere. Like I said, Atomfall has no quest markers, but it does contain leads—collections of evidence under different quest headings that you, the player, have to use your noggin to parse and figure out. I started with just one—that somewhere around here was a medicine woman named Mother Jago—and immediately got distracted from it.

Atomfall’s Cumbria is not one open world, but a collection of open-but-smallish maps, and each of them is pockmarked by caves, druid camps, and eerie landmarks glimpsed in the distance. Playing is a constant process of seeing a thing, wondering what it is, and getting completely diverted from whatever you were doing before.

“I don’t know any game designer that’s ever made a game that’s too small,” says Kingsley. “I prefer a small, really good game than a really big kind of game that isn’t focused down on what’s important for the player.” And so: Atomfall, with its limitations baked right into it from the start with the huge concrete wall that keeps the Cumbrian exclusion zone separate from the rest of Britain.

But small doesn’t mean empty. To be honest, it doesn’t even mean small—Cumbria felt plenty wide and open to me while playing even if it wasn’t the size of Just Cause 2, and I only saw a small part of two of its maps.

There were plenty of druid camps and roving outlaws to pick fights with, and in my meandering I stumbled across multiple non-hostile NPCs who dropped the first few breadcrumbs of longer quest chains—a dotty old blue-blood in her decaying mansion who seems convinced everything’s still perfectly normal, a fellow explorer rooting through an out-of-the-way scientific bunker.

Some of the quests I uncovered gestured at longer-term, factional choices. When the military overseer asked me to investigate the local bakery, I soon found myself choosing between law and order and a woman desperately trying to protect—and keep secret—her infected husband. I opted for the latter, naturally, choosing to head out into the wilds and get medicine for the poor, doomed man, sparing the bakery owner the pain and indignity of the military hauling him off and punishing her.

I was constantly picking up leads and getting embroiled in plots. And brawls. I got embroiled in brawls a lot too. When our own Phil Savage tried to game half a year ago at Gamescom, he had qualms about its combat, but I get the impression that Rebellion’s spent the intervening time working on it almost exclusively. It feels good: cracking someone round the head with a cricket bat feels crunchy and impactful, while drawing a gun feels almost like cheating.

This is the UK, almost no one has firearms, and bullets put enemies down so fast that even drawing a rusty old revolver feels like an instant argument-ender, a bonafide nuclear option. No wonder I got so distracted picking fights with pagans.

Wandering mind

Those distractions are entirely the point. A key goal for the game’s devs was “to give you a sense of proper freedom,” says Kingsley. That means you can, if you’re so inclined, “go around as a mass murderer and shoot everybody,” and the game will attempt to contort itself around your choices, New Vegas-style.

“From a pure games design perspective, it’s really nice to lean into what computers can do well, which is react to you and give you a different experience.” I was eager to test this, so immediately upon finding Mother Jago (after getting distracted by a cave filled with druids, a conspiracy in the local village, several threatening phone calls from an anonymous Welshman, and attempting a one-man assault on a local military outpost) I loosed an arrow into her head, expecting it not to work.

It worked, and Mother Jago—who I’d assumed was some kind of plot-critical NPC—crumpled into her flowerbed before I’d given her so much as how’d-you-do, no game over screen, not even a Morrowind-style ‘you’ve really hosed this one, chief’ pop-up. It might even have been a good idea: I found a letter on her body that suggested nefarious dealings with local druids.

My attempt to dam up this part of the game’s plot had only succeeded in diverting it along a new course, generating new leads, though I could have reloaded if I’d had regrets., It’s not just possible to make a decision you regret and reload a save, says Kingsley, it’s pretty much assumed you will. The game’s narrative variables are there for you to jam a spanner into, reload, then jam in somewhere else.

My time with the game didn’t quite give me the time necessary to really see how far these systems bend but the idea is exactly the kind of thing that gets me very excited. Still, I’ll reserve judgment until I have the full game in my hands; Kingsley cops to the fact that it’s all quite new for Rebellion as a whole. “Making a sniping game, we kind of know what works… we sort of were experts in that. In this area, whilst I play games like this a lot myself, the difference between playing a game and making a game is quite stark, actually, and so there’s a little bit more nervousness, but also excitement.”

Atomfall hits Steam, Epic, and the Rebellion store on March 27.