We’ve apparently never written about Atomfall , an oversight I’m now all too happy to correct, having played a promising forty minutes or so at Gamescom 2024. In development at Sniper Elite makers Rebellion, it’s a "survival-action game inspired by real-life events" – specifically the Windscale fire , which in 1957 coated much of northern England in radioactive fallout. Atomfall’s alternative history makes Britain’s worst nuclear disaster even more disastrous, plunging the realm into full-on post-apocalyptica and leaving your good amnesiac self to dodge death with nothing but a cricket bat and whatever you can scrounge out of sheds.
I like it! Mostly. Despite the Blighty setting and, let’s be honest, this preview’s proximity to Fallout: London , Atomfall more immediately evokes the compelling grimness of a S.T.
A.L.K.
E.R. game than the pulpier Fallout.
And not just because Windscale was a mini-Chernobyl. While the few non-hostile NPCs I encountered were as chipper as they were Northern, life is hard round Atomfall’s parts. If I was lucky enough to pick a gun off a slain outlaw, it was invariably a rusted piece of shit, and I was only slightly more likely to get ammo for it than I was to find an open, functioning branch of Pret.
Much like S.T.A.
L.K.E.
R., the demo’s quarry town setting of Slatten Dale offered a blend of rural beauty and ravaged horrorscape. That said, this is no hardcore survival sim, and certainly not the kind where you’ll be chopping tree.