Atomfall hands-on preview and interview – a very British apocalypse-David Jenkins-Entertainment – Metro

Atomfall – a quintessential British scene (Rebellion)

The makers of Sniper Elite and Zombie Army turn their hand to a post-apocalypse game set in the UK, in a cross between Fallout and The Wicker Man.

At the rate things are going we could end up getting at least one obviously British video game every year. In 2024 we had Thank Goodness You’re Here! and next year there’s Rebellion’s Atomfall to look forward to – a post-apocalyptic survival adventure game set in the Lake District. One per year might not sound like a lot, but it’s a great improvement over none at all, so we’ll take it.

We got 20 minutes or so hands-on with Atomfall at Gamescom but prior to that all we knew about it was the brief announcement trailer during the Xbox Summer Showcase, where it gave the impression of being a British version of Fallout. Not as literally as the fan-made Fallout London, but still a game that is inspired by Bethesda’s first person open world games, as well as the likes of Metro 2033 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

In talking with Ben Fisher, Rebellion’s Associate Head of Design, it became clear that the game’s inspirations extend beyond just games to classic British movies and TV shows, such as The Wicker Man and The Quartermass Experiment. 20 minutes wasn’t long enough to get much of a handle on the game but the subsequent talk with Fisher was very encouraging, with a game that feels genuinely British in terms of setting, tone, and gameplay.

We were given very little backstory before we started playing, only that our character has recently woken up from a coma and in the meantime the UK, or at least most of Cumbria, had been devastated by a nuclear accident. Although seemingly one closer to the high strangeness of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., rather than the more straightforward destruction of Fallout.

The game is set in an alternative history where the Sellafield nuclear power station fire in 1957 (when the plant was called Windscale) proved more disastrous than in real-life and… something happened. We’re not sure what and the character you’re playing as doesn’t either, but there’s weird atmospheric distortions coming from the plant and most people have been evacuated.

What’s left are scavengers and a cosy looking village called Wyndham, which is protected from the scavengers, and perhaps other things, by the army. As a result, everyone seems to have gone a little stir crazy and there’s a hokey looking 50s robot wandering around town, so it’s not just the nuclear accident that makes it an alternate history.

The demo started out on in the, very pretty, wilds of Cumbria, with a lone telephone box ringing incessantly. Naturally, we answered and were told, by a weirdly distorted voice, that ‘Oberon must die’. There was no indication of who Oberon was but that was it, in terms of instructions. That’s a positive in our book, especially as it was faintly reminiscent of being told to just get out there and defeat Ganondorf in Zelda: Breath Of The Wild.

Atomfall – we never got to shoot anyone, which is good because we didn’t have a gun (Rebellion)

There were a few different paths we could have followed at this point, but we could see the concrete walls of the village not far off, so made for that. We never actually saw any scavengers, and didn’t get into any fights, but we could hear them and see vague movement in the distance, so we did the sensible thing and ducked into the thick grass and made our way carefully between cover until we got to the village.

The welcome was not exactly ecstatic, with grumbling soldiers and locals wary of outsiders, but we were allowed to roam freely, ducking into the pub to pick up on gossip and exploring the limits of the wall, beyond which, so the locals whispered, lay a sect of druids.

Our session ended with the discovery that someone had been murdered in the church, with the vicar acting in a very suspicious way and fretting about how and if the news should be announced. We’re not sure where that was going but it all seemed interestingly weird and different, and according to Fisher that’s exactly what Rebellion is aiming for.

Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC
Publisher: Rebellion
Developer: Rebellion
Release Date: March 2025

*available on Xbox Game Pass day one

GC: I do feel proud of myself, that I said to the other guy, before I started playing, that I bet John Wyndham comes up in conversation, when I speak to you. And then I find out the village is called Wyndham. So I get it, I see what you’re doing here.

BF: [laughs]

GC: So where did this come from? What were you wanting to do?

BF: So the original gestation point of this project was Jason Kingsley, one of the owners and founders of Rebellion. He noticed that there are games in that kind of post-apocalypse survival genre – Fallout, Metro, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – lots of games that are about surviving a nuclear disaster but none set in the UK. And yet the world’s first major nuclear disaster was Sellafield.

GC: There’s something to be proud of, a world first for Britain!

BF: [laughs] But because we make games that often have a pulpy, British slant the question was what would a Rebellion style post-atomic survival game… what would that look like?

GC: Is it possible for a British developer to do anything like this and not make it comedic? I’m not saying it should be otherwise, but I’m not sure we’re capable of taking ourselves seriously in the way Americans, or certainly Russians, would in this sort of situation.

BF: [laughs] Well, if it didn’t seem to quite fit that tone range of…

GC: Seeing the soldiers in the Dad’s Army outfits, it’s very hard to take it seriously. Even though it would be in that context, as Dad’s Army was in its.

BF: Yeah, yeah. So, the characters take themselves seriously but what we wanted to do was reflect the storytelling style of classic British sci-fi. So, we went back to The Quatermass Experiment as an early reference point and The Prisoner’s in there, early Doctor Who, also things like The Wicker Man and a general folk horror tone.

There’s lots of influences that came in but we found that as we were writing that we wanted to write the characters in an honest fashion, a believable fashion. So, our principal writer is a fantastic writer, and really good at characters that have a dry, humorous texture to them.

GC: When I was playing someone started talking about druids, so it sounds like there is a strong horror element too?

BF: Yeah, pulp horror for sure.

GC: What’s that one… Blood on the Devil’s Claw?

BF: The Blood on Satan’s Claw, yeah that’s a classic.

Atomfall – what has happened while you were asleep? (Rebellion)

GC: I’m getting an inkling as to what your DVD collection looks like.

BF: [laugh] Yes, it’s very Hammer Horror. So, looking at those retro storytelling style, there’s a humour to it but it’s earnestly portrayed and that was a good, natural match for us. Finding those storytelling props and combining them in a way that seems to blend naturally with part of our own development process. Also, what we found is that folk horror storytelling and Cold War storytelling have lots of thematic resonance. So there’s even an element of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in there.

The idea of characters who are fighting with the difference between their personal identity and their allegiance to a particular group. The recurring theme of fear of the outside group and tensions between political leanings as well as rural and urban outlooks, old-fashioned and modern ways of looking at things.

Once we started matching up the storytelling tropes of these sort of themes, we got lots of resonances and used that in the game world. Also, if you look at something like Quatermass, those stories were early enough in the process of developing the language of sci-fi and speculative fiction that there isn’t a clear distinction between genres, like there typically is nowadays.

GC: I remember back then people like Arthur C. Clarke seemed open to the idea of the supernatural being real and that wasn’t seen as an outlandish concept at the time.

BF: Yeah, I think the quote from him was that any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. And there’s an element of that as well. So, typically, in the Quartermass Experiment and other things that Nigel Kneale did, and a lot of stories of that era, it was fashionable to explore the idea that something might seem supernatural or mystical but there’s a rational explanation for it.

And in our game you don’t start aligned to any particular faction and you operate as a detective, uncovering what’s happened and different people’s perspectives on it. There’s never good guys and bad guys, there’s always different perspectives and you just choose what you trust the most, what you believe the most.

GC: I’m unclear how serious the game gets; how nasty it becomes?

BF: As you start the story, the characters in the game world have found a kind of unstable equilibrium, where they tolerate one another. But as you poke your way into the mystery you destabilise things and things get a bit more desperate and nasty. So, it’s like a classic detective story, in that there’s a state of stability at the start of the story and the detective destabilises things over time. So, the truth gets out eventually, but the question is, is the world actually better for that truth being uncovered?

GC: I think of something like The Wicker Man, where it’s quite whimsical at the start and then absolutely horrific at the end. Is that the angle you’re going for?

BF: Exactly that sort of thing. And Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, similarly, once you learn all of the secrets, or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, you feel worse by the end of the story. Like you say, it’s horrific. But there’s definitely an element of that in this.

And The Wicker Man’s a great example because the ending is horrific but there’s no value judgement in that ending. What makes it horrific is the disparity in views and the fact that it’s kind of left ambiguous. It’s not confirmed…

Atomfall – The Wicker Man references aren’t subtle (Rebellion)

GC: It’s interesting because you get the feeling he would’ve been happy with the end he met, it was merely the process of getting there that was uncomfortable.

BF: [laughs] Exactly that. There’s always a good and a bad side to each event in the game. You found the vicar and the murder?

GC: Yes, I just got to that when I had to stop.

BF: As you investigate that, there’s no good guys and bad guys in that story. It’s a murky story and by the end of uncovering all of the weeds associated with that murder… no one comes out as a good guy at the end of it. And then you’ve got to decide what to do about that.

There’s an occupying military force in the village and you can report what’s happened or you can decide to side with any one of the people who remains from the investigation. You can encourage some to flee the village, if you think they’re responsible, but then, by the end of that little vignette story, you come away with a handful of weeds that lead you to other parts of the story.

So, it’s all a giant interconnected web. But by the end, the more you learn the murkier it gets. You just have to decide for yourself, by your own moral compass, who to side with.

GC: The demo seemed very unguided, is there a golden path through the game? There didn’t seem to be any waypoints on maps or anything. That’s quite an extreme amount of freedom, which can put some people off.

BF: Yes, yes. So, at the start of the game, where you would typically have your difficulty selection, we’ve got what we call play styles instead. So, you can tune how intense combat is. We think the game is the most interesting when the combat’s very intense, when the guidance is minimal, and when scavenging for materials is difficult.

But we want as many different people to play the game as possible, so you can tune the intensity of combat, the level of resources available, and the level of guidance. We want to create it for people who wanted no guidance at all, as well as people who wanted to be guided through the experience. So, you can choose to highlight some of the clues as moving you towards the heart of mystery. But still, there’s not a correct path. There’s not a golden path and there’s not a true ending.

GC: Oh really?

BF: No, there’s multiple different endings to the game. The way that we structured it is like a Sniper Elite mission. So, we’ve done a lot of learning from what we’ve done internally and in one mission in a Sniper Elite game, you’ve got an objective and as you explore the mission you’ll find methods around you to achieve that objective, and then depending on how you approach the objective you might find different exfiltration points in the mission.

So, we asked ourselves the question: what if we structured the whole game like that? So that’s why you find different characters with different perspectives. Some of them might offer you escape from this quarantine zone – it’s up to you whether you trust them or not – and different people will want different things and might contradict one another.

So there’s multiple ways out of the quarantine zone and it really, structurally begins to emerge… it feels like it emerges spontaneously from seeing what happens when there’s no quest system. How do we guide a player a character through a sandbox?

A lot of the iteration process in Atomfall is taking away creative scaffolding that can help you choreograph the experience. So, it’s non-linear, there’s not a main story, there’s not choreographed combat encounters; they’re slightly procedural, slightly random – situational, it’s up to you whether you engage or not. And it wildly changed our design philosophy over the course of production.

GC: I didn’t get the sense that there was much of a survival element? There was no Geiger counter going off or a hunger meter or anything. That must have been a thought at one point, so why did you decide against that?

BF: We tried lots of different models of that over the course of production, for sure. You have health, obviously, but you can’t take many hits. And that’s just because combat is most interesting when it’s high stakes on both sides. As you push into the mystery and into other areas in the game there are things like radiation leaks and other things that are spoilers… damage types which you have to learn to avoid or mitigate.

We’ve not got anything that’s like hunger or thirst or sleep meters, because it’s one sustained investigation and we wanted to keep the intensity high on that, and focus on that, and having the hunger and thirst felt almost like an administrative layer.

Oh, and we don’t have stamina but we do have a heart rate meter. That’s how Sniper Elite games tackle the same thing. Effectively, it’s the reverse of a stamina meter. The more activity you perform, your heart rate spikes, and that means things like your gun aim will be less accurate.

GC: The thing I’m most interested in is that it’s British, which is so rare nowadays. It’s rare for any game to indicate its country of origin, unless it’s America or Japan. Has that been a problem? Because you’re already taking a risk here, with this being a new IP.

BF: I don’t know if you would start with a piece of paper and end up with Atomfall. So much of it… we followed the fun essentially, we found what was interesting in the idea. Rebellion is very British and… it’s in the name. Jason and Chris Kingsley want to do what they find interesting. We have a house style and tonally, if you think about 2000 AD [Rebellion owns the comic and all the rights – GC] as well, there’s a very British slant to it.

What has been an advantage is the art director on Atomfall, who’s American. And that helps in that he could point out things that are unique to Britain that we don’t even notice. Even like dry stone walls… if I drive home to Scotland there are dry stone walls that are older than America. And that idea of layers of history seems to fit naturally with the environment and it seems counterproductive to resist the Britishness of the environment.

Asking what would happen if you had one of these pulpy atomic stories but set in a British environment… so much of the game emerged from trusting the testing and putting in things that were British because they would be appropriate to the area.

A quick example would be, very early on you come across a phone box with a ringing phone in it. Iconically British but also, it’s based on something that actually happened to Jason while he was rambling. He walked past a real red phone box, in the middle of nowhere, and it just started ringing. He looked at it and he thought, ‘I’m not gonna answer that.’

GC: He didn’t?! Oh, man! It was probably God or someone.

BF: [laughs] But the moment stuck with him and then we’ve been part of the story, we’ve been able to coax some interesting mystery out of it.

Atomfall – nobody seems pleased to see you (Rebellion)

GC: There’s also a proud history of British open world games, I wonder if that’s had any influence on the game? Things like Elite and Damocles and Starglider 2 were so far ahead of their time and yet largely unknown to the rest of the world.

BF: A lot of those games, that’s what I grew up on. You have to trust the player a lot to make a sandbox game, particularly one with not a lot of guidance, like we have. And there’s a philosophy that comes from that, giving you that freedom and not wanting to choreograph your experience.

They’re both perfectly valid, but choreographed experiences leads to a more Hollywood style experience. I worked on Strange Brigade and Zombie Army 4 and they had more linear structure to them, so they had choreographed highpoints. And this is philosophically very different, it’s more open and it’s up to you to make those points happen.

But yeah, that kind of retro, open world atmosphere for sure… a lot of it is subconsciously bubbling up. And in the tone of the game as well, lots of… when I was growing up a lot of the kids’ shows had a weird pagan edge to them. So if you think of Moondial?

GC: I don’t remember that?

BF: It was a kid’s show about a girl who could maybe travel back in time or maybe travel into a kind of faerie realm by visiting a sundial in a garden at night. There’s an occult weirdness that just permeates retro British culture.

GC: [laughs] On the flipside of that you must have looked at things like Fallout and Metro. But were you looking at that for inspiration or for things not to do? Not because you thought they were bad but because you wanted to do your own thing.

BF: We really started with a set of creative pillars, of a tone that we wanted the game to have, like freedom and openness. But we started with the pillars, we didn’t start with other reference. It was never ‘Fallout, but…’ And that changes your philosophy.

So we ended up looking at dozens of different games and picking and choosing different elements. There have been times where we’ve looked at how does Fallout: New Vegas give you a sense of freedom as well as give you a sense of overall objective.

And we look at that and then places where they’ve done something that’s not tonally appropriate for us, we know we have to solve this a different way. Part of the process has been looking at dozens of reference points, choosing small bits from all of them, and then going through the hard work of manipulating them until they stick together.

GC: We haven’t got time to get into the current woes of the industry but one of the obvious ways to get out of it is lower budget titles. I’m not saying you’re not AAA, but I don’t think you cost $300 million either.

BF: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

GC: It seems the only sensible way to go forward, which means it probably won’t happen. But if it does do you think that will help to ensure more British games and games from other countries of the world. Just to be selfish, if a game is from somewhere not traditionally known for making games then there’s a good chance it’ll be unusual and interesting, and that’s a good thing for everyone.

BF: I get you. Yeah, I would hope that happens. The bigger the budgets you get, the higher the risks. The higher the risks the more safe you have to play it and that can choke out interesting ideas. When we were producing Atomfall there was always five times as many ideas as you have time.

So, we had to be very, very sensible about the order in which we tackle ideas. You have to be grown-up about knowing when to stop. And whether adding more time and adding more ideas is actually to the benefit of the game or it’s just interesting to do.

So, during this production of Atomfall we did extend the time once, because we thought, ‘We’ve got these ideas and the whole thing would become so much richer for it.’ But we still try and be disciplined about it, because Rebellion’s definitely punching above its weight.

We work with agile teams that aren’t as big as you might expect, but we work hard as a team of experts to make pulpy genre games that I don’t think a bigger publisher could or would.

GC: How many people are working on the game?

BF: It’s changed over the course of production because it started as a kind of skunkworks experiment. It might not have worked but it showed so much promise as we developed that over the last couple of years we’ve scaled up to… it depends how you count but something like 150.

GC: That’s a fair size. That’s AA½ at the very least.

BF: [laughs] Yeah, but that also includes shared resources between multiple teams, and support teams, and things like that. That’s why it’s hard to count, because we all share at Rebellion!

GC: Well, that’s been very interesting, thanks for your time.

BF: No problem at all, I enjoyed it.

Atomfall – wherever this is, we didn’t get that far (Rebellion)

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