Atomfall

Written by Jason Dailey on 3/24/2025 for PS5  

I’ve seen the words “British Fallout” tossed around quite a bit when describing Atomfall, and while both video game series do have “fall” in their titles, don’t be fooled into thinking that Atomfall is simply a Fallout dupe. It’s more “Sherlock Holmes investigates Chernobyl with guns and knives while surrounded by veritable nutcases”, if I had to boil it down to one sentence. Despite a somewhat anticlimactic ending structure, Atomfall is one of the best surprises of 2025, and a game that I hope marks the start of a new series from Rebellion.

Based loosely on the real-life Windscale nuclear plant fire of October 1957, Atomfall picks up five years after that disaster, with a fictional wall and military quarantine zone having been established in the interim. You wake up in a mysterious bunker with no recollection of how or why you got there. A scientist in a hazmat suit, bleeding like a stuck pig, clambers in and tells you that the truth about Windscale must get out and he requests your assistance in making it so. From there, the world of Atomfall is your oyster.

Leaving the bunker, you can go anywhere and do whatever you please. There is no traditional quest structure in Atomfall, instead opting for a more open-ended investigative structure that sees you acquiring leads through conversations with NPCs, reading notes in the world, or discovering new locations. At the start, it is a good idea to visit Wyndham Village, the town just downhill from the bunker, but I admit to venturing down the other fork in the road for a bit at first. Therein lies the beauty of Atomfall – its world is a ball of yarn waiting to be unraveled depending on which threads you choose to pull at. These are big words that I’m about to say, I know, but I hadn’t felt this level of joy from exploration and discovery since perhaps Skyrim.

Finding a new location tucked away on the map and going in to explore, only to find a new lead or new weapon was constantly rewarding. The entire world felt connected, which often led to exciting discoveries. A hidden tunnel would get me into a previously inaccessible area, or the cellar under a building was hiding some terrible secret. My curiosity was almost always rewarded, in one way or the other. What Atomfall does better than most open-world games is fostering not just a sense of player agency, but actual player agency. There is no handholding, no quest markers, no yellow paint, and no delineation of main versus side missions here. You’re left to follow your own curiosity and align with the factions and people of your choosing. In fact, to my knowledge, every named NPC can be killed off, sometimes closing entire narrative threads before they ever get started. I said goodbye to two folks very early on, without knowing that my choices would lead to their demise, though in hindsight, it was a logical conclusion that I should have considered before acting.

To that end, I felt like every decision I made had a tangible outcome. Following a lead to its conclusion can close off others prematurely, or sometimes you can play both sides of the fence until two leads come to a tipping point. It’s also difficult to trust anyone that you meet in Atomfall as you never know who the good guy or bad guy is, yourself included, making each decision a tough one out of fear of making the wrong choice. With that said, the game feels a bit anticlimactic at the end, leaving me with more questions than answers. Atomfall has multiple endings, depending upon your choices and the leads you follow along the way. Without spoiling anything, after 15 hours of playtime, I was looking for a bigger payoff for a game that handles player agency so well for the first 14 hours.

From a gameplay perspective, Atomfall is a gritty first-person slasher/shooter with a variety of weapons at your disposal, including knives, bows, pistols, rifles, cricket bats, and more. Playing on the default difficulty, ammo is relatively scarce, meaning that if you pick a firefight at every turn, you’re going to run out of bullets quickly. Stealth is a viable, if not preferred, way to play for big chunks of the game. You can sneak up on enemies for stealthy takedowns, shoot them with a bow, or throw a hatchet at them. Inevitably, you’ll find yourself in open combat at some point, whether you get spotted by an enemy, or trip an alarm.

Combat can be over fast, especially if you are outnumbered, or if some enemies have guns. Staying mobile and using cover to break line of sight is key, as is using the left bumper button to deliver a good, old-fashioned kick to the chest to stagger enemies and create openings for you to attack. Though nowhere near as good, it reminded me a little bit of the combat from The Last of Us series, only in first-person. Atomfall’s combat ranges from serviceable to good, depending on the encounter, and is elevated a bit on PS5 by the adaptive trigger support on the DualSense controller. Guns are slow and weighted, packing an appropriate punch, allowing you to feel the trigger pull of each weapon, or the draw of a bowstring. I must admit though that by the end of the game, the trepidation of getting into open combat faded a bit as I found more powerful weapons and increased my storage capacity for ammo, which made it far easier to survive, despite only having 25-ish total inventory slots and a heart rate mechanic that prevents you from button-mashing melee weapons. Up to that point, however, I constantly had that internal monologue of, “Oh, I want to go in there, but it looks too dangerous for me right now.”

Everything I’ve described to this point is the standard Atomfall experience based off its default difficulty. The game allows you to tailor the experience to your liking. So, if you’re someone who prefers exploration and doesn’t want combat to be as challenging, that’s a playstyle setting, or if you want to spend more time in combat and less time wandering about, there is also a playstyle setting that turns on objective markers. I strongly recommend starting with the default Survivor playstyle to get the full effect as I simply cannot imagine playing this game with objective markers. I mentioned that it took me about 15 hours to see the credits, but I can easily see playing Atomfall for double or even half that amount of time. I left a lot of stones unturned, and if not time constrained, I would have left no stone unturned – or at least as few as possible. This is also a game that I think you could speedrun in just a few hours, which is going to make for some interesting YouTube videos.

Looking under the hood a bit, graphically-speaking, Atomfall can be a looker at times on PS5 Pro, thanks to one of the lusher post-apocalyptic environments you will see in a game. I took every screenshot in this review directly from my machine, and while its environments can be breathtaking, during gameplay its character models betray it as a game still available on last-gen consoles.

As a total package, Atomfall is an absolute pleasure to play. I don’t often feel compelled to go back and play a game again, but if I didn’t have to move on to my next review, I would do just that. I keep thinking about all those leads I didn’t track down and how they may have changed things, or if they could have answered some of my lingering questions. It is one of those games you think about when you’re not playing, and one that you will talk about with your pals and realize that you’ve seen and done things the other hasn’t. We all know that creating a brand-new intellectual property is a dicey affair in the gaming industry nowadays, where the first false start may be your last, but I am so glad Rebellion took a chance on Atomfall. They’re certainly on to something with this game, and my hope is that this is the start of a new series that continues to focus on player agency as its primary mechanic.