Atomfall Review – Britain’s Bleakest Mystery is Also One of Its Best

Into the Heart of the Quarantine

The British countryside has never felt this unsettling. Atomfall, the new survival-action game from Rebellion, wastes no time establishing its eerie tone. One moment you’re climbing out of a rusted bunker in England’s scenic Lake District, and the next you’re being told by a crackling phone booth to “trust no one.” There’s no long-winded prologue or exposition dump. Just the sun shining on dew-covered grass, a fence line curling over a hill, and a creeping feeling that something has gone horribly wrong. And that feeling never really leaves.

While it shares some conceptual DNA with Bethesda’s Fallout and the mystery-first design ethos of Elden Ring, Atomfall carves out a personality all its own. It doesn’t rely on spectacle to hook you—it relies on curiosity. Where most open-world games are obsessed with breadcrumb trails and checklist objectives, Atomfall strips all that away. It drops you into the middle of a radiated, isolated Britain and simply trusts that you’ll find your own way, and more importantly, find your own meaning. And it works. Mostly.

Surviving the Windscale Zone

Set five years after a fictionalised version of the real-life Windscale nuclear accident of 1957, Atomfall reimagines Northern England as a quarantined “hot zone” where nature is thriving—and society is unravelling. A wall keeps people in. Paranoia keeps them apart. And the game gives you a front-row seat to the moral and mental decay of the people trapped inside.

Rather than following a singular narrative path, the game lets you chart your own course through its factional tensions and sinister conspiracies. You might find yourself mediating between a village vicar and an armed resistance group one moment, and investigating a locked room above a bakery the next. Sometimes diplomacy works. Other times you’ll be forced to make brutal decisions without clear moral outcomes. And through it all, you’re guided not by a quest marker—but by intuition, rumours, scraps of paper, and flickers of smoke on the horizon.

One of Atomfall’s most admirable choices is how little it holds your hand. Instead of highlighting every key location or filling your screen with icons, it leaves the map intentionally vague. Want to find a hidden bunker? You’ll need to cross-reference a note with longitude and latitude coordinates. Need to track a suspect? Better start asking the locals—or rifling through their homes. It’s a refreshing design choice that rewards attention to detail and encourages actual exploration, not just fast travel and checkbox chasing.

A Nation Armed and Unready

Combat in Atomfall is gritty, grounded, and often unforgiving. You’re not a power-armored juggernaut—you’re just someone trying to survive. Early on, your arsenal is limited: blunt melee weapons, bolt-action rifles, a pipe bomb if you’re lucky. Every shot counts, every wound lingers, and every enemy—be it a cultist, rogue soldier, or mutated local—feels like a genuine threat. There’s no run-and-gun bravado here. This is a game where charging in blindly is a fast way to end up in a shallow grave.

The shooting mechanics themselves are deliberately weighty. Reloads take time. Your aim wobbles if you’re panicked or exhausted. And stealth, while basic, becomes essential. Sneaking through tall grass with a bow and arrow feels infinitely more reliable than kicking down the front door with a shotgun. Ammo is scarce, your health is fragile, and the enemies don’t pull punches. It creates a sense of real tension—especially in the game’s many subterranean bunkers, where every corner could hide something lethal.

That said, the combat isn’t without its issues. The stealth system, while serviceable, lacks some of the flexibility seen in Rebellion’s Sniper Elite series. You can’t toss bottles for distractions or craft more elaborate tools like smoke bombs. Encounters can feel inconsistent—sometimes smart, sometimes a bit janky—but they’re always dangerous. And that danger fits the world. You’re not a hero. You’re just trying to get out alive.

Britain at the End of the World

What truly sets Atomfall apart is its unapologetically British identity. This is not a game filled with generic Americana—it’s packed with pubs, red phone boxes, Cornish pasties, tweed jackets, and dry, dark humour. You can brew a cup of tea to reduce stress. You can find a shotgun in a biscuit tin. And you’ll meet characters who sound like they walked straight off the set of a 1960s BBC mystery. One side character speaks like a royal; another sounds like a drunken Fawlty Towers extra. And somehow, it all fits.

Beyond the surface charm, there’s a deep undercurrent of folk horror running through the game. Atomfall channels The Wicker Man, The Day of the Triffids, and classic British sci-fi with unsettling confidence. You’ll encounter towering wooden effigies in quiet forests, disturbing rituals behind village walls, and fleeting glimpses of things that maybe—just maybe—weren’t really there. The sense of unease is constant, not just from the world itself, but from how it toys with your perception of what’s real.

Oddly enough, it’s always sunny in Atomfall. There’s no weather system or day-night cycle. And while that might sound like a missed opportunity, it ends up working in the game’s favour. The bright, beautiful countryside becomes a mask for the rot beneath. It’s disarming. And when the game does drag you underground into caves, labs, or fallout shelters, the contrast is immediate—and terrifying.

Verdict

Atomfall is a rare kind of post-apocalyptic game—one that doesn’t rely on spectacle, loot grinds, or endless hand-holding. Instead, it offers a deeply atmospheric world, rich in mystery and moral ambiguity, and asks you to figure it out. It can be unforgiving. The combat isn’t always clean, and the stealth could use more depth. But none of that undermines the experience. This is a game that rewards patience, thoughtfulness, and immersion.

If you’re tired of bloated open-worlds and crave something a little stranger, a little more grounded, and a lot more British, Atomfall is well worth the journey into the unknown.

Score: 9/10