Atomfall Massacre: I Snapped and Killed All

Join me on a violent journey through the English countryside, also known as 90 minutes with Atomfall, the new survival-action game from Sniper Elite developer, Rebellion. I recently visited a pub in North London for a pint and some hands-on playtime, and came away intrigued by Atomfall's open-ended approach to mission design and its eerie tone. I also may have lost my mind and decided to attack everyone I saw, including an old lady who likely didn’t deserve it, with a cricket bat. Let me explain why.

In Atomfall, every NPC can be killed, from the lowliest grunt to the most important quest-giver. As I sat down to start the demo, I decided to test this design. My approach was inelegant; barely two minutes into my exploration of this digital Cumbria, I clumsily activated a tripwire alarm, which forced me to dispatch three alerted guards using the blunt face of a cricket bat. This hefty piece of wood became my murder partner, christened with a liberal splash of claret.

Later, I looted a bow and arrow, and being a glutton for archery in games, I quickly equipped it. Now set for both long and short-range encounters, I let Mr. Cricket Bat take a well-earned rest. Nearby, I spotted a hulking wicker man, towering over me and waiting to be set alight. I wasn't going near that; I've seen how that story ends. Such sights nod to the folk horror undertones that serve as the bedrock for this region of Atomfall's segmented world, which is made up of multiple "open zones". This creates a convincingly uneasy atmosphere that only feeds into the larger mystery I'm trying to crack: what exactly happened here in this sleepy, now irradiated corner of England?

My thoughts about this mystery were interrupted by a rabble of druids, who presumably had something to do with that wicker man. They proved the perfect range finders for my newly-acquired bow. One. Two. Three. They all fell down. "I'M ROBIN BLOODY HOOD," my brain shouted to itself, before I snapped out of it and back into my London pub surroundings. I hadn’t had a drink yet, I promise. It was only 10am.

The bow felt good to fire, but I was more interested in Atomfall’s smart approach to stamina. Instead of a traditional depleting and regenerating bar, a heart rate monitor increases the more you perform physically taxing actions. Sprinting for an extended period, for example, pushes your heart rate well over 140 bpm, making it harder to aim steadily and accurately if you suddenly have to stop and fight. Later, I found a Bow Mastery skill manual that unlocked a perk negating the impact of a heightened heartbeat on drawing the bowstring back. While not the most exciting perk, and with Atomfall not boasting the most complex skill tree suite, it does seem malleable enough to tailor your character’s skills to your preferred gameplay style, whether you favor stealth over gunplay.

Atomfall Screenshots

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With my only achievement so far being a bunch of dead druids, you may rightfully wonder what my overall goal is here. And, to an extent, so did I. Aimless exploration of the Casterfall Woods region had yet to unearth anything significant, so I followed my only quest lead: a note pointing me toward a herbalist, Mother Jago, who lives near an old mine. Along the way, I spotted allusions to the greater story at play, as a shimmering, oily swirl of blues and purples hovered over a power plant – the apparent cause of Britain's descent into the post-apocalypse. Nearby, a phone box rang, and a creepy voice warned me to stay out of the woods. It was too late for that, but thanks for the call anyway.

The path was littered with similar small environmental story touches, such as an old boathouse rigged with an unsettling alarm system, the words “get lost” painted across it – a warning the nearby mound of skulls and bones seemingly didn’t heed. There’s an enjoyably uneasy vibe around every corner of Atomfall, with sleepy, leafy forests giving way to creepy zones of terror. Plenty of Fallout comparisons have been made since its reveal, but I think Stalker and its recent sequel are far more apt touchstones, both in terms of tone and game design.

Following another druid massacre in which I butchered them and looted their garden center home for herbs (a quick-thyme event, if you will), I met Mother Jago at her quaint allotment retreat. Dressed in a plum-colored coat and animal skull and rose-laden hat, she resembled Angela Lansbury if she’d got big into black magic aromatherapy instead of crime solving. But my hopes that she could make Atomfall’s opaque mystery any clearer were immediately dashed – she gave only vague answers to my questions, despite exhausting every dialogue option as I dug for clues as to where to go next. This reminded me of classic point-and-click adventures in the way you’re encouraged to explore every corner of conversation in search of a hint. Eventually, a door was opened: Jago offered what she promised to be valuable information in exchange for the safe return of her herbalism book. A book that was, of course, not in a library, but held hostage at the druids’ fortified castle. So, with a new lead in my notebook, I traipsed back across the map in search of recipes and the druid blood protecting it.

Atomfall’s freeform design meant I could approach from any angle, so I decided to attack the castle from the side. As I made my way there, I encountered a druid patrol near an abandoned petrol station. The surely soon-to-be-considered historic Battle of the Forecourt kicked off as I lobbed my only grenade into the middle of them. The enemy AI wasn’t the most reactive, rarely darting for cover or engaging in any evasive maneuvers, but the satisfying eruption of blood and bits of bone did alert a couple of archers from further down the road. I halted their advance with a nail bomb and then proceeded to slalom their arrows, quickly closing the distance to snap one’s neck before getting my trusty bat out for another round of head-smashing. There’s definitely fun to be had playing around with these enemies, but from the small sample I’ve had so far, I wouldn’t go into Atomfall looking for top-tier combat. Instead, it seems wise to treat enemy encounters more like a fun sideshow to the main event of discovering the world’s secrets.

After sniping a couple of axe-wielding brutes, I made it inside the castle’s outer walls. There, I stumbled across a locked hut. A note printed with a set of map coordinates pinned to its door suggested that the keys were far away to the southeast. Atomfall doesn’t believe in objective markers, instead leaving it up to you to study your map and place down markers on points of interest yourself. Could this locked hut be where the book was hidden? Did I need to go on a quest for this key? My hunch told me no, and I instead walked up to the central keep’s big front doors.

Once inside, I found a few more druids to club, but no sign of the book. I hunted around its dank hallways, finding nothing but cloth and alcohol to craft healing bandages with. I spent a good ten minutes searching every corner, but no luck. It’s a further example of Atomfall’s obtuse approach to mission design. You won’t have your hand held here, and the book won’t glow gold with a big “pick me up” sign attached. While it can lead to moments of frustration, I found myself ultimately encouraged by Rebellion’s approach to make something that challenges the player and sticks stubbornly to its explorative, almost detective-like vision.

With the book nowhere in sight, I decided to follow the paper trail and head to those map coordinates in search of the keys I previously read about. Perhaps this would unlock my path forward? The coordinates led me into the den of a poison plant monster... thing that seemed to boil my brain if I spent too long near it. Rifle bullets made minimal impact, and there was little I could do to prevent my quick death. I reloaded my save and used my Skyrim bunny-hopping muscle memory to bypass the beast, leaping down a rock face to collect the keys from one of the creature’s earlier victims. I headed back to the hut, where I found a shiny new perk point and a smattering of ammo. As you’ll no doubt be aware, none of these items resembled the herbalism book that I was trying to find.

Forlorn and slightly lost, I ventured under the castle and deep into its bowels, where the druids concocted their rituals and chemical-fueled practices. I killed the High Priestess and about a dozen of her lackeys, found an SMG, a recipe for crafting poison bombs, and an atomic battery which seemingly opened up a whole new questline that I simply didn’t have time to look into before my demo time ran out. Again, the observant among you will notice that none of these items were the book I was looking for.

Xbox Games Series Tier List

Xbox Games Series Tier List

After my play session ended, I was told the book *was* in the castle, just lying on a table I must have walked past several times. Before that revelation, though, I started to believe the book simply didn’t exist. That it was a ruse. A lie. I decided to go back to the herbalist and see if she had anything to say for herself. She didn't, of course, because the book was real and the quest to acquire it was legitimate. But my own confusion manifested as fully buying into my character’s descent into violence, and so I killed her. She became one with her plants in the soil. Searching her body for some kind of hidden “truth”, I found a recipe for something that would appear to help combat the poison swamp monster I encountered earlier. It was too late for that, but I assumed this was the valuable information she was going to exchange her book for. We could have saved a lot of time here, it seems.

Not that you can shave a huge amount of time off Atomfall’s runtime. I was told by the developers at Rebellion that you’d struggle to finish the story in “less than four or five hours”, and that most players will take around 25 hours. Quite what will happen within those 25 hours could be quite varied, though. I spoke to someone else at the demo session who went on an entirely different adventure to mine during their time playing, one that started with a crashed helicopter I never encountered and led to a whole new region filled with killer robots and mutants. It appears that even by just skimming the surface of Atomfall, there are many depths, secrets, and mysteries to be found.

I do wonder if some of the objectives may be too obtuse for some, though. The lack of direction could certainly be offputting, but Atomfall feels like a game that rewards you the more you indulge in its obfuscated quest design. The blurred lines between the side and main objectives add a real peril to every action, with its malleable plot design encouraging each player to tell their own tale and find their own ending and explanation for what has happened here in the irradiated English countryside. I’ll still see the end of the story, despite killing off poor old Mother Jago; it may just be wildly different from yours.

But, that’s all that I have time to see today. For now, my hands bloodied from the undeserved demise of a herbalist and the warpath I’ve left behind, I decide to engage in full-British mode: take my cricket bat, head to the pub, and wait for this all to blow over.