The year is 1962 and you’ve just woken up in the shadow of the Windscale (now Sellafield) nuclear power station in Cumbria, five years after its catastrophic meltdown. Trapped in the sizeable quarantine zone surrounding the accident site, you must stay alive long enough to figure out how to escape – a task made rather more challenging by the presence of aggressive cultists, irradiated monsters and highly territorial terror bees. Imagine Stalker, but set in northern England, and you’re edging towards what Oxford-based developer Rebellion has in store.
Fallout may seem like another obvious inspiration for this irradiated game world, but after playing a two-hour demo, it’s clear the game draws more from classic British sci-fi. Here you are, stuck in the picturesque Lake District, with its lush woodlands, gurgling rivers and dry-stone walls. But all around you are the burned-out remains of 1960s cars and tanks, abandoned farm buildings and odd sounds and symbols that suggest something extremely sinister is happening. The development team have mentioned Dr Who, The Wicker Man the novels of John Wyndham as key inspirations, and you can see it in the grubby dislocated scene all around you. Approach a phone box and pick up the ringing handset, and you may hear a disembodied voice warning you about an apparently friendly character you met up the road. Stray into a cave and a ghost-like monster comes at you, infecting you with a paranoid mind virus. This is very much the stuff of Quatermass and Jon Pertwee-era Who.
It’s not long before I bump into a gang of druids stalking the undergrowth and I’m suddenly thrust into combat. But in the spirit of Stalker, and other survival games such as Escape From Tarkov, I have to rely on improvised melee weapons such as cricket bats and scythes, or on rusty guns that may or may not fire the meagre handfuls of ammo I’ve managed to accrue. The developers have said they want this game to be about grimly hanging on to life; you’re not a super-soldier. Everywhere there are little trinkets to scavenge, from apples to machine parts.
When characters aren’t trying to clobber you with bats, they may offer you information or trading opportunities. It seems you’re free to wander through overgrown farms and ruined industrial buildings looking for clues about what the hell even happened here. Just watch out for the glowing greeny-blue bees nests hanging from trees – those guys are really territorial. And poisonous.
Even in my short demo, there’s a nice sinister sense of tension in the air. Relying on faulty handguns and explosive devices that you’ve stuck together, Blue Peter-style, with double-sided sticky tape and things you’ve found in an abandoned military checkpoint adds a sense of desperation and disaster.
I did find some of the menus and weapon selection tricky, and for a game that relies heavily on stealth, it’s very easy to accidentally mess up because you’ve not loaded your shotgun in advance. But then this is the stuff of the survival game: often it’s better to hang around in the long grass than engage with the enemy (although sometimes it’s not exactly clear where you’re in cover and where you’re not, so I was giving my location away a lot).
Atomfall looks like an interesting amalgam of Stalker, Resistance: Fall of Man and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, with some role-playing elements lobbed in. Skill points improve your stealth, health and combat efficiency as you progress, and there are plenty of little notes and clues scattered about the wilderness to find. I think a lot is going to depend on just what the mystery at the heart of the game turns out be.
What does it mean for an apocalyptic adventure to take place in rural England? We’re gonna need more than quaint cottages and enemies with regional accents to capture the horrific majesty of The Triffids, The Daemons or that 70s public information film about playing Frisbee too near an electricity substation. But just the fact that we have a survival adventure with the Lake District as its beautiful, supernaturally charged setting is something to be excited about.
Atomfall is out on 27 March
