circleWhen Atomfall was first revealed at the Xbox Games Showcase in June, many people asked, “Is this the British Fallout?” “In some ways it is, and in some ways it’s not,” says Ben Fisher, vice head of design at Rebellion, the Oxford-based studio that developed Atomfall as well as games like Sniper Elite 5 and Zombie Army 4. He explains that Rebellion head Jason Kingsley’s original idea was to look at Fallout’s free-form, self-guided experience and think about how it could be applied to something more familiar.

The difference with Atomfall is in its structure. “It’s a much denser experience,” Fisher says. “One of our benchmarks is Fallout: New Vegas, which is a denser experience than Fallout 3 or 4 in that it’s primarily one interconnected storyline, with layers driven by the player’s choices.” Rather than one giant open-world map, Atomfall features a series of interconnected maps, similar to the levels in the Sniper Elite games. “That’s what we’re good at,” Fisher says, adding that many of the game’s most interesting secrets are buried in bunkers deep underground.

Atomfall tells an alternate history of the Windscale fire, Britain’s worst nuclear disaster, which occurred in 1957, which led to a large swath of the Lake District being placed under long-term quarantine in the game’s world. Atomfall’s Windscale factory is in a slightly different location to the real factory (now renamed Sellafield), which is part of a science park and where sinister secret experiments take place. Players wake up in a quarantined area five years after the disaster, but with no idea who they are. “Your role in the game then is to uncover what happened and, to some extent, decide what to do about it,” says Fisher.

The feel of the gameplay is reminiscent of the film Children of Men. “It’s a desperate battle for survival,” Fisher says. “You’re not a master assassin; it’s more like a pub brawl.” Players must craft weapons like hatchets, Molotov cocktails and bows and arrows, but because Atomfall is set in Britain there are very few guns or ammo, although there are cricket bats. “The fights are intense,” Fisher says. “It’s kill or be killed, and you or your enemy go down quickly.”

But far from gritty realism, Atom Fall boasts influences from pulp novels, with Fisher citing The Quatermass Experiment, The Prisoner, classic Doctor Who and The Wicker Man as major inspirations. “The Day of the Triffids was also a big inspiration,” he adds. “The idea of ​​a feel-good catastrophe, of waking up in the middle of something and not knowing what’s happened.” It’s no coincidence that there’s a village called Wyndham, where you can also encounter a strange, deadly plant.

Folk horror runs deep in Atomfall. Some villagers trapped in the quarantine zone have rekindled an old pagan cult that dates back to the dissolution of the monasteries. “There was an old monastery, and the monks may have been worshipping things they shouldn’t have been worshipping,” Fisher hints, adding that the cult is based on ancient British symbolism, such as the Green Man. This is just one of the factions you can ally with in the game. The other is the Protocols, a remnant of the military sent to control the population after the disaster. But after five years of isolation from the outside world, the soldiers have become more authoritarian. “They’re kind of a warlord at this point.”

Other beings players might face include a fire-breathing ’50s robot from a British Atomic Research Department facility, disaster-related wildlife and flocks of bats, rats and crows that have “gone a bit crazy”, says Fisher. There’s also a local vicar and a jolly woodland witch, while the game’s bandits are a cross between Morris dancers and football hooligans. “There’s a distinctive Britishness that comes through in the features,” he says, adding that it could be the first game to include a Last of the Summer Wine Easter egg.

Freedom is at the core throughout. “We don’t offer a main quest in the traditional sense,” Fisher says. “We’ve made the game structure around discovering clues and piecing them together to figure out what you can do next.” After that, what you do with that information is entirely up to you. “We even allow you to kill every single character in the game,” Fisher says. “Nobody has plot armor.”