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Atomfall (Video Game)

They built Hell in Cumberland, and you're right slap bang in it.
Reg Stansfield

Atomfall is an action-survival game developed and published by Rebellion. It was released for PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S on March 27, 2025.

The game takes place in an Alternate History where the Windscale disaster of 1957, Great Britain's worst nuclear accident in our timeline, was significantly worse, leading to the quarantine and isolation of a large area of Cumberland surrounding the Windscale atom plant. You are woken up in a bunker by a scientist imploring you to venture into the plant to learn the truth about the quarantine zone.

Gameplay involves the player roaming around the quarantine zone while managing your health and resources and encountering the different factions that have formed inside the area. Gameplay UI indicators are kept to a minimum, encouraging a strategic, thoughtful approach to completing objectives.

The game's first downloadable expansion, Wicked Isle, was released on June 3, 2025. The game's second downloadable expansion, The Red Strain, was released on September 16, 2025.

A prequel comic tie-in, also titled Atomfall, was published in the 2000 AD sister series, Judge Dredd Megazine #477-481.

Previews: Reveal Trailer, Gamescom Trailer, Release Date Trailer, Gameplay Overview, Features Trailer, Pre-Launch Trailer, Wicked Isle Expansion Trailer, Wicked Isle Gameplay Overview, The Red Strain Expansion Teaser Trailer, The Red Strain Expansion Launch Trailer, The Red Strain Gameplay Overview


Atomfall contains examples of the following tropes:

  • The '60s: The game takes place in an Alternate History Britain in 1962. While the world still carries the same cultural and architectural aesthetics as it did in reality, technologically it is leaps and bounds ahead of what was available at the time. This includes giant military robots patrolling the quarantined country roads of northern England and the presence of an advanced government agency called B.A.R.D.
  • Action Survivor: Your character, as far as can be determined, is no one particularly special note , and has no extraordinary combat abilities. Nevertheless, in one day you'll graduate from taking out random bandits to destroying or outsmarting killer robots, and disabling the interference field that has trapped everyone in the area for five years.
  • A.K.A.-47: It has a mix of real names, near-real names and invented names. Examples of the latter two cases include "Lee Mark 4" rifle (Lee-Enfield Mark 4), "Enfield LMG" (Bren light machine gun), and "Falkirk Battle Rifle" (FN FAL automatic rifle).
  • All for Nothing:
    • If you provide Iris with Mother Jago's tonic to treat her infected husband, when you return to the bakery she informs you he escaped and ran off towards Casterfell Woods, never to be seen again. Iris herself will be killed during the endgame while attacking Protocol soldiers during the fighting when the Druids invade Wyndham after you deal with Oberon.
    • If you help Ilya Kozlov re-establish contact with "Agravaine", she'll just kill him after arranging to meet up with him, as he has outlived his usefulness, just like you do if you help her.
  • Alternate History: On the harder end of the scale, with the real-life Windscale disaster being exaggerated to a Chernobyl-like incident causing a large section of Cumberland to be quarantined. The construction of the Windscale Nuclear Plant was also relocated at the last moment from its real-life location of near Seascale to near the fictional village of Wyndham, as a cover to build a research facility to study the Oberon meteorite.
  • Amnesiac Hero: Your character has no idea who they are or how they wound up in a bunker in the Zone. Notes you can find in various bunkers indicate that some of the surviving Interchange scientists are suffering from progressive amnesia as a side effect of something they've been doing in their attempt to stop Oberon.
  • Anti-Frustration Features:
    • Highly vertical areas will have convenient ladders for you to climb, and there's usually a way around particularly risky paths if you're low on ammo.
    • If you enter an area without much natural light, and haven't already gotten the torch, there's usually one laying around.
    • While most enemies respawn when you leave an area, robots that have lost their atomic batteries will usually stay disabled.
    • Since there's no tagging system or way to see through walls, enemies will usually whistle or mutter to themselves to alert you they're in the area.
    • You can kill any NPC, including the ones that are necessary for you to escape with. The Operator provides a potential way out, no matter what.
    • The game auto-saves frequently, so you won't lose too much progress when you die. There are also three Auto-Save slots, reducing the consequences of an inconvenient save point.
  • Anyone Can Die: You can kill any NPC in the game, no matter how important they are to the leads you're pursuing. In fact it's entirely possible to kill friendly NPCs by accident, as they only let you know they're friendly if they see you, and the game heavily encourages stealth and sneaking up on people to snap their necks.
  • Applied Phlebotinum: The organic substance obtained from the Oberon meteorite hidden in the Windscale plant. It can be used to create the advanced computers in the Interchange and AI for the BARD robots, make medications allowing someone to instantly learns skills, and turns people into glowing mindless zombies.
  • Apocalypse How: Falls pretty firmly into a Class 0, a Societal Disruption in a Local Area. Specifically, the region of Cumberland surrounding the Windscale Plant has been quarantined from the rest of the UK, leading to a breakdown of civil order and the emergence of bandit gangs and the Druid cult in Casterfell Wood. The only pocket of real civilization left is Wyndham Village, which is under the increasingly authoritarian control of the Protocol. The rest of Great Britain and the world at large is apparently going on as normal though. This can be upgraded to a Class 2, however, if you join Mother Jago and give Oberon the means to expand beyond the quarantine zone and infect the world at large.
  • Artificial Stupidity: The enemy NPCs in this game aren't very bright, as they have a noticeable habit of blindly following each other into danger, making it all too easy to kill them. This is best seen when standing in an enclosed space or at the bottom of a ladder, where they will proceed to come after you even as you continue to pick them off.
  • Artistic License – Law: One of the ambient dialogue lines you can hear from female Outlaws is them remarking on how useful guns are and wishing firearms would still be legal for women even after the quarantine is lifted. In real life, British gun laws have never applied differently based on gender; it's always been legal for women to own firearms under circumstances where it is legal for men to own them.
  • Attack Its Weak Point: Flamethrower robots have fuel tanks that can be punctured and set on fire to make them overheat. Other models need to be set on fire through other means. When sufficiently hot or damaged, a robot pops out its atomic battery to cool down, whereupon you can either grab it (if you still need any) or shoot it to explode the robot, doing massive damage to everything around it. Standard robots can be damaged by shooting the glass head dome where their exposed vacuum tubes are; it only takes several rusty revolver shots to this area to overheat a robot.
  • Auto-Save: The game has three auto save files, and saves every three minutes by default. You can change the save interval from as low as one minute to as high as one hour.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Submachine guns are great for hosing down fast-moving enemies at close-to-medium range, but they chew through ammo like crazy and ammo for them is the rarest in the game, so unless you're farming Protocol patrols for ammo in Skethermoor (which by itself costs ammo, likely for your pistol or rifle), you really don't have much opportunity to use the submachine gun.
  • Baba Yaga: Mother Jago is supposed to evoke the archetype, both by name and judicious misuse of mushrooms.
  • Bad Boss: Dr. Garrow turns out to be directly responsible for the disaster due to their arrogance and shortsightedness. Depending on what leads you follow, she's killed by another character over abandoning hundreds to their fates to save her own neck. This is foreshadowed if you decide to free her from her cell: She sprints into the Interchange and locks the door behind her, leaving you to deal with a prison riot.
  • Bag of Sharing: The Pneumatic Tubes found in bunkers and suchlike are a single-player version. You can put things in a tube, and retrieve them later from any other tube. Exactly how these things are connected is not something the player needs to worry about.
  • Batter Up!: One of the weapons that can be used by the player and enemies is a cricket bat.
  • Berserk Button: The main quest-givers can turn on you based on your actions, usually involving your decisions in the endgame.
    • Mother Jago will attempt to kill you alongside the Druids on your way out of the Windscale Plant if you kill Oberon.
    • Conversely, Dr. Holder will attack you if you feed Oberon the growth formula as requested by Mother Jago, effectively dooming humanity.
    • Dr. Garrow will angrily refuse to work with you further if you copy the data from the dam to a tape (as requested by Joyce Tanner) instead of erasing it like she asked, and will attack you if you approach her in the Interchange.
    • Joyce Tanner will attack you if you delete the dam data as requested by Dr. Garrow, believing that you've secretly copied the data to a tape and have it on you. Unlike the other examples, you can convince her to continue working with you with the right response to her accusations.
    • Captain Sims will order his men to attack you if you admit to helping Dr. Garrow break out of prison.
    • While not an endgame quest-giver, Iris will understandably attack you if you kill her infected husband.
  • Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Joyce Tanner seems perfectly nice (and is also the easiest endgame quest-giver to find, due to being the only one that shows up during the normal course of the main quest) but once you finish their quest, things rapidly go downhill, ending in the Captain Obvious Reveal if you follow a certain questline that she's actually the Soviet agent "Agravaine" sent to retrieve a sample of Oberon as a "deterrent." Even if you have no qualms about handing Oberon over to the Soviets, Joyce still betrays you and captures you for interrogation. She'll also pull a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness on Ilya Kozlov, one of the original Soviet spies from 1957, if you help him reunite with her. Additionally, if you destroy Oberon with Dr. Holder's poison instead of the explosive failsafe, Joyce will be furious, as the Oberon sample you obtained for her will be worthless if there's already an effective deterrent against it. As such, she'll demand you kill Dr. Holder before she lets you escape with her. Overall, she's much more vicious, ruthless, and cold-blooded than her initial cheery heroic demeanor suggests.
  • Black Site: Skethermoor Prison, currently run by Protocol, is clearly an illegal operation, right down to loudspeaker announcements specifying which form to fill out if a prisoner beating was planned in advance or happened without warning. Notes you can find inside indicate it was already a place for the British government to secretly keep prisoners whose detention wasn't strictly legal, even before Oberon was discovered and Windscale was built.
  • Blatant Lies: When asked how they avoided being caught in the quarantine five years ago, Dr. Garrow claims to have been in Oxford at the time of the disaster, which you'll know is complete bollocks if you've read one of numerous notes in the Interchange documenting what really happened. Clearly, Garrow doesn't want to admit they sealed the Interchange and escaped before anyone else even knew what was going on, effectively leaving their colleagues behind to die.
  • Border Patrol: Swarms of leeches will eat you if you just try to swim across the lake to the Windscale Plant, and it's implied something even nastier takes out any boats that try to make the crossing or escape to sea.
  • Boring, but Practical: You need four atomic batteries to advance the plot, and you can get three of them through barter at trading camps, and two more from previously disabled robots.
  • Botanical Abomination: Despite taking the form of a giant space rock, Oberon appears to be ultimately plant-like in nature, given that its spores result in a glowing blue Alien Kudzu and causes humans infected by them to turn into fungus-infested zombies. Some of the B.A.R.D. scientists liken it to an egg; a mineral shell protecting an organic core.
  • Calming Tea: Tea is a consumable that stabilizes your heart rate, and there's an achievement for consuming tea, a pastry and cake together.
  • Came from the Sky: Oberon turns out to be a meteorite that fell to Earth during Shakespeare's time, most likely originating from the Kepler's Star supernova of 1604. While made up of a miracle matter capable of generating vast energy and creating supercomputers, the interior of the meteorite also contains virulent mutating spores. The Wicked Isle DLC indicates there was a smaller scale, contained outbreak of the spores on Midsummer Isle from a smaller and weaker fragment of Oberon, which may have inspired Shakespeare's play.
  • Collection Sidequest: There are achievements and tracking for:
    • Special comic book-themed lunchboxes you can find buried treasure in
    • Comic books themselves
    • Destroying garden gnomes in Wyndham Village
  • Combat Pragmatist: The game encourages this combat style, especially as ammo is relatively rare and can't be crafted, but throwable weapons can easily be crafted and melee weapons are abundant.
  • Creator Provincialism: The game is set in an alternate-history Great Britain, where developers Rebellion are based out of.
  • Creepy Good: Dr. Holder is found in an abandoned church cellar that he's turned into a makeshift Mad Scientist Laboratory and has pale skin and glowing blue eyes from his exposure to Oberon, but he's the most openly heroic of the quest givers, as he's the only one who both wants Oberon completely destroyed, doesn't betray you, and doesn't need to sacrifice the civilian population of the Zone. Tellingly, while the Operator warns you against trusting any of the other endgame quest-givers, his only objection to Dr. Holder is the concern that Holder's plan isn't reliable, at least compared to just setting off a large amount of explosives to deal with the problem.
  • Cryptic Background Reference: You can find a letter to Dr Garrow, telling her that the Ethics Committee will not be considering her case any further, but that she should not consider this to be the equivalent of a Not Guilty verdict. The letter says nothing about what she did. Given the letter is on her person and thus likely written some time after the disaster, it's likely discussing her responsibility for the disaster. Which hints are her motives of erasing all evidence showing that she was largely responsible for what happened.
  • Cycle of Revenge: Dr. Holder wants Dr. Garrow dead, for causing the disaster and sacrificing the rest of the B.A.R.D. scientists to both save herself and cover up her responsibility for what happened. However, Jean Hamer wants Dr. Holder dead for more or less the same reasons; as a civilian, she has no grasp of the nuances of the situation and simply blames all B.A.R.D. scientists for what happened. This can make Dr. Holder's death quite ironic if you kill him for Jean Hamer after watching him kill Dr. Garrow.
  • Disaster Dominoes: No one party is guilty of the catastrophe ending up as bad as it did. It's just that the actions of the Soviet spies, the nuclear plant meltdown, the alien spores containment failure and the mutual backstabbing of the scientists and the local military contingent resulting in a scarcity of resources all contributed to the pile-up that led to the power issues that led to the meltdown that caused a mass evacuation (which failed to actually get anyone far away enough before the greater military stepped in) which halted efforts to recontain the spores (and left a lot of scientists locked inside the Interchange with both the spores and the test subjects to either mutate or starve to death). Each individual issue was probably solvable on its own, and the actual events unfolded over the course of three days, but put together... We got the Zone.
  • Druid: One of the enemy factions is a group druids based on pre Christian British paganism.
  • Dug Too Deep: During the game, you find out that the Windscale atomic research plant is really a cover for the mysterious "Oberon," which is located underground. If you follow the right route, Dr Garrow will tell you "But... well, then we dug too deep into Oberon in a very literal sense." This caused all sorts of unpleasantness to be released. Specifically Oberon is an ancient, long-buried meteor made of a material with amazing energy properties. Living, organic alien spores were found within a hollow cavity inside the meteorite, but were not virulent at the time. However, eager for more of the meteorite mateiral, Dr. Garrow ordered increased drilling (going against safety procedures) despite warnings from her subordinates, resulting in a massive explosion of energy when the meteorite's core was breached, activating the spores and leading to the disaster.
  • Elite Mooks:
    • The Thralls, Infected with Glowing Eyes of Doom and wearing protective gear which render them immune to critical hits. On normal difficulty levels they're extremely hard to kill (requiring several shotgun blasts to bring down), and should best be avoided.
    • Protocol soldiers all carry automatic or semi-auto military firearms, often in good condition, compared to Outlaws who carry a mix of melee weapons and single-shot or bolt-action rusty firearms, or Druids who carry a mix of melee weapons and bows. Many Protocol soldiers also have metal body armor which roughly halves the damage of any attack that hits it. On the plus side they don't aggro against you at medium range, unlike Outlaws or Druids, unless you're trespassing or have already made an enemy of them.
  • Exclusive Enemy Equipment:
    • Many of the best weapons in the game can only be obtained by killing Protocol patrols in Wyndham or Skethermoor.
    • Joyce Tanner and Captain Sims both carry unique pistol custom variants with moderately better performance (Joyce has a custom Hi Power and Sims has a custom M1911) that can only be obtained if you kill and loot them. However doing so obviously locks you out of their ending paths.
  • Extremely Short Timespan: As there is no day/night cycle (or weather effects outside of the Windscale plant), it's implied that the game takes place over the course of one day. Reinforced by an achievement for completing the game in less than five hours.
  • Featureless Protagonist: Nothing is known about the protagonist. They are not given a name, are not seen in reflections, and cover their entire body in clothing.
    • If you return to the bunker with all your plot-relevant tools towards the end of the game and look around, you'll find two notes from an anonymous scientist complaining about the strange crank calls he's receiving, with the implication you might be the scientist, though neither the prologue scientist or Dr. Holder seem to recognize you. A note on a dead villager in Skethermoor also implies others have heard the voice on the telephone as well.
    • You can also find a miscellaneous note about a Sole Survivor from Convoy 4, the previous military convoy sent into the Zone. The ending slideshows show that you're wearing a near-identical uniform as Joyce Tanner from Convoy 5, with a red torch emblem also worn by Dr. Garrow who also came in with Convoy 5 by air, which may imply you're that Sole Survivor from the previous convoy. Protocol soldiers don't recognize your uniform, but that might be explained by Protocol and the Convoys coming from different branchs of the military.
  • Final Boss: Averted — the game does not build up to a confrontation with an unusually powerful enemy. Most of the quest givers want you to destroy Oberon, but Oberon is a project, not a person, and is dealt with accordingly.
  • Fish People: A new creature type in Wicked Isle, they're a type of Feral that adapted to the islands watery environment.
  • Folk Horror: Territories controlled by the Druid factions have this atmosphere, one of their strongholds is a ruined castle with a giant wicker man in the courtyard.
  • Foreshadowing: When you visit the bakery and speak to Iris, you can hear the Voices murmuring, even though no spores are visible, giving you a hint that she's hiding her infected husband upstairs.
  • Fun with Acronyms: The British Atomic Research Division, or B.A.R.D., which is actually researching an ancient alien meteor codenamed Oberon.
    • The Red Strain expansion introduces C.O.R.E., Co-ordinated Orbital Research Establishment.
  • Gang of Hats: the various groups around the quarantine zone wear outfits that make it obvious what their affiliation is:
    • Protocol Troops wear British Army Uniforms, obviously.
    • The Druids wear various medieval and Folk Horror outfits.
    • Bandits dress like Victorian Era London street thugs. The Preview video for Wicked Isle shows the bandits on the island wear more nautical themed outfits like tricorn hats.
  • Golden Ending: Dr. Holder's ending, which is the only ending where Oberon is destroyed for good, you're still free at the end of the game, and the civilian population of the Zone aren't exterminated. Well, relative to the other endings, at least. The only downside the Operator can think of when narrating the ending is the fact that Holder had no ambitions or plans beyond stopping Oberon, and thus no escape plan other than hiding in a bunker and waiting for the whole thing to blow over. The Wicked Isle DLC adds the Talking Down the Angel ending, in which you also end up destroying Oberon for good (by convincing a splintered-off piece of it to help you destroy it!) and escaping the Zone via an ancient secret passage.
  • Good Is Not Soft: Dr. Holder is one of the more noble characters in the game but if he learns Dr. Garrow is free and in the Interchange, he'll gun her down in cold blood. He even admits it was partially out of revenge for her role in the catastrophe.
  • Graceful Loser: Even though the Operator wants Oberon destroyed, in the endings in which you side with Oberon/its proxies (and thus likely destroy the world), in the ending narration the Operator still congratulates you on your victory, albeit with a heavy dose of dry sarcasm.
  • Hand Cannon: The Webley revolver does almost twice as much damage as the 9mm Browning Hi-Power or M1911 pistols, and in Pristine condition with the damage upgrade skill the revolver can kill regular human enemies with a single torso shot.
  • Hive Mind: Oberon appears to be one, which is confirmed in the Wicked Isle DLC where you can speak to the Fallen Angel, a piece of Oberon which was separated from it. The Angel speaks through the corpse of Abbott John, and indicates it is a hive mind made up of everyone that it has absorbed.
  • Hollywood Hacking: This game's idea of "hacking" is the Signal Redirector which lets you redirect the flow of electric current through junction boxes to unlock or lock doors, depower auto-turrets and so on.
  • Hub Level: The Interchange connects to all the other maps, in addition to having its own dungeons to crawl. There are also a set of sewer tunnels that serve a similar purpose early in the game.
  • Human Sacrifice: Implied to be practiced by the Druids, and Mother Jago's ending has you jumping into a pit to be "one with the soil."
  • Hyperactive Metabolism: Cooked food (e.g. tinned meat and Cornish pasties) is much more effective than raw fruit and vegetables (e.g. tomatoes and potatoes).
  • Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The game has separate difficulties for Combat, Survival and Exploration, ranked Assisted, Casual, Challenging and Intense. When you start a new game, you are offered a choice of "Playstyle":
    • Sightseer (Assisted, Asssisted, Assisted)
    • Investigator (Assisted, Casual, Challenging)
    • Brawler (Challenging, Casual, Assisted)
    • Survivor (all Challenging, the default)
    • Veteran (all Intense)
  • Illegal Religion: The Druids are banned in Wyndham by Protocol. Justified in that they apparently practice human sacrifice and are worshipping a Voice created by an evil space rock.
  • Infinity -1 Sword:
    • The Mace is the best melee weapon in the game, able to take down most opponents in two hits or one heavy attack, and has a high chance of spawning in a chest at the start of the game in the Outlaw cave northwest of Ned Buckshaw's shack. A second can be found in Casterfell Woods, either in a chest in the Druid Caves or wielded by their High Priestess. A quick kick to stun opponents then a heavy bonk on the head to dispatch them handily takes care of anything short of a Feral or a Protocol soldier with body armor. With the two melee combat damage upgrades, even the mighty Thralls go down in 2 bonks from the Mace.
    • The axe isn't quite as powerful as the mace, but it's much easier to find (it's a common drop from enemies) and deals enough damage to kill common enemies with a single heavy attack. Like the mace, it's rather slow, but the kick-bonk combo works great in any 1v1 fight.
    • The Bow is a powerful silent weapon with a good range, and is a common drop from Druid enemies. There is a bow, some arrows and the archery skill book in the Castle Ruins, also in Casterfell Woods.
    • The unique Modified JM-3 assault rifle, one of the best firearms in the game, can be obtained from nearly the beginning of the game by traveling through the Salt Mines to Skethermoor, then heading to the northern edge of the map; an old cave there has a narrow passageway through which the JM-3 can be found, though you do have to fight your way through a few Ferals to get to it.
  • Inventory Management Puzzle: You only have so many slots in your backpack, which includes plot specific items like atomic batteries, and only four slots for large items like cricket bats and rifles. You also can't craft anything if your backpack is full, although you can use healing items and buffs directly instead of picking them up.
  • Item Crafting: On top of common healing item and buff potion crafting, you can unlock a skill that lets you expend two worn out weapons of the same type to make a better one, and then once more, in order to maximize the weapon's performance.
  • Item Farming: Since enemies always respawn with their weapons, you can pretty quickly get enough of the more common guns to craft a "Pristine" firearm. That said, you can't craft ammo, and there's only so much you can carry.
  • It's the Only Way to Be Sure: Protocol doesn't just incinerate people who show signs of infection, but also anyone they've had contact with. At the end of the game, if you assist Captain Sims, he'll call in Operation Atomfall to firebomb the entire region, killing everyone except for whatever Protocol troops could be evacuated.
  • It Won't Turn Off: The Voice on the Phone contacts you via various red telephone booths scattered around the Zone. However, these phone booths are clearly no longer in operation (the telephone lines they would have been connected to have long since collapsed). In his ending, the Voice on the Phone even notes that the phones he contacted you on were disconnected, and perhaps he was in your head the whole time. A subtle detail is that the messages received from phone booths seem to be recorded, as they always say the same thing no matter how you respond. However, when you speak to the Voice on the Phone using the telephones in the bunker you wake up in or in the Windscale Nuclear Plant, you can actually have a real conversation with the Voice, who actually responds to your questions. Noteably, these are the only two phones that could plausibly still be operational.
  • Karma Houdini: Dr. Garrow, in their ending, gets away with covering up their involvement in the Windscale disaster while getting all their research and their samples to do the same thing over again.
  • Killer Gorilla: You can find a poster which says "You wouldn't play with a gorilla, would you? Do NOT play with the robots."
  • Leave No Survivors: In Captain Sims' ending your character escapes the Quarantine Zone with him, but all the villagers are massacred when the Zone is firebombed to contain the spread of the spores.
  • Machete Mayhem: The "Farming Knife" is a machete in everything but name. It is an excellent melee weapon, with high speed and damage, and the chance to cause bleeding.
  • May Contain Evil: Those Training Stimulants you've been injecting to boost your skills? Turns out they're a refined extract of the mutating spores taken from Oberon. Dr. Holder tells you not to worry about it too much, as the amount of exposure you get from using them is about the same as you get from simply wandering around in the Zone.
  • Mêlée à Trois: Characters from different factions will fight each other, but this almost never happens since they universally avoid going into each others' territories. The big exception is during the endgame after you deal with Oberon, as this triggers the Druids to invade Wyndham and Slatten Dale, and a counter force of Protocol to invade Casterfell Woods.This leads to many firefights between Protocol, Druids, and Outlaws.
  • Menu Time Lockout: Lockout is OFF by default, but you can change it to ON. There is also an option for the menu to close when the player takes damage.
  • Mercy Invincibility: Any attack that would kill you instead drops you to 1% health. This is very helpful, as on the default difficulty a single heavy attack from an enemy can take off more than half your health.
  • Mighty Glacier: The Thralls in the deeper depths of the Interchange are limited to The Slow Walk, but are extremely durable, being resistant to headshots and requiring several shotgun blasts to kill.
  • Modular Difficulty: Combat, Survival and Exploration can be individually set to Assisted, Casual, Challenging or Intense. Each of those can also be fine-tuned.
  • More Criminals Than Targets: Averted; at first, the Outlaw population seems rather high, but then you reach Wyndham village and discover that it's huge, at least by the standards of a fictionalised version of real-life nuclear disaster open world video games like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. franchise. Given the size of the civilian populace in the Zone, the number of Outlaws actually seems reasonable.
  • Multiple Endings: The game has 6 different endings depending on which of the factions/characters you ultimately side with. The ending also has multiple "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue segments which vary based on your choices and playstyle throughout the game (such as whether you killed a very large number of enemies, whether or not you listened to the calls from the Voice on the Phone, did a lot of sidequests or killed a lot of friendly NPCs, traded a lot or talked a lot or explored a lot or read a lot of notes, and whether you speedran the game or played for a very long period of time). Notably, you can achieve most of the conditions for all six endings in a single playthrough (except one path that requires you to unknowingly aid the death of another ending's key character will stall a bit earlier than the others) and then just rotate the same save file through which one or two final steps you will perform to get the corresponding outcome. The Wicked Isle DLC adds 3 new endings to the main campaign, based on actions you take in the DLC area which carry over into the main game. Likewise, The Red Strain DLC adds additional endings which function in a similar manner.
    • The Operator: Destroy Oberon and return to the room where you woke up. Get knocked out by gas.
    • Captain Sims: Destroy Oberon and return to Sims, who gives you a ride out in a helicopter and orders the Atomfall protocol.
    • Dr. Garrow: Take a sample of Oberon, return to Garrow with the sample and her research notes. She opens a secret passageway for you to leave the zone with her.
    • Dr. Holder: Destroy Oberon and return to Holder, who invites you to share a bunker with him until things calm down.
    • Joyce Tanner: Destroy Oberon after taking a sample and return to Tanner, who reveals herself to be a Soviet spy and kidnaps you for interrogation.
    • Mother Jago: Feed a growth serum to Oberon and return to Jago, who urges you to jump into a pit to "become one with the soil."
    • Jean Hamer (DLC): Steal a piece of the Fallen Angel for Jean Hamer to sell on the black market, blow up Oberon and escape on a ship with Jean and her pirate Outlaws.
    • Join the Angel (DLC): Rejoin the Fallen Angel with Oberon, merge with the Angel and let Oberon assimilate the entire world.
    • Talk down the Angel (DLC): Convince the Angel/Abbott John to turn against Oberon, destroy Oberon with the Abbott's head and escape the Zone via an ancient tunnel that the Abbott tells you about.
    • Dr. Keane (DLC): Hook Dr. Keane up to the other brains, allowing him to take control of them all. Keane has you help him crash the Albion space station into Wyndham. This wipes out 13% of the British landmass, but puts a definitive end to the Red Strain as well as Oberon.
    • The Processing Department (DLC): Help the Processing Department brains escape to the Albion space station in a rocket, where they promise to develop a solution to the Red Strain and Oberon problems. As a reward for your help, they extract your brain with the promise that their robots will eventually prepare a rocket to launch you into space to join them, though it may take the robots a year or two.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: A running theme in the various subplots, but Joyce Tanner takes it to the extreme, as your reward for helping is to hand over an Oberon sample to the Soviet Union, who then abduct you for interrogation.
  • Occult Blue Eyes: Several characters who have been infected by the spores but haven't quite turned sport glowing blue eyes, fitting with the setting's Folk Horror elements, even if the cause is scientific not supernatural. In Dr. Holder's ending, he says that you have these eyes too. He hopes that they will fade away before you are found.
  • One Bullet Clips: Played straight normally; however, averted on Veteran difficulty, where reloading a weapon causes you to lose all the remaining bullets in the weapon. Oddly, this even applies to weapons like the Lee-Enfield no.4 bolt-action rifle, where you should be able to "top-up" the weapon's ammo without discarding the remaining rounds.
  • Opt Out: What Dr. Garrow's ending amounts to if you follow her instructions. Garrow is the only endgame quest-giver who doesn't want you to either destroy Oberon or empower it, reasoning the best thing to do is to not mess with it any further, simply wanting to escape the Zone with a sample of Oberon's core. Do as she says and the two of you effectively pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here!, leaving the situation with Oberon and the Quarantine Zone completely unresolved.
  • Pretentious Latin Motto: The motto of the British Atomic Research Division is NOVA LUX DISCUTIT UMBRAS ANTIQUAS ("New light dispels old shadows").
  • Rank Scales with Asskicking: The Druid High Priestess, who is glowing with an aura of spore energy, is noticeably tougher than a normal human enemy, having slightly over 3 times as much health (which makes her slightly tougher than a Feral, though nowhere near as tough as a Thrall). She also has a small chance of spawning equipped with the mace, the game's strongest melee weapon.
  • Regenerating Health: Health will partly regenerate after combat, when your heart rate has returned to normal. You can learn a skill which increases the speed and amount of regeneration, but it's only about 50% of full health, which is usually only enough to survive a couple of hits.
  • Religious Horror: In contrast to the Druids in the main game, the Preview of Wicked Isle shows that part of your investigation into the island involves exploring the ruins of the local Abbey and seeing hallucinations of past events, it is implied the monks may have discovered a meteor similar to Oberon and formed a connection to it just like the modern day druids.
  • The Remnant: The Protocol soldiers still enforce the quarantine, despite being cut off from outside support. In addition you can find two Soviet agents, who are all that remain of an infiltration team sent in just prior to the Windscale disaster. One (Ilya Kozlov) is hiding in a cellar, the other is Joyce Tanner.
  • Roswell That Ends Well: You can find a note from one of the BARD scientists, which says "What we've found here defies easy classification. Suddenly it doesn't matter what the Yanks might think they've found in Roswell. This easily trumps anything they found scattered in the desert."
  • Schmuck Bait: If you break into the robotics lab early in the game, there's a large button you can press that will trigger an audio log providing a lead on how to advance in the area...and also activates the security system. The narrator of the audio log even apologizes for it.
    • In one area, there's a broken robot in a pond with an atomic battery seemingly free for the taking. If you go for it, bandits will come out of the woods and take potshots at you.
  • Sequence Breaking:
    • Data Storage A in the Interchange is completely infected with spores, requiring you to use a Strange Tonic to survive in the area long enough to power it up. Normally, you'd need to infiltrate the Druid's castle main base, one of the largest hostile encampments in the game, and get all the way to the end for the Strange Tonic recipe. However, there's a Strange Tonic in the Casterfell Woods B.A.R.D. bunker (the same one the radio tower keycard and Rogue Trooper Easter Egg are in) that you can use to skip dealing with the Druids entirely. Fortunately, Data Storage A is the only mandatory area of the game saturated with spores; even the Windscale Plant itself has safe paths through the spore clouds you can run through without the tonic.
    • You can get a signal redirector by following the Windfall investigation line in Skethermoor (which can be as simple as getting a key in the Protocol workshop and using it to open a crate in one of the first rooms in the Protocol outpost bunker near the burnt village), which lets you entirely skip having to infiltrate Skethermoor prison (the game's other massive encampment) and dealing with Dr. Garrow to get the signal redirector.
    • You can kill Dr. Garrow with a bow while she's in her cell, which doesn't aggro the Protocol guards. This lets you fulfill Dr. Holder's requirement that Garrow be freed before you can proceed to the endgame with his ending without needing to shoot your way out of the prison and permanently piss off the Protocol soldiers in Skethermoor.
  • Shout-Out: A LOT from British media and fiction.
    • The B.A.R.D.s' Machine Monotone makes them sound like Daleks, but with a deeper voice.
    • The B.A.R.D. itself is an in-universe in-joke, as Oberon is a character in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
    • Behind the Interchange building in Skethermoor you can see a Blue Phone Booth and if you climb up the cliffs to get to it the iconic TARDIS noises play leaving behind nothing but a very familiar looking hat on the ground.
    • The Prisoner (1967) gets several references, including an achievement "We Want Information", a chessboard with a White Sphere plus scoreboard for a VI and a note with the title "I Am Not A Number." One of the endings even pays tribute to the opening of the series, with the protagonist getting hit with a knockout gas.
    • "The Wicker Man (1973)" gets one as well, with a wicker man you can climb into. You can't set it on fire though.
    • The plot itself draws on various aspects of the "'Quatermass" stories.
    • You can find a classic Street Judge helmet sitting among a row of regular helmets in a bunker. You can also find a dead Rogue Trooper in a bathroom stall. These are more obvious than most, since 2000 AD is owned by Rebellion's parent company.
    • Multiple copies of "The War of the Worlds (1898)" can be found dotted about the zone foreshadowing the similar nature of how Oberon arrives on the planet, the cylindrical shape of the meteor, the spread of the Fungus mirroring the Red Weed and one document commenting on the potential of the meteor being deliberately sent to Earth.
    • A familiar looking car complete with armchair and broom can be found in the zone.
    • Three small cars colored red, white and blue are lined up overlooking a broken bridge next to Casterfell Dam, each with 2 skeletons wearing 60's era racing helmets in a nod to the Literal Cliffhanger ending of The Italian Job (1969).
    • In the Hardware Store in Wyndham Village are two, a dead parrot in a cage and on a cabinet Four Candles.
    • The Operator evokes Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons antagonists The Mysterons with their deep synthesized voice and similar to how the Voice talks only through the phone boxes, The Mysterons ability to only communicate over the radio.
    • A bathtub with three skeletons can be found at the bottom of a hill.
    • Datlow Hall is a nod to prolific SF editor Ellen Datlow.
    • The collectible comics and lunchboxes you can track down are all actual strips and characters from the period.
    • In addition to the village of Wyndham being an acknowledged tribute to SF author John Wyndham, the village has some strong similarities to the setting of his novel The Chrysalids. You'll also find killer plants similar to Triffids, another of Wyndham's creations.
    • Not specifically British, but in one conversation with the Operator, they declare "We are not your friend./We are your only friend."
  • Status Line: Averted — Atomfall has a very minimal user interface. By default, the only UI element on screen is the compass marker. The health and heartbeat meters only appear if you take damage.
  • Story Difficulty Setting: "Sightseer" playstyle has Combat, Survival and Exploration all set to Assisted (the lowest difficulty), and has the description "A low-pressure mode for those who want to enjoy the narrative and exploration of Atomfall."
  • Survival Horror: Atomfall describes itself as a "survival action" game: ammunition is generally limited, and enemies are challenging even at the lowest difficulty, but the setting is mostly realistic. And then the supernatural elements appear, and you go from fighting (or dodging) scavengers in funny outfits to fighting people who have heard "the Voice in the Soil" to fighting things that used to be men, deep beneath the earth.
  • Talking the Monster to Death: In the Wicked Isle DLC, you can convince the Fallen Angel to turn against Oberon, stating that because it is separated from Oberon it is an individual, which means one of two things; either as an individual it is too tainted rejoin with Oberon, or individuality is not as offensive as it thinks. Once convinced that individuality is not so offensive, it can be convinced it should not forcefully take away the individuality of others. This causes Abbott John's personality to emerge from the Angel and help you destroy Oberon and escape the Zone.
  • Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Melee weapons can be thrown at enemies to damage them, and a skill you can earn gives you a chance to impale enemies with bladed weapons when you throw them.
  • Title Drop: Once you earn Captain Sims' trust, he'll inform you that the military is planning Operation Atomfall, which will evacuate Protocol and bombard the entire area with firebombs.
  • Universal Ammo: Ammo is divided into arrows, pistol bullets, submachine gun bullets, rifle bullets, and shotgun shells. Shotguns are shotguns and both of the game's submachine guns (the Sterling (aka the Star Wars blaster) and the Sten) use 9mm. However, the game's 3 pistols (a Webley revolver, a M1911 pistolnote , and a Browning Hi Power pistol) all use completely different calibers (in fact the Hi Power should use the same 9mm as the 2 submachine guns). Also, most of the game's rifles do use the same .303 British cartridge, with the exception being the starting .22 varmint rifle which uses the same rounds as them despite being much weaker (making the .22 rifle kind of pointless as it uses the same ammo as the much more powerful and high-capacity Lee-Enfield no.4 bolt action rifle, which is also available on the starting map).
  • The Un-Reveal:
    • You never learn anything about the Operator, not even how it can use the phones in the first place when they're all disconnected. You can find notes that imply that it's a hallucination, since supposedly no one else can hear it ringing, but it's not the Voice in the Soil, since it wants you to destroy Oberon, and it can incapacitate you with knockout gas in its ending, so it has some impact on reality.
    • You also never learn your original identity, or how you lost your memory in the first place. One smaller note, the fate of the surviving scientist who wakes you up at the start of the game is never revealed, as he's gone without a trace if you come back (although if you return to the bunker in the Operator ending after dealing with Oberon, there's a chance he'll be blocking your path as a Thrall).
  • Vague Stat Values: Atomfall is not the sort of game where you shoot people and numbers come out.
    • Weapon power is on the scale Low - Average - High - Excellent.
    • Your character has Vague Hit Points: The HP bar is divided into quarters, with no numbers.
    • Enemies don't have any kind of health bar, and some don't even show damage. You just hit them until they stop moving.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: All routes out of the Quarantine Zone require you to deal with Oberon, which is deep beneath the Windscale Plant, which can only be accessed by powering up the Interchange.
  • The Vicar: Vicar McHenry fits all the topes. Soft spoken, wearing glasses, trying to do his best to ease the stress of his flock during the Quarantine, and is hiding an infected BARD scientist in the church cellar, and also tracking the movements of hidden Druids in the village.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: Depending on what leads you follow, and how you choose to pursue them, you have the option to do some pretty godawful things to escape or even just for your own gain. One trader even explicitly warns you against killing them.
  • Video Game Caring Potential: Unless you're trespassing, as long as you don't antagonize Druids, Outlaws, or Protocol, they'll generally leave you alone and will warn you they'll engage if you don't back off. Similarly, you can generally make them back off outside these areas by brandishing a weapon. There's also multiple paths to key quest items that lets you avoid combat if you want to. Averted, however, with Ferals and Thralls, who will attack you no matter what.
  • War Crime Subverts Heroism: Protocol insists that they are here to protect the citizens of Wyndham, but they keep the village under Martial Law, run a Black Site prison for anyone who resists them, and in Skethermoore you can find several burned out houses with skeletons inside, implying the were killed by Protocol.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: The game never clarifies the ultimate fate of Prudence Rook if you don't inform her that her sister Charity is dead by showing her Charity's farewell letter, which considering that she's suffering from dementia and both her caretakers are dead is rather alarming. Granted, it appears she's been living alone for several years already, so she has some ability to care for herself, and is even aware enough to avoid the traps set up all around outside the house.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: A mild example, if you choose to play a violent run it'll be noted by the Operator with a slide in the epilogue noting your body count. The number of kills required to trigger this is high enough you won't necessarily get it on a normal playthrough as long as you don't kill every enemy you see, though if you 100% the game you'll probably get it, especially if you tried to grind out Pristine military weapons by farming Protocol soldiers. This ending slide also overrides all other ending slides, except for the "listened to the Operator/ignored the Operator" and "did sidequests/killed named NPCs" slides.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Captain Sims and Protocol overall treat the villagers with barely concealed frustration and contempt, and in his ending Wyndham and the surrounding area are firebombed to oblivion, but the threat of the spores and Oberon's influence moving beyond the Quarantine Zone is real, and justifies his actions somewhat. Sims is also completely sincere in his offer to help you if you join him, unlike Joyce who betrays you as soon as You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.

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