Atomfall

Atomfall is an action game played from a first-person perspective. It is set in an alternate history in which the 1957 Windscale fire covered much of the Lake District, Cumberland in radioactive fallout. Players can collect various resources and scraps to craft weapons, or use firearms to defeat enemies, though ammunition is scarce in the game. While Atomfall is billed as a survival game, players only need to manage the player character's health and heart rate.

Combat, sprinting and kicking enemies will increase the protagonist's heart rate, resulting in darkened vision and muffled hearing. Stealth tactics can be used, and the game can be completed without killing any enemy. Killing all characters in the game is also an option.

Shortly after World War II, a slate mining operation in the Lake District discovered a meteorite dubbed 'Oberon'. The British government established the British Atomic Research Division (BARD) and built the Windscale nuclear plant on top of the site both to mask the true nature of the discovery and to power the network of bunkers and research facilities in the region. A massive interconnected bunker called the Interchange acted as BARD’s center of operations and entry point into the Oberon site. Research into the Oberite mineral and the alien contents within Oberon produced massive technological leaps such as the atomic battery and the training stimulant.

On 10 October 1957, an incident (implied to be caused by both internal negligence and foreign sabotage) in the Oberon site launched an energy surge that destroyed the Windscale plant, scattering radioactive and alien contaminants in the region as well as creating an interference field that disrupt electrical components (such as aircraft) and blocked all signals into and out of the area. The British government quickly enacted a quarantine around Wyndham village, a small settlement across a lake from the Windscale plant, and then to the wider region.

Atomfall was developed by British developer Rebellion Developments. The game was inspired by Fallout: New Vegas, which was described by Ben Fisher, associate head of design at Rebellion, as a "dense" experience and one that valued player choice. Instead of building a single large open world area, Rebellion opted to build several smaller but interconnected zones due to the team's expertise in crafting maps of similar size, having worked on the Sniper Elite series. Metro and BioShock also influenced the game design. However, unlike these games, investigative gameplay was prioritised by Rebellion in an attempt to promote players' freedom and facilitate world-building.

Fisher described it as a "desperate" survival game. Both the player character and enemies in the game are easily killed. The team compared the gameplay to the film Children of Men, in which players assume control of an everyman instead of a skilled fighter. Pulp fiction also influenced the game, with The Quatermass Experiment, The Prisoner, Doctor Who, The Wicker Man and The Day of the Triffids cited as the team's inspirations.

Atomfall received "mixed or average" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. OpenCritic determined that 64% of critics recommended the game. In Japan, four critics from Famitsu gave the game a total score of 31 out of 40.

On 1 April 2025, Rebellion announced that Atomfall had reached 1.5 million players, making it the company's most successful launch.