I wasn’t originally going to play Atomfall. I was sure I would dislike it. Sure, Fallout, but it’s British is a catchy marketing phrase, but once you start to see gameplay trailers and hear official descriptions, it’s clear that’s the furthest thing from the truth. And the truth is that those gameplay trailers and official descriptions painted a picture of something I would dislike.
Instead of British Fallout, those previews showed a contained, slow-paced survival adventure where you had to scavenge for a paltry amount of supplies to survive, deal with some sort of survival meter, and take part in calculated, easy-to-die, hard-to-win combat encounters. As a renowned hater of survival games, none of that appealed to me.
But it’s on GamePass, so I gave it a shot, fully expecting I would try it, dislike it, and uninstall it fairly quickly. At least I’d be able to say I actually played it when I made my online presence for the next few months based entirely on my dislike for it, as gamers are required to do by birthright.
Atomfall starts with your character, nameless and faceless, being woken up in a bunker by a bleeding scientist in a hazmat suit. You have no idea who you are, where you are, or why. The scientist tells you that quarantine has been in effect for 5 years, and you have to get to a place called The Interchange to fix things. He gives you a key card and sends you on your way. If you want, you can find a bandage to bring them or not. After a short tutorial, you leave the bunker and emerge in the British countryside of Cumberland. There’s a glowing blue beam in the sky emanating from a power plant in the distance. A telephone booth rings. You answer it, and a mysterious voice tells you to get to the Interchange because “Oberon must die”. After that, you’re on your own.
I struggled to put the game down at all after that. I was immediately enthralled. Simply put, Atomfall is a triumph in “figure it out” game design. No answers or explanations are provided; you must seek them out. The game drops you into its world, gives you a carrot to chase, and lets you have it on your own. There are no waypoints, there are no quest markers, and NPCs do not have exclamation points above their heads. If you want to know what to do, you must explore, you must find places and people, read clues, piece together where to go and who to trust.
Atomfall is not the first game to have this kind of design philosophy, and it’s not even the best at it. Maybe not even close to being the best. But it sucked me in when many other games could not. That’s because it has a critical component for this type of exploration-first gameplay, and storytelling to work.
Incredible world design.
Dropping you into a world and telling you to figure it out only works if the world is interesting to figure out. Not only is Atomfall’s world interesting to figure out, but it’s also so dense and carefully crafted that it’s impossible to feel overwhelmed. That’s its X factor.
Games in general are too big. They pack too much content, too much bloat, and make their worlds double the size of what they should be in an effort to maximize players’ time with them. It’s exhausting. Especially in games that are based on the player figuring it out themselves. Getting dropped into a giant world with no direction is overwhelming. When you have such ground to cover and no clue which direction will even have the clue you’re looking for, it’s easy to tune out.
Atomfall is dense in the best way possible. It consists of 4 explorable open areas plus The Interchange. None of these areas are large, but they’re tightly packed with interesting locations close enough together that you’re always discovering something. The world is explorable to your own conviction, but it’s just as dense and handcrafted as a linear game. It’s impossible to get lost. Even if you go in the opposite direction of the lead you’re investigating, you’re guaranteed to find a clue to something else.
Now look, I love big expansive worlds to become immersed in as much as the next person. I played Skyrim for dozens of hours when it came out. I played Red Dead Redemption 2 for even more. I played Elden Ring for 40 hours and never even left the opening area. But there comes a breaking point.
Those huge games have their place, but at a certain point of exploration, the ratio of open land to interesting landmarks has to skew towards the latter. I can’t tell you the number of lull periods I experienced in Breath of the Wild because so much of that game is empty land with nothing interesting. I mean, I could tell you, but I won’t because then I’ll go on a rant that will anger the crazy Zelda diehards and also all the other crazy gamers.
Exploring giant worlds is exhausting, not just because of the size and amount of time it takes, but because often, it’s large for the sake of it. What good is a giant map if most of it is empty space between the places you actually want to go? Sometimes it works. Games like Elden Ring and Skyrim thrive because even the space in between landmarks is interesting. They’re big and spacious, but they feel dense. They feel handcrafted when a lot of open-world games don’t.
That’s what a game like Atomfall does spectacularly well. It’s dense and handcrafted. There is no empty space to get to the interesting stuff, it’s all packed in there. You cannot go 20 steps without being near something discoverable, whether that be a clue to a quest or lore explaining.
The end result is that while the world is about 1/16th the size of something huge like Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, it feels more engaging and immersive. Whereas a game like Valhalla is ginormous, it’s filled with bloat. Much of its world is filler, whether that be the activities or the locations themselves. It was designed to be a big world. Atomfall was designed to be an interesting world. There’s no filler.
It’s so well crafted that you can get around without looking at your map. It only takes one visit to each hub to figure out how to get around since you can direct yourself based on the location around you.
It’s 1 am now as I’m writing this, and I’m becoming less lucid and you’re probably wondering what the point of this is, so I’ll wrap up.
I’m not here to review Atomfall. It has problems. I also have no interest in writing up a more traditional review. I just think the world design is so well done that it helps to illustrate something I feel gaming needs more of. Dense, compact, handcrafted open worlds.
The star of Atomfall is the world. Each answer you uncover brings more questions, and each character you meet brings new wrinkles in the unfolding mystery of what the hell happened in that Power Plant. You’re always discovering something useful, always visiting someplace interesting. And because of that, it’s more engaging and more immersive. There are a lot of benefits to huge worlds that hinge on players wandering them, virtually cosplaying as an adventurer of their own making.
But when you offer them a world that’s meticulously put together, you captivate through specificity, with careful attention paid to every detail from what happened to the world itself, all the way down to what happened in specific rooms, you situate them in a setting that triggers something more powerful than fantasy. Open world games thrive on letting gamers “explore a world,” often without understanding what that means. It’s not enough to make a huge location where the player can run around. It needs to be a world, not just a playground. It needs to have history, it needs to be lived in. It needs to be crafted with the same care that linear levels often get.
It doesn’t matter how big a game world is, it doesn’t matter how many hours of content are packed in. To be engaging, a game world must justify its existence beyond being a place in a video game. Whether it’s Atomfall, Skyrim, Elden Ring, or Red Dead Redemption 2, the best explorable game worlds are the ones that were handcrafted with the love and care of a batch of cookies baked by your Grandma. The non-racist one anyway.
That’s what Atomfall gets right above all else. Its world may be small compared to other open-world games, but it’s so much bigger where it counts.