Atomfall is the first completely new IP from British developer Rebellion in seven years, and it feels like it’s landing at just the right time. After years of quality Sniper Elite and Zombie Army instalments, the studio has been working away on an experience that’s quite a bit different: a detective-esque undertaking in the countryside of 1960s northern England. This has resulted in a nice degree of curiosity ever since the game’s original announcement, but now, three weeks away from launch, Atomfall is peaking.
A series of developer-led trailers and videos has seen interest in the PS5, PS4 game surge, and luckily, it’s not just smart marketing. Having played a section of the early game for around 90 minutes, Atomfall is proving to be the real deal. The alternate universe proves gripping, and the mystery at hand a constant source of intrigue and excitement. If the full title shapes up in the same fashion, then this will be no sleeper hit — it’ll get all the love and attention it seemingly deserves.
The plot setup alone is enough to attract eyes and ears: you wake up in a northern England village inside the quarantine zone setup surrounding a nuclear disaster. It’s been five years since the blast, and all is not right. With mutants roaming the countryside and cults set up to the side, you’ll need to discover what secrets the rural setting is hiding.
Our digital play session (livestreamed via Parsec) dropped us in the Casterfell Woods a few hours into the main story, with one lead directing us to visit Mother Jago by the mine’s entrance. The hook of Atomfall is that despite presenting itself as a traditional objective, there’s no guarantee it will actually lead anywhere.
A detective experience at heart, you have to separate fact from fiction, barter for information, and sneak behind enemy lines to crack the case. As Rebellion pitches it, some revelations are purposefully withheld and there are no promises around a satisfying ending. It’s a pretty intriguing setup, and one that — at least in our short hands on time with the game — proved a real driving force.
Atomfall uses an open zone structure and lacks quest markers. When you find a new story lead, it’ll be added to your log and the associated location will be pinned on your map. These leads come from exploring the environment and talking to people, with examples we found including audio logs from a downed helicopter and notes left hidden in basements.
It’s up to you which clues you pursue to learn more about the area and uncover secrets, but since it’s possible to fail leads and lock yourself out of story paths based on your decisions, there’s always a bit of risk tied to your actions. Once again, Rebellion isn’t promising you’ll be content with your discoveries come the game’s conclusion, so there’s genuine stakes to the leads you see to the end and the others you ignore. As such, it’s the sort of experience ripe for replay so you can see what you missed the first time and gain a better understanding of the overall narrative.
Combat plays a pivotal role in the space and time between those findings, though given we were playing the game over livestream, it wasn’t the setting to draw any real conclusions from. Fighting our online connection as well as in-game enemies, we came equipped with cricket bats, axes, and guns to fend off cultists and soldiers. What came as a bit of a surprise was the amount of ammo our character was packing, and even more could be fairly easily sourced from the environment. You’ll be scavenging tons of resources for crafting as you search new locations, and bullets are a part of that. As long as you don’t go in all guns blazing, it seems like you could build up a pretty healthy artillery stock — or maybe this was only for the purposes of our demo.
We’ll need to play Atomfall natively on PS5 before we can critique its other potential qualities, but what seems to be set in stone is the gripping mystery at its core. In the 90 minutes we got to play, uncovering new leads to chase was the clear highlight as we found fresh characters to pick the brains of and locations our map was missing. It was a thoroughly enjoyable process, which when drawn out over the course of a full game full of dead ends and story reveals, appears primed to result in one of 2025’s narrative highlights.
Atomfall launches for PS5 and PS4 on 27th March 2025. Are you looking forward to the trip to rural England? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
