Atomfall is an achievement in cutting to the chase

Forget the number of hours it takes for a game to “get good” — how am I spending the first 15 minutes?

Call me impatient, but a game’s opening seconds, even those introductory moments as a character comes alive or a world opens up, are make-or-break for how far I am willing to soldier on into what could be 20, 30, or 100 hours of play. So what a relief it was to fire up Atomfall, the new stealth-driven survival adventure from Sniper Elite developer Rebellion now on PlayStation, PC, and Xbox (via Game Pass), and feel immediately dunked into its radioactive mystery.

Atomfall takes place in an alt-universe patch of northwestern England where a nuclear disaster has left buildings crumbled and society torn apart. There are paramilitaries operating walled-off towns and pagan cults stalking the open fields. A dash of retrofuture machinery gives the backdrop a Fallout flavor (intentional), while the mannerisms and encounters are delightfully British (“press X to pour tea”). There’s lots to discover, and enough jank to the physics to build an aura of danger — in “the zone,” you’re in the wild.

None of this is spelled out when your first-person avatar wakes up confused, underground, and faced with a decision to help or hurt an ailing doctor who dangles the first of the game’s many mysteries in front of you. You grab a backpack and a few supplies and rush out the door into the devastated but sunny Cumberland countryside, with only a few breadcrumbs scattered to let you know where to go next. My first time booting up Atomfall was at 11 p.m. on a weary Wednesday night; I was terrified by the stillness of the land and thrilled to decide in which direction to run. For all its Fallout and STALKER connections, Myst came to mind more than once.

Not too long before jumping into Atomfall, I trudged through the opening hours of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the definition of the AAA open-world experience that offers so much at the end of the tunnel. A long, long, long tunnel. Dozens of foundational cutscenes aside, my initial time with Shadows felt like booking a trip to Disney World then immediately beelining to the monorail. Even the tutorial-fueled cold open of Shadows, which finds up-and-coming samurai Yasuke plowing through baddies, felt so on rails as to grind my interest to a halt. Not every game needs a mystery to propel it forward (though Shadows kinda has one), and I welcome a guided tutorial to intricate systems that will soon replace family birthdays and login passwords in my memory. But Shadows’ first two hours of play lacked the flicker of immediacy. After I adjust brightness and calibrate controls and shuffle through character creation options, I want to accomplish something right away — something more than just pressing buttons.

Instead of a preface laying out the whos and whats and wheres, Atomfall’s opening demands investigation. At first, the only clues are in the scenery — an ethereal light beaming from behind nuclear cooling towers, scintillating against the moorland like the Shimmer in Annihilation — and a few hints from the doctor that suggest a direction. Typical on-screen prompts explain crafting, combat, and stealth, but knowing how the systems work in Atomfall requires some experimentation. What’s worth making room for in your inventory? Live a little, and you’ll figure it out. How do you survive a spat with a local outlaw? Pray to god the cricket bat you just picked up is a decent weapon. How do you successfully trespass through a military encampment without tipping off the guards? That stream might muffle your steps. Maybe.

Atomfall’s investigations leave a similar curiosity gap, relying on clues and coordinates to get you to the next milestone moment instead of obvious map landmarks. It’s not a notebook game, but I felt in total control of where my detective brain wanted to go next — or didn’t. There are a number of bunkers and other dimly lit death traps scattered around the hills of the radiation zone, and early on, when I felt bold enough to flick on my torch (or as the non-Brits say, flashlight), I descended down to ultimately meet my demise. The nuclear fallout has not been kind to every local.

I have many more hours to go in Atomfall, but it’s a relief that it didn’t take even an hour to feel absorbed by Rebellion’s pitch. The setup kicked me out the door. The gameplay dropped me into the unknown. Without a clue, I started walking. Having broken into a mine haunted by shadowy figures, hit the gate of a compound that may unlock the secrets of this disaster, met a vicar who begged me to keep a discovered murder a secret… I want to keep digging.

Rebellion is right to say that Atomfall is “AA punching up.” The game is modest in size, but the scope seems to have created greater urgency in the pacing. Games of much smaller scale — a retro platformer, a pixel life sim — also ask you to hit start and learn as you go. There are AAA games with similar immediacy (Baldur’s Gate 3 comes to mind), but many more that prioritize graphical polish and the vastness of their mechanics before getting around to the reason we all showed up.

Atomfall lands between the two for me, thanks to genre and a simple bit of cinema logic: show, don’t tell. If you see a door, you’ll run to it. Then you’ll keep running. You’ll figure out the rest — or die trying.

Atomfall is out now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.