Atomfall’s Director On The Game’s Development, Fallout Inspirations

Atomfall has attracted plenty of interest since its reveal last summer, and a lot of that is due to the other games it’s been compared to. The big ones are Fallout and BioShock, but as is easy to tell from any of the promotional material, this is a very British post-apocalypse, so it had to forge its own identity.

After playing an hour and a half of Atomfall at a preview event last week, I sat down with game director Ben Fisher, to discuss how developer Rebellion approached this premise – and what gave him the inspiration to pursue such a project in the first place.

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I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing when I played an hour and a half of Atomfall, but that very much feels like the point.

“The world’s first major nuclear disaster was the Windscale fire, but there haven’t been any games based around that setting,” Fisher tells me. “Rebellion tends to make games that have a broad, pulpy Britishness to them, so it was like a good, natural fit.”

Swapping The City For The Countryside

However, Atomfall goes another step further away from what we typically see in the genre, setting the game in the countryside and small villages, as opposed to more urban areas that are typically depicted in post-apocalyptic video games.

“We did make sure we didn’t have any London accents in the game, so there’s unexpected regional accents,” Fisher says, explaining that the team strove to recreate the 1950s English countryside faithfully. “We tried our best to pull from real world reference points, real British history […] It’s this rich well to pull from that so few people are pulling from.”

This is where it differs from Fallout greatly. As Fisher puts it, the Fallout’s American Dream backdrop gives the games “tongue-in-cheek” optimism. The quarantine zone in Atomfall, however, certainly isn’t trying to inspire its citizens.

“We found that if you looked at the ‘50s, ‘60s storytelling style, and then broadened the lens a little bit to include folk horror like The Wicker Man, there is that kind of cynicism, that kind of ‘keep calm and carry on’ weariness, and that influenced the tone of the game and the characters,” he explains. “There’s not much in the way of comedy […] It all fits into that dry, dry sense of humor.”

Yet there was humour to be found when playing through the early parts of the game. In the village of Wyndham, I came across two geezers at the pub, debating whether they could jump the huge killer robot that patrols the streets. Fisher laughs, but says this is all in aid of worldbuilding.

“We wanted to make sure there was that typical Britishness to some of those set pieces,” he says. “We talked about the characters complaining about the weather, when the weather is a giant, blue, semi occult looking vortex in the sky. It just seemed like a funny fit for those characters to take the world seriously, but to evidently be a little bit weird, and for them to seem to have acclimatized as well.

“You come into this world five years after the disaster, and everyone else has found a kind of stable equilibrium. But you come at it as an outsider, and it helps you question how sane are these people? Because they’ve been here for a long time, maybe they’ve gone a bit pickled.”

What Atomfall Takes From Fallout: New Vegas

But Fisher did previously say that Atomfall is inspired by Fallout for a reason, or more specifically, Fallout: New Vegas. It’s just that, judging from what I’ve played, these inspirations are more than surface level, finding themselves interwoven into the premise at almost every turn.

“The narrative [of New Vegas] largely all reflects this key location and the events happening in that location, and all of the characters you come across are esoteric people that have a perspective on this central location,” he says. “So really, that was it. It was a reference point for the idea of a densely concentrated RPG adventure experience. […] It’s a totally relevant point of reference, but only one of many.”

One aspect of New Vegas present in Atomfall is the fact that you can kill anyone and everyone. However, Atomfall goes a step beyond that, claiming that it was also made in mind for players who want to kill no one. I assumed this was something that the team had to have settled on very early in development, building around it, but Fisher explains that this was not the case.

“No, it came quite late,” he tells me. “One version of the game was structured more like Metroidvania, so we had a sequence of sandbox maps where you would find skills or clues or work with characters that would help you get to the next location. You’d gradually open this world [up] over time, but you were sent through in quite a choreographed sequence.

“When we played through that game, it felt like it wasn’t as open and free as it could be. So we asked the question, what happens if we lean right into that Rebellion cultural DNA of giving players freedom and openness? What if we just let them kill everyone? And you know, they might close routes to themselves, but that’s fine. That’s valid for their play style.”

Of course, this isn’t just something you can patch in. After this was decided, the team had to make sure Atomfall’s story didn’t fall apart without NPCs. I saw one of these safety nets while playing the game, as the world is full of mysterious phone boxes. The phone has a chance of ringing when you walk past it, with an unknown caller nudging you in certain directions. If you’ve killed everyone, this might be your only guide in the game.

It won’t be long until we see if all of this comes together, and if this gamble with player freedom pays off. In the meantime, I left my preview session with lots of questions, and plenty of leads to chase up when Atomfall launches on March 27. In any case, this is certainly much more than British Fallout.

Survival

Action

Adventure

Released

March 27, 2025

ESRB

Teen // Blood, Language, Violence