I’ve always believed that more games should use northern accents. My favourite part of Still Wakes The Deep was the Scottish patter between some of the rig workers. Maybe that’s an indictment of the rest of the game, but it endeared me to inconsequential NPCs and immersed me in its Lovecraftian world.
While we get quite a lot of gruff Yorkshire tones or annoyed cockneys in fantasy RPGs, I’ve long lamented the lack of Scousers in games. I’d love to hear someone from my neck of the woods in a triple-A game, but I’d settle for some solid Welsh representation, the dulcet tones of a Geordie, or really anything other than the bland American accents we hear so often.
Manchester excluded, obviously. I don’t need that sort of jumpscare in my survival game, thank you very much.
So you’d think that I’d be ecstatic to hear all manner of northern accents in Atomfall, the upcoming survival game from Rebellion Developments. Instead, I came away feeling… Confused.
Accents, Explained
For those of you not from England, the majority of characters in Atomfall speak with a Cumbrian accent and dialect. There are delicious slices of slang that only locals will pick up on, served to you in casual conversation or overheard as you pass by. These moments are brilliant, every sentence drawing you deeper into Atomfall’s quarantine zone and pushing you forward as much as the leads and quests scribbled in your menu.
So what’s the problem? I hate to say it, but the problem is Scousers. Maybe I’m being ungrateful, maybe I’m missing something, but they feel out of place in the Cumbrian hills.
They shouldn’t, really. When the summer hits the west coast of England, we tend to head north and south in equal measure. North Wales or the Lake District will have been the location of countless childhood holidays for most of the people who live in a ten-mile radius of my house. Moel Famau is two barely pronounceable words to 99 percent of you reading this, but it’s an institution for us. The Lake District is less so, but schoolkids still piled into Keswick and Windermere on residentials at the end of the year, and likely again with their parents once the holidays rolled around.
What I’m saying is, the odd Scouser in the Lake District shouldn’t feel out of place. So why does it?
A part of it is the time period Atomfall is set in. We have a modern Scouse accent hitting our ears when a 1960s version should do the trick. Check out interviews with the Beatles and Steven Gerrard, you’ll immediately hear the difference. Back then, we sounded almost Brummie at times.
Breaking Immersion
But there’s something else, too. It matters who is saying something. And when I hear a Wyndham local speaking Scouse, it feels off. These characters are Lake District locals, trapped in their village by a quarantine they don’t understand. Their accents should reflect that.
If the Scouse accent came from an occupying soldier, I wouldn’t have this quandary. They’ve been shipped in to keep the peace and prevent anyone from leaving. They could be from all over the country, from other countries even, as they’re a private armed force. They’re not local, so when I heard a Scouse bark from a rifle-toting Protocol soldier, I felt a jolt of happiness. When it came from the mouth of someone I assumed to be a Wyndham native, I felt confused.
There are possible explanations for this. This NPC could have moved from Liverpool to Wyndham at some point before the incident. They could have been on their holidays. But this should have been intimated by the game.
In a game so obsessed with small details – scrawled notes leading you to underground bunkers and offhand comments indicting certain members of society – this feels like an oversight. If it was a character you could interact with – the baker, for instance – they could mention that they moved here. They could mention that they miss home. They could turn that accent into a tiny story that tells you so much about their character with just a sentence or two. But a random bark from an equally random NPC? It doesn’t hit the same.
Atomfall does a lot right. The vast majority of the accents are right. But there are a couple of NPCs who ruin the immersion for me. They probably won’t for many other people. H*ck, maybe there’s a super niche lead I didn’t follow that explains it all. I hope so. I really do. Prove me wrong, Atomfall. Prove to me that Scousers aren’t the problem.
Next
Atomfall Was Inspired By Fallout, But Became So Much More
Atomfall’s lead dev Ben Fisher walks us through the games development, from creating a very British apocalypse, to letting players kill everyone.