Atomfall and Avowed Share One Oddly Specific Trait

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home April 1, 2025 245 Views 6 Min Read
Atomfall and Avowed Share One Oddly Specific Trait



Summary

  • Atomfall and Avowed share deep lore and themes tied to powerful entities like Sapadal and Oberon.
  • Both games feature exotic, otherworldly landscapes affected by the influences of their respective beings.
  • Avowed’s Sapadal and Atomfall’s Oberon serve as cautionary tales on the consequences of meddling with powerful forces.

Rebellion Developments’ recent title, Atomfall, brings players into a retro-styled world filtered through a heavy dose of British culture and history. Its plot is based on the Windscale Power Plant nuclear fire that occurred in 1957, branching off from known reality into an alternate timeline where the reasons behind the accident are far more mysterious. Atomfall blends FPS action, RPG and survival elements, folk horror, and sci-fi to create a compelling experience where players must uncover the truth behind what actually befell Windscale.

Meanwhile, Obsidian’s highly-anticipated RPG, Avowed, was released back in February and garnered a good reception from fans and critics. It marked something of a return to form for the studio as a dark fantasy FPS RPG set in the world of Eora established in the two preceding Pillars of Eternity CRPGs. And though they may be said to share some general similarities in terms of design, there is a deeper story aspect that ties them closely together in their presentations and major themes, creating an interesting parallel between the two games.

Atomfall steam pic blue light cave

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Major spoilers for Avowed and Atomfall ahead.

Atomfall’s Oberon and Avowed’s Sapadal Are Strangely Two Sides of the Same Coin

Avowed’s Sapadal and the Dreamscourge

Avowed expanded the series’ lore in a big way, revealing that the Living Lands’ forgotten god, Sapadal, had been trapped by the newer pantheon for centuries. Its tortured throes in its attempts to escape were the root cause of a plague known as the Dreamscourge that was altering the Lands’ flora and fauna. The player character, the Envoy, is revealed to be the chosen of Sapadal and can either embrace and restore the trapped god or destroy it.

Atomfall’s Oberon

The source of the explosion at the heart of Atomfall‘s Windscale Facility was due to the experimentation on a massive meteorite that fell to earth in the 1600s. Given the name Oberon, the meteor was the catalyst for the scientific collective known as BARD being able to produce items like atomic batteries and autonomous robots. However, when Oberon’s core was breached, it awoke a biological hive mind-like entity, causing the catastrophe and resulting in the quarantine zone and its population being affected and changed by its alien influence.

How Atomfall’s Oberon and Avowed’s Sapadal Represent Similar Themes

The similarities between Sapadal in Avowed and Oberon in Atomfall are apparent in their presentations and natures. In both, the world is being warped by their respective influences. This is reflected in their visual designs, with exotic fungal growths and clouds of spores rendered in striking and vibrant color palettes covering their landscapes and creating an otherworldly look to the environments.

Both entities are also able to communicate telepathically or through dreams with humans who come in contact with the above. And though Sapadal and Oberon aren’t necessarily intentionally malevolent, their effects on the populations gradually erode and change them, twisting their mental state and physical appearance. Some have found ways to resist, holding onto their personalities while still displaying the physical changes. But those who have been overtaken completely and driven to a feral state are described and named as “thralls” in both titles and often must be dealt with violently or avoided altogether.

On top of their above shared traits, there is a strong environmental aspect and cautionary message contained in both titles’ representations, with one viewed through a fantasy lens and the other being sci-fi. In both cases, the reasons that their alien/nature gods lashed out were due to outside forces imposing their wills on them.

Avowed‘s Sapadal was acting out of self-defense and a desire to escape imprisonment. In Atomfall, it was the reckless actions of a few who decided to continue experimenting and drilling into Oberon without heeding their fellows’ warnings and disregarding the potential consequences, with a disastrous result. Both make for compelling case studies, and provide fans with philosophical and metaphysical food for thought while being satisfying experiences unto themselves.

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