Atomfall inextricable from its setting in northern England. It's a mishmash of genres – primarily a first-person survival game, with RPG and immersive sim elements – that largely succeeds in delivering a captivating experience, even if its individual parts never feel like they're reaching their full potential.

You play an amnesiac who, at Atomfall's outset, wakes up inside the quarantine zone that has been established around the Windscale nuclear site (now known in real life as Sellafield). Atomfall's alternate history takes place five years after the Windscale fire of 1957, where the accident had devastating and mysterious effects on the surrounding environs. Escaping a bunker and exploring the region, you become embroiled in trying to learn not only who you are and how you got there, but also the secrets of the zone itself.

Atomfall's Game World Is One Giant Puzzle & Its Leads System Is How You Solve It

Welcome To Wyndham Village, We Don't Do Quests Here

Atomfall is almost immediately enthralling because it shirks a traditional quest system for what it calls "leads." Leads don't provide any quest markers, and they often don't even have clear-cut objectives – they're bits of information you've collected, a thread to pull on. It can be wonderfully immersive, especially early on, since you have very little information to tell you who or what is important. You slowly reveal the web of the quarantine zone's crumbling society in the interest of pursuing the single objective the game gives you immediately: find the Interchange.

The Interchange is presented as your only means to escape the zone, and Atomfall revolves almost entirely around it. The initial mystique surrounding the Interchange wears off quickly – it's a research station that was locked down when the Windscale disaster occurred, having been inaccessible since – but Atomfall's central mystery pertaining to it continues throughout the game.

Following leads results in a rather engaging exploratory loop. Atomfall has four major areas that surround the Interchange, one of which is the would-be idyllic village of Wyndham, if it weren't for the military occupation, roving gangs of outlaws, pagan zealots, and mysterious illness. The entire game world is effectively open to you from the start, letting you pick whichever sliver of intel is most compelling. As you investigate a lead, you'll find more, and soon you've got a journal full of notes to reference while you slowly unlock the secrets of the Interchange.

Making discoveries feels organic, and there are some satisfying moments of revelation when leads overlap, but the illusion starts to dissolve about halfway through the game. Atomfall's world being set up as one large puzzle is fascinating, but it's constantly funneling you toward its preset storylines by necessity, so it starts to feel like everything is an open secret. As you progress through Atomfall, you gradually find more notes pertaining to leads already resolved or already being investigated.

It's really an unavoidable consequence of the game's design, but it's also something of an unfortunate motif found throughout Atomfall's gameplay systems. Atomfall is novel and immediately enthralling in all its facets, but those facets tend to wear thin or fail to compellingly evolve, which is luckily mitigated in part by the game's comparatively brief runtime of around 20 hours.

Atomfall Tells A Captivating Story In Spite Of A Few Missteps

A Dynamic Narrative Unfolds According To Your Choices

Perhaps the one exception to Atomfall's immediate attractiveness is the main character, who is unceremoniously dumped into the zone. Being amnesiac doesn't necessarily make the game's opening especially engrossing. It feels like an attempt to smooth the divide between player and avatar, but the result is everything compelling about Atomfall's narrative and world being a step removed from you as the main character.

The saving grace is that you, equally confused as your character, have no preconceptions to work with. There's nothing for you or the main character to do but wander and see what happens, so the slack is luckily picked up fairly quickly by eclectic characters and conundrums of all shapes and sizes. The intrigue comes naturally once you start pulling on threads, and secondary plots can be just as interesting since they feed into your overall perception of the quarantine zone.

Despite the diminishing returns as your sleuthing narrows toward the finale, Atomfall's overall narrative structure is quite impressive. You won't find many notes placed for the sole purpose of world-building; almost every bit of diegetic text informs the story and your actions. Gradually you build a dossier of the zone's movers and shakers, with a handful of parallel main leads offering your much-coveted escape from the quarantine zone – in exchange for your help, of course.

The main narrative arcs and mysteries are captivating enough, even if they're propped up by rather archetypal characters. I was a bit disappointed, though, to have a few lingering questions go unanswered as the credits rolled, even after reloading saves to see three different major ending permutations. Still, Atomfall's written structure is intricate enough that I'm still generally fascinated by the narrative overall, and it clearly lends itself to giving each player a unique experience, whether that's following as many major leads as possible throughout, or establishing loyalty to certain characters right out of the gate.

Combat Can Be Intense, But Atomfall Won't Offer Much Progression

Pick Your Favorite Guns & Aim For The Head

There is some satisfaction to be found in smartly rationing your precious rifle ammo via a string of headshots, but combat isn't necessarily Atomfall's forte, and ultimately turns into a repetitive obstacle to the more interesting aspects of exploration. Fighting a gaggle of blokes decked out in cricket gear is entertaining at first – and dangerous thanks to how few attacks you can tank – but the cutthroat combat is let down significantly by poor and predictable enemy AI.

It's all too easy to put yourself in an advantageous position, aim down sights at head height, and pull the trigger as foes come around the corner one-by-one. Melee combat isn't any more compelling despite a nifty kick attack that acts as a universal stun. While I'm glad Atomfall decided on a rather constrained scope for its game world, in the latter half I found myself simply avoiding combat entirely, just so I could stop wasting ammo on rote encounters (often exact scenarios I'd already seen since enemies respawn) and see where my current leads were heading.

One satisfying exception to the poor AI is lone melee attackers realizing when they're outgunned. A couple of times, I was able to point my shotgun threateningly, causing a melee-weapon-toting enemy to back off while I searched the area before leaving them be.

There's also very little evolution to any of the combat systems. You can find some neat guns, and there are a few upgrade opportunities, but not long into the game you'll have seen all the weapons and enemies Atomfall has to offer. It's not a deal-breaker, especially considering combat is clearly not the main focus, but if you try to follow up on nearly every lead like I did, you'll probably start to grow tired of repeating fights as you revisit certain areas too.

The Windscale Quarantine Zone Is Gorgeous, Albeit Noticeably Unambitious

Even Feral, Blue-Eyed Monsters Can't Ruin The View

A major boon to Atomfall's overall experience is that it runs well and is great to look at, at least generally. The caveat is that this is likely because it's a cross-generation game (over four years into the ninth console gen), and cuts some noticeable corners to be so. On PlayStation 5, the frame rate is consistently high with no graphics options to be found, but the nature of it being a survival game means you'll end up staring at a lot of blurry, flat textures while you're rummaging for items.

It's saved in large part thanks to great art direction, which is reminiscent of Alex Garland's 2014 film, Annihilation (a likely inspiration for some story beats as well). Despite the abundant STALKER parallels, Atomfall's quarantine zone is not somber or melancholic in its atmosphere, but vibrant, and it would almost be pastoral if it weren't for the odd goings-on. It also curiously s Obsidian Entertainment's excellent RPG Avowed in being the second game this year to have a notable fascination with potentially malevolent fungi.

The Windscale Mystery Makes Atomfall Worth Your Time, If You Can Look Past Its Shortcomings

Slow & Often Clunky, But A Compelling Rabbit Hole To Fall Down

Atomfall is sustained by captivating exploration, its central mysteries, and a menagerie of characters. Its narrative structure at large is its greatest achievement, letting you choose who to trust as you inch closer to the heart of the Interchange. If you're looking for deep combat, however, you may be disappointed in Atomfall's moment-to-moment action. It's a slow game that wants you to consider your actions carefully through analysis of the information you've compiled, and while the game itself runs smoothly with very few hiccups, its mechanics can feel unwieldy.

There's a distinct charm to Atomfall, and I was fully captivated by the main story, even if the game built around it never quite reaches excellence. Stopping for a cuppa to lower your heart rate or infiltrating the ruins of a castle infested with neo-pagans calling themselves druids exemplifies the earnestness of Atomfall's design, but for how clever I think its puzzle-box world is, it's equally uninspired in many of its buttressing gameplay systems.

ScreenRant was provided with a PS5 digital code for the purpose of this review.