Like limited-time public demos, media hands-on preview builds often include helpful text boxes that flash on-screen to inform the player that there are only a few minutes left. During my half hour with Atomic trap One appeared at Gamescom while I was chatting to the flat-capped landlord of a carefully British pub. Alf Buckshaw of Grendel’s Head had done well to portray the world behind his grimy windows, droning on about the post-government military quarantines and Droog-esque bandit gangs that sprang up in the wake of Rebellion’s fictional exaggeration of a real 20th-century nuclear disaster. But time was of the essence, so I swung a cricket bat and started hitting the poor chap on the head. To my surprise, he was still up for a fight, even in his old age.
Playing a choice-driven RPG with a built-in time limit can force you to do strange and ethically shady things. And I don’t usually do that with a live audience, so it was hard not to worry about the judgement being passed over my shoulder by Rebellion’s head of design, Ben Fisher. After being gunned down by a drunken soldier for my crimes against the elderly, I got up for a quick chat about this inimitable Cumbrian STALKER-like.
“I wish we had a bingo card for what players did during the demo,” Fisher said before explaining the inspiration behind Atomic trap. “There are a lot of games that are set in nuclear post-disaster zones, but (previously) none were based on the world’s first major nuclear disaster, which was at Windscale.” The three-day reactor fire that broke out in 1957 at the Windscale nuclear power station (now Sellafield) in northern England is the worst in British history, spewing radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and dooming local milk supplies. “In the real world, the plant was there to make plutonium for bombs, and actually the nuclear power generation was a cover for a government operation,” Fisher continued. “In our story, the plant has been moved to a slightly different location and has a slightly different secret project. Part of the mystery is uncovering what happened there.”
Inevitably the commentariat will call the latest Rebellion ‘British Fallout’, but Atomic trap is far more brutal, with desperate combat that feels more like Metro or STALKER than its vault-happy American counterpart. It’s also very much a detective game at heart, one with mysterious leads rather than quests and a role-playing spiderweb that sees you making unexpected discoveries, interacting with factions and reaching perplexing conclusions across a series of lush Lake District environments.Fallout: New Vegas comes closest to Fallout, as it’s largely one cohesive story about a specific location,” Fisher said.
The Gamescom demo has been skipped Atomic trap‘s opening, but the story begins in 1962, five years after the Windscale disaster. Our amnesiac protagonist is awakened in a bunker by a bleeding man in a hazmat suit, who tells them they need to find The Interchange, a place central to Atomic trap‘s guiding mystery. Like the rest of the game, it’s up to you whether you help him in exchange for information. The disaster zone you enter later is sealed off from the rest of the world, with some kind of interference preventing transmissions from coming in or out. “Nobody knows what the outside looks like; it’s all left a bit bleak and ambiguous,” Fisher said. “There are clues as to what’s going on, but we leave some things open to interpretation because that adds to the texture of being a detective.” The game world consists of six maps filled with bunker dungeons and interiors, including bakeries, churches, and castles. You can travel back and forth between these maps to follow clues, with Fisher ominously noting that the population will change based on your actions.
“Dark Souls was a useful reference point because, at some point during development, (Atomic trap) was structured more like a Metroidvania game — it was a series of sandbox maps, and each one had a big story dungeon where you got a resource or learned some information to unlock a new location,” Fisher said. “But when we were developing it, we thought, What would happen if we unlocked all the doors and let the players go anywhere?“
The focus of my demo was Slatten Dale, a pastoral playground with a pillar of electromagnetic anomaly constantly visible in the margins. An initial conversation with a musical kid (who had the same last name as the innkeeper I would later beat to death) introduced me to Atomic trap‘s multiple-choice dialogue system, where you can choose from a rotating trio of options defined by mood tags, such as Questioning, Honest, or Evasive. I enjoyed the banter and bargaining with the dale’s array of charming NPCs, and it was great to hear authentic Cumberland accents throughout, with characters unafraid to drop “the” into a random sentence or throw in a “summat” or “nowt.”
I scavenged through some of the nearby ruined farmland, stumbling past tripwires and Kilroy graffiti to pick up cans of non-Spam and other crafting materials. I also strangled a distracted outlaw to acquire the legendary cricket bat that would ultimately spell Alf Buckshaw’s downfall. You can also find military and survival manuals during exploration that grant access to skills, but unlocking them requires a specific material called Training Stimulants. “They let you learn things quickly, and there’s a justification for why that’s in the fiction—it’s part of the mystery,” Fisher said. Atomic trapThe skills are divided between melee, ranged, conditioning and survival. They allow you to reduce damage, disarm traps or stun longer with your kicks, to name a few.
Inevitably, the clues I had picked up about the area during my conversations led me into imminent danger and I found myself recklessly entering a complex patrolled by armed bandits. Atomic trap‘s combat is frantic but deliberate, with long, deliberate animations and heavy feedback. It’s well-suited to the immersive sim-lifer who enjoys the unforgiving encounters of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobylbut it will be an uphill battle for those accustomed to the jerky omnimovement touted by modern shooters like Apex Legends And Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Thankfully, Rebellion has opted for adaptive playstyles rather than rigid difficulty settings to smooth over some of the kinks. “You can set how intense you want the combat or survival to be, and you can set how guided you want the exploration to be,” Fisher said.
I got in a few close-up blows with what appeared to be the leader, but in a fit of excitement and shock, I botched three revolver shots and had to shoot the gates of the compound with a Molotov to prevent the gang of hooligans from giving chase. “We want you to always feel pressured when you get into a fight, because fights are largely optional,” Fisher said. “You can play the game without killing anyone, or you can kill everyone, including what you would consider quest characters. There are still options to complete the game when everyone is dead, and it’s up to you who you trust and who you don’t.”
After a creepy subterranean excursion fending off a creepy, crawling horde of eyeless mutants, I arrived in Wyndham, a sleepy cobblestone village occupied by a military cabal called Protocol. “Their job was to enforce the quarantine protocol and keep the place secure, but they were locked up with everyone else,” Fisher said. “So the question is… are they the official government, or are they warlords? They have no communication with the outside world, so how are they in charge?” Protocol’s subjects had a typically British “keep calm and carry on” attitude about them, no doubt promoted by the giant robot rattling around the village hall. There’s also a group of pagans in the woods, a “back to nature” cult who have taken to worshipping the disaster and building wicker men to honor it.
Unlike Fallout, there are no catchy, licensed ’60s songs to keep you company here, but Rebellion has written their own music to add an extra layer to the soundtrack. Atomic trap‘s storytelling. “There are gramophones and radios playing what sounds like folk music, and we wrote those songs to reflect our lore, because the mystery at the heart of the game isn’t just something that’s happening now – its roots go back in history, and we’re trying to show the influence of those events through the music.” It’s this dense and layered approach to the story that sparked my interest in Atomic trapa game that quotes generation-spanning esoterica such as Children of men And The Prisoner as tonal influences. With its old-school fighting and lack of hand-holding, it certainly won’t be for everyone, but I could easily have spent several hours wandering around Slatten Dale, poking my nose into the cracks and cottages to get closer to some of Atomic trap‘s most seductive mysteries.