Atomfall, the action RPG survival game that takes place after a nuclear disaster, released later this month. While it’s far from the first to explore a post-apocalyptic setting due to nuclear disaster, it does join the rarer genre of being based on true events. It joins the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series in this smaller category, which takes place in an alternate history where the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl led to another, more catastrophic event, in 2006. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster is well-known, however, but the event that precedes the story of Atomfall is one many have never heard of.
Atomfall is an alternate-history take on the worst nuclear disaster the U.K. has ever seen. While other nuclear disaster games tend to take place many years after the incident, Atomfall is set five years after the disaster. The game also appears to take a route more similar to that seen in Far Cry: New Dawn, where the landscape is less of a wasteland and instead an altered, yet beautiful and lush environment. Of course, that’s far from the truth of what actually happened.
Atomfall Is Inspired By the Windscale Fire That Took Place In 1957
The Lesser-known Nuclear Disaster Will Be at the Center of This Survival Action RPG
Players in Atomfall will be navigating a post-nuclear disaster environment, crafting, fighting, and searching for answers. Atomfall tasks players with solving the mystery of what really happened, with the game taking place five years after the incident within a nuclear quarantine zone; nowadays, however, the cause of the disaster is readily available, well-documented information.
The Windscale Piles were two nuclear reactors, known as Pile 1 and Pile 2, constructed after WWII nuclear arms research had granted the U.K. considerable knowledge of the science of nuclear energy. Pile 1 became operational in 1950 and Pile 2 followed in 1951. Both Piles were graphite-moderated nuclear reactors and, at the time, had been documented by Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner to potentially have issues due to graphite’s nature of energy build-up when bombarded by neutrons. If the energy was allowed to build up too much, it could escape, resulting in a powerful rush of heat. This meant that both Piles were ticking time bombs; they were only meant to be kept operational for five years, but that operation was stretched to seven until the Windscale fire.
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When both Piles became operational, the operators immediately became concerned by the rise in Pile 2’s core temperature. To regulate the heat and manage the potential build-up of energy, regular annealing known as Winger releases were done. This kept the Pile stable, but over the years, forcing a release of the stored energy became more difficult. When the 9th Winger release was supposed to take place on Oct. 7, 1957, Pile 2 instead released all of its energy through only one channel, instead of through all channels which would have allowed it to evenly heat up the entire reactor as planned.
The operators decided to do another release, which appeared to fix the issue. However, the next day, instead of the temperature of the reactor cooling now that the release had been done, it was rising. Operators sped up the cooling fans, and radiation detectors indicated a release, causing operators to assume a cartridge had burst. As this had happened before, they weren’t concerned; however, the cartridge hadn’t burst but actually caught fire.
Turning up the cooling fans quite literally inadvertently fanned the flames, and operators did not identify the fire until it had already been going for 48 hours. By Oct. 11, eleven tons of Uranium were on fire, and multiple efforts to put out the fire had been unsuccessful. Finally, the air flow was shut off, and the flames died down; at this time, no one in the area had been evacuated. The radioactive fallout of the fire spread throughout the U.K. and Europe; at the time, the U.K. government ordered reports of the fire to be heavily censored. This makes a perfect setting for the alternate history of Atomfall; a nuclear fire caused widespread disaster throughout the U.K. and Europe, and the government is covering it up.
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Of course, in real life, eventually, the public was granted all information pertaining to the fire, including the fact that small but highly dangerous amounts of the radioactive isotope polonium-210 were released during the fire. It’s been nearly 68 years since the incident and while there were some long-term health effects, the U.K. and Europe effectively fully recovered from the incident. The reactor is scheduled to be fully decommissioned in 2037, with chances of another fire entirely ruled out.
Atomfall will explore the direct aftermath of the disaster, in an alternate history where presumably it took longer to contain the fire and the government kept its secrets. It’s an interesting setting for players to dive into, and one that many may not have been aware of as a possibility until the announcement of this game.
Atomfall
Survival
Action
Adventure
- Released
-
March 27, 2025
- ESRB
-
Teen // Blood, Language, Violence
- Developer(s)
-
Rebellion Developments
- Publisher(s)
-
Rebellion Developments