Atomfall: the game inspired by Windscale Pines’ near nuclear disaster

The 1952 documentary Atoms at Work, available on BFI Player, describes the particle of the title as both a “source of destruction” and “one of the greatest creative sources known to man”. The accompanying black-and-white footage shows balloons measuring atmospheric cosmic rays, and technicians using tongs to handle radioactive material.

The jewel in Britain’s post-war nuclear programme was the Windscale Piles, twin reactors in Cumbria that were the focus of another film, 1954’s Steel and Atomic Energy. Opened four years earlier, Windscale served as the world’s first nuclear power station and employed over 5,000 staff. It promised to make the UK a major atomic power via the production of both electricity and weapons-grade plutonium.

That dream soured on 8 October 1957 when overheated graphite and uranium cartridges caused a fire at the plant, leaking radiation across the Cumberland pastures. The government was forced to condemn all milk from 200 square miles of farmland. Then they had to reassure the public that they weren’t about to be menaced by mutated ants, as seen in Them! (1954).

The Windscale site was rebranded as Sellafield; today the 1957 accident remains overlooked, outside of scientific circles. But it has clearly lingered in the minds of video games developer Rebellion, who this month unleash Atomfall: a first-person survival adventure that takes place in a timeline where Windscale wasn’t contained, and radiation seeped throughout northern England. It’s a game that’s as much in debt to dystopic sci-fi as it is to real-world nuclear mismanagement. 

Atomfall imagines an irradiated Lake District five years after the 1957 Windscale leak. Players take control of an amnesiac who has awoken in the ‘Quarantine Zone’, and who must pick his way across ruins and rolling countryside to find out what happened to him. The environment is home to traps, devastation and reclaimed buildings on par with The Last of Us (2013), but the danger is nestled in landscapes that wouldn’t look out of place in fly-on-the-wall films such as Scenes from Village Life (1948). Even the melee weapons your character builds – axes, arrows, cricket bats and petrol bombs – seem quaintly British when compared to the flame-throwers and rifles of Naughty Dog’s twist on the apocalypse. 

Walking the deserted footpaths has all the tension of a stealth game, but Rebellion’s associate head of design Ben Fisher has ensured that environmental threats (which range from radioactive crows to Lost-in-Space-style robots complete with whisk antennae) are more akin to a “pub brawl” than a straight infiltration mission. As with the developer’s Sniper Elite franchise – whose latest instalment features a plucky one-man army disabling Nazi fortresses with silenced machine guns – the realism doesn’t come at the expense of the fun. Tonal influences such as killer plants and a village called Wyndham are merrily brought to life to create an authentic 1950s “cosy catastrophe”.

Atomfall puts as much emphasis on the human reaction to a mass disaster as it does on having your player being chased by radioactive bats. As with Odd-Meter’s Indika (2024), which follows a nun receiving devilish visions in an industrial Russian landscape, Atomfall features a background militia unit, Protocol, who clash with a religious cult inspired by the Green Man myth. Film fans will pick up on homages to rural horror The Wicker Man (1973) and occult sci-fi Quatermass and the Pit (1967), as well as an eccentric “hedge witch” character who shares traits with recently-unearthed Irish chiller The Outcasts (1982).

The game’s mix of realism and mischief allow it to join the crop of recent single-player titles that revisit overlooked historical events. It’s not as gung-ho as the period Call of Duty campaigns or as linear as Sucker Punch’s Ghosts of Tsushima (2020), which focused on a samurai improving his skills as he fought off the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Japan. Atomfall instead opts for gallows humour recalling 11 Bit’s siege-of-Sarajevo sim This War of Mine (2014) where players control a civilian caught up in conflict. The player is not just another soldier with a weapon wheel. 

Whether the game will go on to be as popular as the Fallout series (which Fisher has cited as a key influence) remains to be seen. But Atomfall will no doubt be treasured by fans of cult film, survival horror… and hopefully by the committee behind the latest jewel in Britain’s nuclear crown: the Sizewell C power plant in Suffolk. 

That site’s reactor is already the focus of a documentary – perhaps the game can serve as a Protect and Survive-style reminder that, in a country where bunkers are being transformed into designer restaurants, a real atomic catastrophe would certainly not be cosy.

Atomfall is released on 27 March.