Atomfall might have been an apocalyptic classic if it wasn't for all the walking

The Guardian

25-04-2025

'Fast travel'. The greatest two words in gaming. Greater even than 'infinite lives', Clive Sinclair or 'moustachioed plumber'. It is to go from one location in a game where you are doing something important to another location in the blink of a loading screen, cutting out the repetitive kerfuffle in between. (Trivia break: Repetitive Kerfuffle might have been the working title for Tetris!)
We've had it since the 80s. Dragon Quest had a Return spell and the original Zelda had the recorder to take you to different dungeons, and even they were preceded six years earlier by a certain big fat yellow mouth who had dots for supper and ghosts for dessert. Because that guy could go out of one side of the screen and appear on the other instantly. That's fast travel isn't it? My advocacy for this is however tempered by the depression I feel that PacMan may have thought going off the right hand side would mean an escape from his corridor hell, only to return, Sisyphus-like, back where he started.
The Sisyphus reference is apt because, even more than the chafing hands and sore calves, the biggest problem the boulder-pushing Greek had was boredom. Fast travel is essential because we play video games to escape the tedium of real life. And the most tedious thing in life is travel of any kind. Even with the latest fad for space flights, you have to go through the boring grind of making the $20m for the ticket in return for 12 minutes of seeing the Earth look just like it does in the pictures.
When a developer puts fast travel in a game, they are saying: 'I get you. We both want you to enjoy this game. So we will fast as much of this tedious travel as we can.'
Not Rebellion Developments though. Not with Atomfall. Atomfall doesn't just ignore fast travel, it depends on your ability to yomp across great swathes of land you have already yomped across. With really tough enemies. It reduces the game to a study in anger at times.
And this is such a shame because I loved so much about it. The story is fascinating: What really did happen during the Windscale nuclear plant disaster in England in 1957. A fire there was rated a five out of seven on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. Chernobyl was a seven. The end of that recent episode of The Last of Us was a six.
In the game, this event has turned a section of the Lake District into a radioactive quarantine zone, and you wake up in the middle of it with no memory of who you are or how you got there, and then stumble around gleaning bits of info off people in return for doing their bidding. I enjoyed peeling this onion of conflicting information from nicely grey moral characters with just about every accent in the UK displayed at some point or other, because nothing brings the country together like a good old-fashioned quarantine.
I don't mind that it doesn't have a traditional RPG skill tree. There is no XP to grind for. Just Training Stimulants you can find and exchange for better stealth, stamina, weaponry and so on. But there can be too many quests open at the same time. I hope that when the apocalypse hits in this life (next Tuesday at this rate), it is a lot less busy.
I also don't mind that Atomfall is very tough to play, even if you reduce the combat to the lowest level (Useless Dad), but I do mind having a tiny backpack and not enough accessible storage tubes for surplus.
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I love the fact that the only foods you can eat are potatoes, tomatoes, Cornish pasties and slices of cake washed down with cups of tea that lower your heart rate. That is a beautiful detail. But I grew to hate the ridiculous slogs between all this, especially in the final third of the game, which should be when RPGs get into their slickest phase.
Apparently the developers' reason for nixing fast travel was that they wanted you to be totally immersed in this world they created. And what a world it is visually! The countryside is so lush and gorgeous it's like a work of art. And unlike the Sistine Chapel, you don't have to crick your neck to see it. Maybe the developers were so pleased that they may have created the most beautifully rendered world in game graphics history that they thought: 'OK, we will jolly well make sure the punters get to spend time with nothing to do but behold it.'
It's a shame because the world is well set up. The factions of military, outlaws, citizens, hippie mystics and zombies are my kind of party, although the enemy AI is inconsistent and the Big Bad is the most sedentary villain since Davros. With fast travel, I would have completed the game in 10 hours and been raving for more. As it was Atomfall had me wandering around a new place getting angry and resentful at things I had to keep doing for other people. And I already have family vacations for that.