A secluded British town. A mysterious and potentially otherworldly threat. And a giant man made out of wood. Is this an episode of Doctor Who, the original Wicker Man, or what? While it could refer to a multitude of British speculative fiction, this time it’s a description of Atomfall. When the first trailer arrived for the action survival game last year, it immediately evoked classic British sci-fi and horror. The large wooden man and the incongruous red telephone booth in the woods advertise this immediately.
This is, of course, intentional. The team at Rebellion drew inspiration from a number of sources for the upcoming game. In terms of gameplay, Atomfall has seen numerous comparisons to Fallout. In a press preview earlier this month, lead developer Ben Fisher noted this as well as the more thematic inspirations. The team “looked at a few survival games and but also 1960s speculative fiction like Doctor Who, Day of the Triffids, The Wicker Man, and more.”
The speculative fiction inspirations prove particularly interesting for a variety of reasons. For one, not much is known about Atomfall’s story. The preview focused mostly on survival and combat. But Rebellion has promised a robust story focusing on an alternate history of the Windscale disaster—a real-life event in British history.
The Windscale disaster, the UK’s largest nuclear disaster, occurred in 1957. Atomfall takes place five years later in a reality where the event created a quarantine zone. So it makes sense that the game would draw from the speculative fiction of that time.
Atomic Anxieties and Atomfall
Thematically, much of the science fiction and horror of the 1950s and 1960s dealt with nuclear disaster, the post-apocalypse, and dystopia. The Cold War had kicked off in full force, leading to fears of scientific calamity or “the other.” In early Doctor Who, the Doctor often battles tech gone awry. In the serial The War Machines, for example, the Doctor takes on a computer gone rogue. Meanwhile, The Day of the Triffids focuses on a society that isolates itself from a mysterious bioengineered threat. The Wicker Man, from the 70s but based on a 60s novel, tells a tale of an isolated cult that arose in response to a famine.
In an interview with The Guardian, Fisher also named The Prisoner and The Quartermass Experiment as two television inspirations for Atomfall. In The Prisoner, a former British intelligence officer becomes trapped in a strange seaside town. On the opposite end of the British sci-fi spectrum, The Quartermass Experiment focuses on an alien threat in London. Yet Atomfall will riff off of both.
It’ll be exciting to see how Atomfall draws from these beloved speculative fiction works when the game arrives this month. Some of the parallels are already apparent. Many of these works have the setting of society isolated by a calamity—in Atomfall’s case it’s a nuclear disaster. Tech gone (potentially) awry seems apparent from the robots patrolling the town. And the cultists who live in the wood definitely give off Wicker Man vibes. These works run the gamut from low and high sci-fi to horror, yet Atomfall promises to unite them in one tributary work.
We’ll see how Atomfall calls back to these works and more when it comes out on March 27th, 2025 for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and PC. The game will come out for Gamepass day one.
