Atomfall has turned one year old, and Rebellion has marked the occasion with a set of player stats that are exactly as British as the game itself. The headline figure: 16.8 million Cornish pasties consumed across all playthroughs. If you have spent any time with Atomfall, you will know that makes complete sense. The game’s relationship with quintessentially English foodstuffs is one of dozens of small details that make it feel genuinely rooted in place rather than vaguely gesturing at a setting.
For those who have not played it, Atomfall is a survival RPG set in a fictionalised version of the Lake District in the 1960s, in the aftermath of the Windscale nuclear disaster. The real Windscale fire of 1957 was one of the most serious nuclear accidents in British history, and Rebellion uses it as a springboard for something part folk horror, part post-apocalyptic mystery, part quintessential English countryside gone very wrong. It is an unusual combination, and it works far better than it had any right to.
What made Atomfall resonate was precisely what made it seem like a risk on paper. There is no shortage of open-world survival RPGs, but almost none of them are set in rural northern England. The drizzle, the dry wit in the dialogue, the dry stone walls, the sense that something deeply uncanny is happening just beneath the surface of a very recognisable landscape: none of that was guaranteed to translate, and yet it absolutely did. British players found something that felt made for them, and international players found it genuinely exotic in a way that polished American or fantasy settings rarely are anymore.
Sixteen point eight million pasties is, obviously, a marketing number. But it is a good one, because it points at the texture of the game rather than a sales milestone or a concurrent player peak. Atomfall earned its anniversary. Here is hoping Rebellion is already thinking about what comes next in this world.