Atomfall gave me all the vibes

Atomfall had been on my radar for a long time. It's described as British Fallout, but as soon as you get out of the starting bunker you'll realise that this is very different from Fallout. First of all it's Britain, second it takes place in 1962 - five years after the Windscale fire (which was a real thing). It's obvious as soon as you get out of the bunker and into the world that this is no mere nuclear explosion. This isn't radioactive fallout. This is something else entirely. And as you go through the story, find writings and talk to people - where every dialogue choice offers up a different avenue of clues, you'll slowly find out the truth of what happened at Windscale back in October 1957. 

When the game starts you wake up inside a bunker within the quarantine zone. You don't know who you are or how you got there - the zone has been closed off for five years. You emerge from the bunker with the objective to get out of there, but you end up having to find out what really happened before that becomes an option. 

The base game has six different endings, the DLC offers you three more, with all the dialogue choices and mission choices this game offers a lot of replayability. Some of the characters you meet will ask you to do things for them to further their own agendas, and if you do this for them they'll help you escape from the zone. But several of these characters actively work against one another and if you go too far helping one character, another might end up dead. 

All of the endings are very open-ended, some of them gave me more questions than they answered, but that provides possibilities for more DLCs or even sequel(s). 

Personally, while I played I didn't get any Fallout vibes, but it gave me some We Happy Few vibes, some Generation Zero and a little bit Dishonored.

There's enough variety in the world that it never gets boring to explore. There are your plain old enemy NPCs, but the world is also full of tripwires that set off bombs or traps when tripped, there are environmental dangers like bees, rats, leeches, crows, electric eels, exploding/spittting/thumping plants, infection clouds, Skethermoor even has landmines all over, and dark places are homes to ferals. Always pick up everything you find, and always make sure you have Molotovs and/or sticky bombs.

The big bad robots became less scary as soon as I had any gun that could shoot fast and did High or Very High damage. You want to upgrade your weapons and to do that you need two of every kind and the skill perk Gunsmith, which you unlock by finding or buying the Crafting Manual. There are three tiers of guns in the game: Rusty, Stock, and Pristine. To get a Stock level gun you need to combine two Rusty guns (of the same kind) in the crafting menu. To get a Pristine level gun you need to combine two Stock guns. Inventory space is always a hassle to manage, the Pneumatic tubes found inside bunkers saw freqeuent use, and more often than not I'd make a sidetrip to a nearby bunker to either dump things, craft things, or take things out to hand to the trader so I could buy the manual/recipe/battery/ammo they had. 

I really appreciated the Lovecraftian vibes provided by the Wicked Isle DLC, especially the aquatic ferals that gave me strong Shadow Over Innsmouth vibes. I also loved the historical context and aspect provided by the DLC. Weird islander folk, indeed xD

And then you finish the whole game and take a breath and immediately this amazing song plays for the credits. Worth it to finish the game again just to hear it.

Recommendations for playing this game: always pick up everything, make frequent use of the pneumatic tubes, don't fret too much about trading because pretty much everything they offer can be found by exploring. When you wake up talk to Nat and Molly and then go directly to the Village. Talk to everybody there, then head to the Woods, then back to Slatten Dale, and then go to "The Entrance" there. Basically find out as much as you can from the outside before you head to the place they're all talking about. Don't worry, you'll go back and forth between the outside and the inside quite a bit. 

I played through the game twice and managed to unlock five out of six base game endings and two out of three DLC endings. I'll probably play this game again at some point. This has been fantastic!

(And no, Atomfall isn't Atomic Heart lol)