Atomfall on PS5
The thing that immediately grabbed me about Atomfall was its absolute respect for player choice. Your first minutes inside the bizarre, yet fascinating quarantine zone give you the liberty to either help bandage up a wounded scientist or ignore his injuries completely. The best thing about this moment wasn’t the options, but the fact that the scientist was functionally an essential NPC quest-giver. Right from the get-go my Morrowind senses were tingling, and the game didn’t disappoint when I got my first ending 15 hours later.
Yes, you read that right, it took 15 hours to complete a playthrough of Atomfall, not 100. This doesn’t have the scope and scale of a Fallout title or even The Outer Worlds, but it more than makes up for it in the freedom it allows. I cannot properly express what a delight it is to play a game as compact, dense, and full of meaningful choices as Atomfall in 2025. Just like the classic CRPGs of yesteryear, killing quest-essential NPCs is not just possible here, but viable. Every single NPC in the game can be killed, and unlike more sanitized RPGs like Avowed, they actually react to what you do in the world.
