The beauty of Atomfall, aside from its stunning visuals, is that players have the power to craft the game's story their way, and it doesn't just end with who you align yourself with. In this game, you can also toggle a variety of gameplay mechanics to get the most suitable gaming experience for you.
As a survival game, Atomfall doesn't shy away from offering players the standard challenges of a game in the genre, from searching for loot and resources to surviving challenging combat encounters and exploring ruins and bunkers. The degree of challenge, however, largely rests on the player's shoulders, so it is worth looking into the differences in gameplay difficulty in Atomfall so you can curate your own brand of challenge.
How the Windscale Incident Influenced Atomfall
In a The Best War Games interview, an Atomfall dev discusses the flashpoint for its alternative timeline: the 1957 nuclear disaster on England's north coast.
Difficulty Settings in Atomfall Explained
Unlike your standard survival game, Atomfall takes quite a different approach to how easy or challenging your experience is. Instead of difficulty options, the game offers playstyles, which are predetermined settings that are adjusted to suit your playing preferences. It does still have an equivalent to easy, medium, and hard, of course, but it also has options that prioritize more difficult combat or more difficult exploration. The playstyle options are as follows:
- Sightseer - this is the "easy" mode, and will offer players assisted combat, survival, and exploration mechanics.
- Investigator - this mode turns up the difficulty in exploration, making it more challenging to navigate the game's districts and locate important points of interest on the map. Combat is assisted, survival mechanics are set to 'casual', but exploration is elevated to 'challenging'.
- Brawler - this is for those looking for a more difficult combat experience. It does basically the opposite to Investigator, with settings adjusted to assisted Exploration, casual Survival and challenging Combat.
- Survivor - this is the default/recommended playstyle, and is the equivalent to a 'medium' difficulty. All three difficulty factors are set to Challenging.
- Veteran - this mode is for the more experienced players and those seeking a challenge, as Combat, Survival, and Exploration are all set to Intense.
If none of these appeal to you, there is also the option to completely customize your playstyle, so you can make certain parts of each pillar more or less challenging, depending on your preferences. There are a surprising number of customization options, which will help you curate the perfect balance for your playthrough.
What Are The Differences Between Difficulty Options in Atomfall?
The three facets of gameplay that determine difficulty in Atomfall, combat, survival, and exploration, can all be tweaked to suit your preferences. If you decide to choose one of the preset playstyle options, then you will see that each facet will be set to either assisted, casual, challenging, or intense. Your choices here will have a significant impact on the gameplay experience, so it is worthwhile getting an understanding of how each difficulty level differs. Here are the three difficulty indicators and what each tier means.
Combat
Combat difficulty in Atomfall influences the behavior of non-playable characters, and is determined by seven difficulty sliders, ranging from aggression and population, to accuracy and skill. This is how the difficulty levels differ for combat:
- Assisted - enemy numbers are fairly scarce, they have poor perception, and are not particularly resilient, meaning they won't require many shots to kill.
- Casual - enemies will challenge players, but are not overly aggressive. If you take a more evasive approach, they will stop searching for you quickly.
- Challenging - enemy population is more significant, and they are far more aggressive. At Challenging, enemies won't be afraid to bring the fight to you.
- Intense - enemies are very tough to bring down, will spot you will much greater ease, and will be in much bigger numbers. The more formidible enemy types will also appear more frequently.
Survival
Survival is primarily focused on the health, well-being, and resilience of the main character. This playstyle mechanic influences gameplay features spanning from bartering and look frequency, all the way to health regeneration. The difficulty tiers are split as follows:
- Assisted - bartering with tradespeople is heavily in your favour, and there is an abundance of loot for you to harvest.
- Casual - player resilience and loot capacity is much higher, so players don't have to put any real emphasis on keeping stocked up on essentials to stay alive.
- Challenging - loot is fairly scarce, resilience is at a far more realistic level, and traders have the upper hand in bartering situations.
- Intense - this is the most realistic setting - player resilience is low, loot is hard to come by, and trading becomes a real challenge for those valuable items they have in stock.
Exploration
Atomfall lets players tell the game's story their own way through the use of Leads. Instead of your standard approach-markers-to-progress setup, players will need to do a little digging to find notes that hint at where to go to uncover the game's mysteries. As such, navigation is an important facet to the experience, and the difficulty tiers will help determine how much, if any at all, assistance you get when trying to find particular NPCs or locations:
- Assisted - players receive a lot of help with navigation. Compass and waypoint markers are in use, and there are navigation hints to lead you in the right direction.
- Casual - navigation hints are turned off, but compass and waypoint markers are still readily available.
- Challenging - waypoint markers are disabled, but players can still keep their bearings with the compass.
- Intense - you get absolutely no navigational support, as even the compass is disabled.
Your choice of difficulty isn't set in stone, so if you're not enjoying the conditions of your chosen playstyle, you can change them at any time from the pause menu.
Which Difficulty Should I Choose?
While there is certainly plenty to be gained from choosing one of the preset playstyle options, the best way to experience Atomfall is to customize the playstyle to your preferences. The customization menu is far more detailed than you would expect from a game like this, so it really does give you more than enough freedom to tweak it to your liking. In a sense, it's almost like a character build in itself, and really adds to the replayability of the game, aside from the multiple endings you can discover.
With that said, there is something to be said about the Investigator playstyle. A big part of Atomfall's gameplay is finding leads and figuring out mysteries, so to give yourself a more difficult exploration experience would lead to a more authentic playthrough. All in all, Sightseer is great if you just want a chilled game session, Investigator feels the most natural for solving mysteries, and Survivor is the most balanced if you don't have a preference between combat and exploration.
Atomfall
- Released
- March 27, 2025
- ESRB
- Teen // Blood, Language, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Rebellion Developments
- Publisher(s)
- Rebellion Developments
- Number of Players
- 1
