The joys of being sick. I am sitting down to write this while taking a breathing treatment, though admittedly the sound of the nebulizer does sorta serve as a calming white noise. I am returning back to work today and while my asthma is still engaged, the actual influenza should be long gone apart from this damned cough given that it all started on leap day. During my periods of recuperation I have been trying to find various low key ways of enjoying myself while gaming, because my reflexes and ability to do anything that involves a lot of momentum went out the window. I wrote a lot last week about my adventures in the EZ Everquest Server, and I have not quite finished that but I did feel like I needed to venture out a bit more and do other things.
In my travels I stumbled across some patch notes for a game I had never heard of before. Atom RPG is an admittedly poorly named game, but it represents a nostalgic journey back into the era of Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. I’m not sure if you have attempted to play those games recently, but they are a bit of a struggle to get into. They are way more sluggish than your memory of them would indicate, and I struggled quite a bit a few years back in attempting to get started once more in the first game. Atom on the other hand is the sweet spot for Nostalgia gaming… it plays like you remember Fallout playing with all of the modern trappings that make it tolerable for long play periods.
Fallout was a post nuclear war game focused on what happened to America after the bombs fell, and ATOM is very similar except it instead is placed in the civilization that came after Soviet era Russia. This serves to give a really interesting glimpse in how the other faction viewed the inevitability of nuclear conflict and what might occur to society after a great fall plunges us back into the dark ages. Interestingly enough the picture painted is one way less bleak than that of the Metro series. You play as a member of A.T.O.M. a pre-war military organization that more or less plays the same role as that of the Brotherhood of Steel does in the Fallout games. You are sent out into the wastes in search of what happened to a General of your order who was on a mission to recover some ancient tech.
During your journey you will cross a waste dotted with small settlements and all manner of curiosities presented very much in a similar fashion to which you might remember Fallout. There are random encounters as you cross the waste either on foot or later through driving one of a handful of automobiles that are available and that require a constant supply of fuel for which you need to scavenge. The game as a whole feels a little harder than I remember Fallout being, or at least the availability of weapons seems a little harder to come by for a long time. The first handful of weapons you come across break easily, but thankfully the game has a reasonable crafting system and I was able to keep making improvised shivs until I came across better options.
The part that I find most intriguing is all of the soviet era nostalgia that is included in the game given that it is built by a team of Russian developers. I love seeing this familiar genre through a different set of eyes, and a lot of the same tropes playing out in a completely different manner. As far as your party composition goes, you encounter a whole bunch of random characters in your journey. The first for me was a dog that you can in fact pet and befriend and later equip with some nifty armor. After that I encountered a writer that had been exiled to the Gulag before the war and was living a life of isolation walled up on a farm trapped in by giant spiders. After clearing out the spiders he announces that he is joining your party and provides a certain bit of comic relief.
Other companions you can pick up for an indefinite amount of time. One girl for example I saved from a bunch of slavers and she wanted to follow me for safety. You can continue adventuring with her for as long as you like, but I escorted her to the main city in the game and “released” her where she then becomes an NPC working in a bar run by another party member you meet along the way. You can keep checking back in on her to make sure things are going okay which feels nice. The writing is extremely good which is important given this is a game without voice narration and you have to be drawn into the text in order to stay engaged.
I am not sure how long this journey is going to last, but for now I am deeply engaged. It is a game with some rich factions that will be recognizable when viewed through the lens of Fallout, but with a decidedly soviet spin on them. The game also gives you some interesting examples of raiders that are not just madness induced murder machines, but are instead a sort of organized crime syndicate that you can opt to join. I am more or less playing the life of the wasteland hero, helping the downtrodden like I almost always do in a game like this. However there have been more than a few situations where things went south and I wound up having to fight an entire settlement. I am just going to hope those were bad guys, because they didn’t exactly give me much in the way of friendly options.
If you too are prone to fits of nostalgia, then I highly suggest checking out this game. Fair warning however, that if you do get stuck you are going to find yourself wading through a lot of Russian language pages trying to find some of your answers. Additionally the game supports mods but I am finding them prone to the same problem of needing copious amounts of google translate to understand, and as such I have not gone down that rabbit hole. The base game is less than $9 right now and the “supporter” edition with extra goodies is less than $13. Definitely worth checking out if you too have ever tried to go back and play the original Fallout games.
