As with time-limited public demos, media hands-on preview builds often include handy text boxes that flash on the screen to inform the player that only a few minutes remain. During my half hour with Nuclear case one popped up at Gamescom while I was chatting to the flat-capped landlord of a scrupulously British pub. Alf Buckshaw of the Grendel’s Head had done well to frame the world beyond his grimy windows, rhapsodising about the military quarantines that followed the government’s opening and the droog-like bandit gangs that arose in the wake of Rebellion’s fictionalised exaggeration of a real 20th century. Nuclear disaster. But time was running out, so I swung a cricket bat and started hitting the poor guy on the head. To my surprise, despite his old age, he was still ready for a fight.
Playing a choice-based RPG with a built-in time limit can force you to do strange and ethically questionable things. And I don’t usually do this in front of a face-to-face audience, so it was hard not to worry about the judgement that would be meted out over my shoulder by Rebellion’s head of design, Ben Fisher. After being gunned down by a drunken soldier for my crimes against the elderly, I stood up to chat briefly about that inimitable STALKER-like Cumbrian.
“I wish we had a bingo card for what players experienced during the demo,” Fisher said, before talking about the inspiration behind Nuclear case“There are many games that take place in nuclear disaster areas, but [prior to this] there was no story surrounding the world’s first major nuclear disaster, which occurred at Windscale.” The three-day reactor fire that broke out at the Windscale nuclear power station (now Sellafield) in northern England in 1957 is the worst in British history. It released radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and threatened the local milk supply. “In the real world, the station was designed to produce plutonium for bombs, and in reality, generating nuclear power was just a cover for a government operation,” Fisher continued. “In our story, the station has moved to a slightly different location and has a slightly different secret project. Part of the mystery is uncovering what happened here.”
Inevitably, commentators will refer to the recent “British fallout” of the rebellion, but Nuclear case is much more brutal, and the desperate combat makes it more reminiscent of Metro or STALKER than its vault-happy American counterpart. At its core, it’s also a detective game, one with mysterious leads rather than quests and an RPG spiderweb where you slash your way to unexpected discoveries, liaise with factions, and reach circuitous conclusions in a series of lush Lake District environments.Fallout: New Vegas is the best analogue to Fallout because it is essentially one coherent story about a specific place,” Fisher said.
The Gamescom demo skipped Nuclear case‘s opening, but the story begins in 1962, five years after the Windscale disaster. Our amnesiac protagonist is awakened in a bunker by a bleeding man in a hazmat suit who tells them they must find the Interchange, a place in the center of Nuclear caseis the main mystery. Like the rest of the game, it’s up to you whether you help him in exchange for the information. The disaster zone you later enter is sealed off from the rest of the world, and some sort of glitch prevents transmissions from coming in or going out. “Nobody knows what it looks like outside; everything is kind of bleak and ambiguous,” Fisher said. “There are clues as to what’s going on, but we leave some things open to interpretation because it adds to the feeling of being a detective.” The game world is made up of six maps filled with bunker dungeons and interiors, including bakeries, churches, and castles. You can travel between them to follow up on clues, with Fisher ominously noting that the population will change depending on your actions.
”Dark Souls was a useful reference point because at one point during development, [Atomfall] was built more like a Metroidvania game – it was a series of sandbox maps and each one had a big story dungeon where you got a tool or learned information to unlock a new location,” Fisher said. “But during development, we thought What would happen if we just unlocked all the doors and let the players go anywhere?”
The focus of my demo was Slatten Dale, a rural playground with a permanent column of electromagnetic anomaly on the edges. An initial conversation with a musical oddball (who had the same surname as the innkeeper I would later beat to death) introduced me to Nuclear case‘s multiple-choice dialogue system, where you can choose between a rotating trio of options defined by mood tags, like “Questioning,” “Honest,” or “Evasive.” I enjoyed bantering and haggling with the valley’s many charming NPCs, and it was great to hear authentic Cumberland accents throughout, with characters unafraid to drop “that” in any given sentence or throw in a “something” or “nothing.”
I searched some of the ruined farmlands nearby, stumbling past tripwires and Kilroy graffiti to pick up cans of non-Spam and other crafting materials. I also strangled an inattentive outlaw to get the fabled cricket bat that would eventually be Alf Buckshaw’s undoing. While exploring, you can also find military and survival manuals that give you access to skills, but to unlock them you need a special material called training stimulants. “They let you learn things quickly, and there’s a justification for why that happens in fiction – it’s part of the mystery,” Fisher said. Nuclear caseThe skills are divided into melee, ranged, stamina and survival and allow you to mitigate damage types, disarm traps or stun for longer with your kicks, to name just a few examples.
Image: Rebellion
The information I had picked up from the surroundings during my conversations inevitably led me into immediate danger, and I recklessly entered an area patrolled by armed bandits. Nuclear caseCombat is hectic but thoughtful, with long, deliberate animations and strong feedback. It’s well suited to the immersive Sim-lifers who enjoy the relentless encounters of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobylbut it will be a tough battle for those who are used to the jerky omni-movement touted by modern shooters like Apex Legends And Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Thankfully, Rebellion has opted for adaptive playstyles rather than rigid difficulty settings to mitigate some of the initial difficulties. “You can adjust how intense you want the combat or survival to be, and you can adjust how focused you want the investigation to be,” Fisher said.
I got a few close-range punches in at the apparent leader, but then in a fit of tingly shock I botched three revolver shots and had to throw a Molotov cocktail at the compound’s gate to stop the hooligan gang from pursuing me. “We want you to always be under pressure when you go into combat, because combat is largely optional,” Fisher said. “You can play through the game without killing anyone, or you can kill everyone, even those you would consider quest characters. There are still ways to end the game when everyone is dead, and it’s up to you who you trust or not.”
After an eerie underground excursion that involved fending off a creepy troop of eyeless mutants, I made it to Wyndham, a sleepy cobblestone village occupied by an army conspiracy called Protocol. “Their job was to enforce quarantine protocol and secure the place, but they’re trapped with everyone else,” Fisher said. “So the question is… are they the official government or are they warlords? They have no communication with the outside world, so how much power do they have?” Protocol’s subjects had a distinctly British “keep calm and carry on” attitude about them, no doubt spread by the giant robot clattering around near the village hall. There’s also a group of Pagans in the woods, a “back to nature” cult that has taken to worshipping the Disaster and building wicker men to worship it.
Unlike Fallout, there are no catchy licensed ’60s songs to keep you company, but Rebellion has written some music of their own to add another layer of texture. Nuclear case‘s storytelling. “There are gramophones and radios playing what sounds like folk music, and we wrote these songs to reflect our lore, because the mystery at the heart of the game is not just something that just happened – the roots of it go back into history, and we try to show the influence of those events through the music.” It’s this dense and layered approach to storytelling that keeps me interested in Nuclear casea game that quotes cross-generational esotericism like Children of men And The Prisoner as sonic influences. With its old-fashioned combat and lack of hand guidance, it is certainly not for everyone, but I could easily have spent several hours loitering around Slatten Dale, poking my nose into its nooks and crannies to get closer to some of the Nuclear caseThe most exciting secrets of.
