“Not god, not alien — just what happens when myth meets fallout.”
At the heart of Atomfall is something that should not exist.
Something ancient, but not old. Powerful, but passive.
A presence that doesn’t command — it leaks.
Its name is Oberon, and while the game frames it as a meteorite or alien entity, that’s a trick of language. To call it a “thing” is to misunderstand it. Oberon isn’t an object.
Oberon is a condition.
And that condition is:
The moment the modern world stops working, and the ancient world comes back — wrong.
☢️ More Than a Meteorite
The crash site isn’t just where a rock landed. It’s where the border between reality and unreality broke down. Oberon doesn’t do — it distorts.
-
People don’t worship it because it speaks. They worship it because it infects meaning.
-
It doesn’t act like a deity. It behaves like a spiritual radiation leak.
-
It’s not malevolent. But neither is it merciful.
It’s the liminal made physical — a threshold with mass.
You don’t find Oberon.
You cross into it.
🧬 The Mutation of Myth
Let’s talk name: “Oberon.”
In folklore, Oberon is the king of the fae, ruler of an invisible realm that overlaps with our own. He represents mystery, mischief, and nature’s unknowable law.
So why does a radioactive space object share his name?
Because this is not sci-fi.
This is a myth re-weaponised.
Atomfall doesn’t just imagine a world where folklore and science collide. It suggests they were always the same thing, just wearing different coats.
Oberon is not the intrusion of alien life.
Oberon is the return of forgotten logic: nature that thinks sideways, time that folds, voice that sings in dreams.
👁️ Not a God, but Treated Like One
The Druids see Oberon as a deity. Protocol sees it as a threat. The player? You’re caught in between.
But Oberon never asks for followers. It never issues commandments.
It doesn’t want worship.
It wants nothing.
And that’s why it terrifies everyone.
A god that doesn’t care is more frightening than one that punishes.
A power that doesn’t judge can’t be reasoned with.
🧠 Liminality as Horror
Liminal means in-between. Threshold. Borderland.
Oberon exists in every threshold:
-
Between body and mutation.
-
Between technology and ritual.
-
Between sanity and revelation.
It’s not just the cause of transformation — it is transformation.
When people hear Oberon, they don’t hear words. They hear suggestion, distortion, memory. It communicates in pressure and presence, not language.
You never get to “understand” Oberon.
You just slowly realize you’ve been inside it the whole time.
🧟 The Dead Walk, But So Does Time
Oberon warps more than flesh. It warps reality’s tempo.
-
Characters lose hours in a blink.
-
Landscapes repeat.
-
Ghosts bleed into physics.
You start to question whether the red phone is real — or if it’s part of Oberon’s influence. You ask if your amnesia is natural — or curated.
Is the world decaying, or just looping?
Are you the protagonist, or another echo walking the same path?
Oberon doesn’t answer.
Because it is the question.
🔮 Cosmic Horror, But Local
We often compare beings like Oberon to Lovecraftian “eldritch” things — unknowable cosmic forces.
But that’s not quite right here.
Oberon isn’t cosmic. It’s parochial. Intimate. Local.
-
It roots in hedgerows.
-
It seeps into cattle.
-
It whispers to midwives and meteorologists alike.
It’s not the vast horror of the void.
It’s the horror of a haunted British field, where something ancient is growing from the ashes of modernity — and no one can stop it.
📖 You Can’t Kill a Threshold
The red phone says:
“Oberon must die.”
But how do you kill a concept? A liminal space?
You don’t.
Because Oberon was never alive.
It was already here.
It was just waiting for the bomb to blow the doors off.
No comments:
Post a Comment