After the Fall

**After the Fall** is an action shooter game developed and published by Vertigo Games, and the game for which this wiki community revolves around. The game was released for early access on Steam, Oculus, and PlayStation VR platforms simultaneously on December 9, 2021. *After the Fall* is set in an alternate universe to ours where an ice age began in the 1980s, and undead mutants known as snowbreed have driven humanity underground to survive. Players take on the role of one of four Runners in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles, CA tasked with finding supplies and harvesting material from snowbreed.

## Gameplay

*After the Fall* is a first-person virtual reality shooter with live service features. Players navigate fully 3D locales using their preferred method of locomotion to move around, and fight hostiles using guns that they are able to aim with motion-tracked controllers. Successful play is rewarded with a currency called harvest which they can trade for different weapons, attachments, and cosmetics. The objective differs depending on the game mode, and *After the Fall* supports both co-operative/player-versus-environment (PvE) play and competitive/player-versus-player (PvP) play modes.

On launch, the game shipped with Harvest Run and Team Deathmatch game modes, with a development roadmap teasing more game modes to come.

### Harvest Run

The Harvest Run mode is the core of the game and what the game's story is centered around. A squad of four runners are dispatched to a harvest site on a mission to fight their way through hordes of common and mutated snowbreed to collect "juice" from the killed undead. Along the way, they may find handguns, booster shots, pipe bombs and other gear on the remains of frozen runners or hidden in locked drawers, as well as floppy disks with weapon upgrade blueprints, and keycards which grant access to supply caches. Each mission contains a "boss fight" sequence against a smasher in an arena-style area, and all players are guaranteed to be given one floppy disk with a predetermined quality level based on the selected difficulty.

### Team Deathmatch

Team Deathmatch in the Tundradome consists of up to 8 players split into two teams of up to 4 with the objective to kill as many respawning members of the enemy team as possible before 10 minutes pass. For balance reasons, all players are forced to use the same locomotion mode. All players spawn with a service pistol; other weapons, pipe bombs, and booster shots can be found scattered throughout the map in predetermined locations. All weapons are their unmodified base variants with an ammo counter. If a player is killed, they drop all of the gear they were carrying and respawn in a random location after 5 seconds.

## Synopsis

During the 1980s, an ice age began due to the overproduction of pharmaceuticals. In order to adapt, experiments were done to develop ways for make humans resilient against the cold, and this resulted in the creation of booster shots which gave people resistance to extreme temperatures. Unfortunately, production couldn't keep up with demand, and the effects of withdrawal from the boosters caused people to mutate and become feral.

### Plot

Spoilers Ahead**WARNING:** The following section contains spoilers for *After the Fall*'s story.
The game's events are set in 2000, 16 years after the fall of civilization. The player assumes the role of a lone survivor somewhere in the ruins of Los Angeles, who finds an abandoned safe room in a downed airplane and gets it operational. Another survivor makes contact through a radio, initially looking for a "Johnny," but when it's clear that this survivor isn't who they're looking for, the man on the radio helps the survivor get equipped using the gear in the safe room, warning them about increased snowbreed activity in the area. Outside, the survivor finds Johnny frozen solid, and is set upon by a horde of snowbreed including a juggernaut who freezes them. As the juggernaut begins to walk away, a snowcat comes barreling in, running over the juggernaut, and the man from the radio emerges with a booster shot, reviving the survivor and urging them to get in the snowcat.

The survivor is brought to The Line - which is explained to be an old metro station turned into a hub - and is directed to speak to Luna Gonzales for direction. The old man who rescued the survivor is identified as Frank, and the survivor is also introduced to Harry, one of Luna's researchers, who explains how to purchase and customize weapons as well as how to enlist for Harvest Runs to collect "juice," which is used in creating the booster shots that prevent survivors from freezing. Luna directs the survivor, now a rookie runner, to enlist in a series of Harvest Runs: Skid Row to learn the ropes, Chinatown and Union Tower to search for missing runner groups, and Quarantine Zone to show the rookie a harvest site with a high yield of harvest. During these runs, the runners and their support team notice and remark on aspects of the snowbreed and sprawl that seem to be changing, such as sprawl tentacles growing larger than they've ever seen before, and how sprawl have begun mutating to explode.

Upon returning from the Quarantine Zone and speaking to Luna, tremors shake The Line, and radio chatter between Frank and Luna reveals that there's a lot of activity in the skyscraper on top of the line, and that a lot of sprawl tentacles have taken the Relay Tower atop the skyscraper offline. Luna directs the rookie to get up there quickly to bring the comms back online, and they assemble a runner group and ascends the skyscraper. As the squad fights its way up, Frank keeps them updated on the situation on the ground - he's lost contact with Luna and last he knew, The Line was being attacked from all sides. At the top, the squad finds the relay tower completely covered with massive sprawl tentacles, and as they begin to clear them, they're set upon by a smasher which retreats before dying and reveals that it's able to regenerate itself and summon back the sprawl that the squad disperses. after a long and intense fight, the smasher is eventually killed, and that seems to cause the sprawl to disperse and the other snowbreed to retreat from the Line. Back underground, Luna says that everything is back online thanks to them, and she and Frank express their gratitude to the rookie.

1. ↑ The Cinematic Trailer has a title card that reads "LA, 2004, 20 years after the fall". It follows that 16 years after the fall would be the year 2000.