Indie games inspired by Fallout are where the old wasteland spirit actually lives on mobile: Memory Wastes is a turn-based survival RPG about an amnesiac in a desert where every faction remembers history differently; ATOM RPG is an isometric CRPG set after a 1986 nuclear exchange that names Fallout as its inspiration on its own store page; NEO Scavenger is the most merciless scavenging sim ever squeezed onto a phone; 60 Seconds! Atomic Adventure turns the fallout shelter into dark comedy; Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a free, open-source survival monster of a game; and Ashworld is a one-man pixel wasteland you can drive across. Six games, six small teams, and not a single energy bar between them.
Bethesda's own mobile entry, Fallout Shelter, is a vault-management idle game — fine for what it is, but it is not the thing people miss. What people miss is the feeling of walking out of a door into a dead world with eight bullets and a bad leg. That feeling is now an indie speciality, and the games below are the ones that get closest to it on Android and iPhone. If you want the mainstream end of this genre, our zombie survival collection covers it; this page is for the small studios.
How we picked
This collection was put together by Lisa, chief editor at MadFox, with our CEO Ilya Azarov, who played the games on his own phone. We looked for four things that made the original Fallout what it was: a post-nuclear or post-collapse world with a history you dig up rather than get told; survival that can actually kill you; RPG systems — skills, gear, factions, dialogue — rather than a single upgrade tree; and a developer small enough to answer their own email. Everything below was checked on Google Play, the App Store and Steam on September 22, 2026, and every price, rating and install figure comes from that day. We played Memory Wastes before writing a word about it, and it earned the opening spot.
1. Memory Wastes
Memory Wastes opens the way Fallout 1 opened: you are outside, you are nobody, and the world has forgotten more than it remembers. Your survivor wakes with no memory in the Shore Wastes, a sepia desert of settlements strung together by dashed lines on a hand-drawn map — Proving Grounds, Toxic Desert, Bone Yard, Black Market, El Dorado, Ash Temple, the Archive. Everything is turn-based and menu-driven, and that is the point: travel costs days, days cost food and medicine, and a journey of five days with 27 rations is a decision, not a loading screen. Four numbers govern your life — Life, Sickness, Food, Medicine — and sickness is the one that gets you, because it is patient and the desert is patient with it.
The hook is the history. Every faction has its own version of what happened before the catastrophe, and you assemble the truth out of records, broken messages and data fragments you find in the field, knowing that the Archivist, the Lieutenant and the man who calls himself King will each tell you a different story about the same ruin. Between the reading there is trade, quests from a handful of survivors, gear, skill progression and turn-based fights against mutants, machines and other people. Death is permanent for that survivor — the run ends — but not everything you achieved disappears with them, which is what makes a second attempt feel like progress rather than punishment. There is no fixed run length: the developers told us the first hour takes you from picking a survivor and finding your feet at the Workshop out into the Wastes, and after that a cautious player lasts far longer than one who goes looking for fights.
Our CEO played the pre-release build and came back with exactly the reaction the developers were aiming for:
From the very first frame the game dropped me into nostalgia for the Fallout series: bleak, lifeless wasteland landscapes, hardcore survival on scarce resources, quests from the few survivors left. What I liked is the spirit of the old hardcore RPGs, now in mobile form, right in my pocket. I consider myself an experienced player of survival RPGs, and in the first five minutes my character died of his wounds fighting giant sand worms — and that produced a wow effect of real challenge. I wanted to go again and push further through the wasteland locations, to collect better gear and learn the story of this world. A very unusual game, one that stands out sharply against the typical casual mobile titles.
— Ilya Azarov, CEO, Mad Fox Games
The game is out: the official release date was September 30, 2026 (midnight Madrid time), the date the developers used in all of their announcements, including the Steam and Epic Games Store versions. When we checked on September 30, Memory Wastes was already live on Steam (free to play), Google Play and the App Store (version 1.0 appeared there on September 29). It is free to play, with localisations in English, Spanish, Chinese and Russian, and the developers run an open subreddit where they answer questions directly.
Interesting concept · Android, iPhone and PC · free to play · turn-based · permadeath · small studio
ATOM RPG does not hint at its ancestry, it declares it: the Steam page describes the game as "a post-apocalyptic indie game, inspired by classic CRPGs: Fallout, Wasteland, Deus Ex, Baldur's Gate and many others." The premise is the road not taken — in 1986 the war between the Soviet Union and the Western Bloc ended in mutual nuclear bombings, both superpowers burned, and you are one of the survivors sent out from the ATOM bunker network into a wasteland of collective farms, bandit camps and half-working Soviet technology.
Mechanically it is the real thing: isometric exploration, turn-based combat on action points, a full stat and skill build, hundreds of items, crafting, dialogue trees with actual consequences, companions who argue with you, and a difficulty curve that assumes you read the descriptions. The mobile port is not a trimmed spin-off — it is the whole 2018 PC game with touch controls, which means dozens of hours and a text volume that will make you grateful for a tablet. Sold once, played forever: $8.49 on Google Play, $9.99 on the App Store, no ads, no in-app currency. Google Play shows more than 100,000 installs and a 4.0 rating, the App Store sits at 4.3 from 221 ratings, and ATENT GAMES was still shipping updates in August 2026.
Fair warning: the UI is a PC UI wearing a phone, and on a small screen the inventory can be fiddly. Everyone who stays past the first hour stops noticing.
No ads, ever · Android and iPhone · $8.49 / $9.99, one-time · turn-based · 60+ hours · small studio
You wake in a cryosleep pod, damp, disoriented, with a large "05" painted on the floor beside you, and something screaming down the hallway. That is NEO Scavenger's opening, and it never gets friendlier. Daniel Fedor's game is the hardest survival RPG on this list and possibly the most influential: a hex map of a ruined Michigan, a turn for every move, and an inventory that is a physical grid where a length of rope, a plastic bag and a broken bottle can be combined into something that keeps you alive one more night.
There is no health bar. There are individual injuries, infections, hypothermia, thirst, hunger and a body that reports each of them separately, and most deaths come from a small untreated thing rather than a monster. Fights are resolved through a deliberate menu of intentions — hide, flee, threaten, strike — where running away is usually the correct answer. Skills you pick at character creation genuinely change what you can do, from Botany to Trapping to the ability to read. Death is permanent and the save file goes with it.
On mobile it is free to download as an unlimited-time demo, with a single in-app purchase to unlock the full game and, importantly, saving. Google Play shows over 100,000 installs at 4.1, the App Store 4.3 from 293 ratings. It is also the oldest game here: the mobile build has not been updated since November 2017, so treat it as a preserved classic rather than a living service, and try the free demo before you pay.
Interesting concept · Android and iPhone · free demo, one purchase to unlock · turn-based · permadeath · solo developer
Robot Gentleman describe their game as "a dark comedy atomic adventure of scavenge and survival," which undersells how stressful the first sixty seconds are. The siren goes off, and you have one minute to sprint through a collapsing suburban house in a wobbly first-person scramble, grabbing soup cans, a gas mask, an axe, a radio and — ideally — your wife, son and daughter, then throw everything down the shelter hatch before the blast arrives. Whatever you forgot is gone for good.
Then the real game starts, and it is a diary. Underground, in a cramped concrete room, you ration soup, send family members out into the irradiated world on errands that may not end well, deal with mutant cockroaches, unwanted visitors and slowly fraying minds, and decide who gets the last tin. The 1950s cartoon art keeps it funny right up to the moment it isn't. Runs are short, failure is the norm, and there are multiple endings worth chasing, which is why people replay it for years.
It is a paid game with no ads and no in-app purchases: $3.99 on both stores. Google Play shows more than a million installs at 3.7 — the low score is mostly device-compatibility complaints, so check it runs on yours — while the App Store sits at 4.3 from nearly 2,900 ratings. If you like it, the studio's space-station sequel 60 Parsecs! is the same design in orbit.
No ads, ever · Android and iPhone · $3.99 one-time · short runs · small studio
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is what happens when a post-apocalyptic survival game is developed in the open for over a decade by people with no deadline. It is free, open source, and quietly one of the deepest games ever put on a phone: a procedurally generated dead America where you can butcher a moose, build a solar-powered deathmobile out of a minivan and a welder, learn martial arts from a book, install cybernetics, brew antibiotics and still die because you forgot to treat a bite.
The frame is turn-based and roguelike — you wake with hazy memories of the world unravelling, and everything after that is your problem. Zombies are the surface layer; underneath are giant insects, killer robots and things the wiki does not prepare you for. The official Android build supports tilesets, sound, localisation and mods, works with a touchscreen or a physical keyboard, auto-saves when the app loses focus, and is save-compatible with the desktop version, so you can start a character on your laptop and continue it on the bus.
Google Play shows over 100,000 installs at 4.1 and the game costs nothing, with no ads and no purchases of any kind. Two caveats: the stable Android release on Google Play was last refreshed in November 2023, and there is no iOS version, so this one is Android-only. The interface is dense and the tutorial is thin — budget an evening for the controls and the rest of your life for the game.
No ads, ever · Android only · free and open source · turn-based · permadeath optional · community-developed
Ashworld is the outlier here and the reason the list is worth scrolling to the end. Pascal Bestebroer, who works alone as OrangePixel, built an open-world survival adventure set a few hundred years from now in the "rage-lands", where water and food are rare and the nights belong to things you do not want to meet. It is real-time rather than turn-based, chunky top-down pixel art, and it moves: you drive cars with genuinely different handling between settlements, raid buildings and underground caverns, take story and side missions from survivors, and fight with a weapon list that runs from boomerangs and chainsaws to rocket launchers and plasma rifles.
Every world is procedurally generated by OrangePixel's own engine, so the map you learn is yours alone, and the game is built for short mobile sessions with checkpoint saves rather than an hour of setup. It is paid and clean: $7.49 on Google Play, $3.99 on the App Store, no ads, no purchases. Apple made it a Game of the Day and TouchArcade put it in their best iPhone games of 2017.
The numbers are the honest part. Google Play shows about 5,000 installs at 4.3 after an update in December 2025; the App Store rating is a weaker 3.3 from 71 ratings, largely from players who expected a slower survival sim and got an arcade one. Go in for the driving and the wasteland mood, not for inventory management.
Interesting concept · Android and iPhone · $7.49 / $3.99 one-time · real-time · procedurally generated · solo developer
Closest to the feeling of Fallout 1 on a phone: Memory Wastes, then ATOM RPG. · Closest to Fallout's writing and quest design: ATOM RPG. · Hardest: NEO Scavenger, with Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead right behind it. · Best for ten-minute sessions: 60 Seconds! Atomic Adventure. · Best free option: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead on Android, Memory Wastes on both platforms. · Best if you want movement and not menus: Ashworld.
The Mad Fox team's take
Fallout's real inheritance is not the retro-futurism, it is being allowed to die stupidly. Memory Wastes killed me in five minutes and I restarted immediately; NEO Scavenger and ATOM RPG have been doing that to people for years.
— Ilya Azarov, CEO
About the indie section
Our indie section exists to give small studios the attention the store charts do not. If you make a post-apocalyptic RPG, a survival game or anything else for iPhone or Android and you would like us to look at it, write to hello@madfox.dev with a store link and a few words about what makes the game yours. We play everything ourselves.
FAQ
Is there an official Fallout game on Android and iPhone?
Yes, but only one of a very different kind: Fallout Shelter from Bethesda, a free vault-management game. The mainline, walk-into-the-wasteland Fallout games have never been released for phones, which is why the indie titles on this page exist.
Which of these games are turn-based like the original Fallout?
Memory Wastes, ATOM RPG, NEO Scavenger and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead are all turn-based. 60 Seconds! mixes a frantic real-time minute with a turn-by-turn shelter diary, and Ashworld is fully real-time.
Which ones are free?
Memory Wastes is free to play on all platforms, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is free and open source on Android, and NEO Scavenger is a free unlimited demo with one purchase to unlock saving and the full game. ATOM RPG, 60 Seconds! and Ashworld are paid once, with no ads and no in-app purchases.
Which of them work offline?
ATOM RPG, NEO Scavenger, 60 Seconds!, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and Ashworld are single-player games that play without a connection. Memory Wastes is a single-player game as well; check the store listing for the current requirements at launch.
Do any of these have permadeath?
Memory Wastes and NEO Scavenger both end the run when your character dies; in Memory Wastes not everything you achieved is lost with the survivor. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is a roguelike at heart but lets you choose a softer world setting. ATOM RPG and Ashworld use ordinary saves.
Are these games suitable for children?
No. All six deal with violence, injury and death in a post-nuclear setting, and ATOM RPG, NEO Scavenger and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead include strong themes and graphic descriptions. Check the age rating on your store before buying for a younger player.