Fallout 3 eases you into its world particularly gently. Your initial exposure to its post-apocalyptic nuclear future is through the filter of a prologue within a sealed shelter, snapshots of a childhood that slowly clue you in to the full picture. It’s a very smart approach to the same kind of player-built character as its RPG predecessors, including Bethesda’s previous big hit The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which it visibly shares a lot of systems and detail with (it’s slightly harder to get over-encumbered). Oblivion kept you underground before showing you its full world, too, but it had you as an unknown stranger in order to free up your choice. How much better to explain the blank slate through being a literal child, and have you select your approach through picture books and standardised testing, all with a satirical edge.
Even before you inevitably leave the confines of Vault 101 you’re embroiled in violence, hacking and betrayal, and on the outside things only get worse. There are many things out there to kill you, from ugly mutated animals to groups of raider humans to bulked up Super Mutants with equally bulked up guns. Survival is a matter of picking battles and of getting to grips with the pseudo-turn-based VATS combat system, which generally proves a lot more powerful than going real-time, and has dramatic camera angles and pinball sound effects to emphasise as much.
The harshness only increases once you start trying to recover from battle. Your specific body parts can get so broken you need to use your precious medical supplies to fix them without increasing your HP. Outside of medicine you can turn to food and drink, but it’s all riddled with radiation and every bite of dog meat and slurp of Nuka-Cola is a gamble with the prospect of radiation sickness. There are items that provide you with broader enhancements including radiation resistance – Rad-X for that one – but take them a few times and you might find you become addicted. There is frequently a dark comic timing to the escalating, compounding ways the world fucks you up.
The grimness of the places you spend time in is similarly relentless. Video games being rendered in shades of grey and brown and the occasional gory red was hardly a rarity around the late ‘00s, but Fallout 3 makes more of it than anything else I can think of. It’s not some carefully torn picture of destroyed beauty, but one where the beauty has been obliterated and decay has long since set in. Everywhere you turn is rubble and grime and horrific gobs of dead body, with just its retro-futuristic computer monitor green-screen UI to set it off. The atmosphere is an oppressive one, producing the kind of tension that makes you jump at any sudden change. Even if the sudden nightmarish skittering sound turns out to have just been produced by knocking over an abandoned shopping trolley.
Moving around, even further limitations lead interestingly to something appealing. As you set off after your vanished father (played by Liam Neeson and therefore inseparable in my mind from Ponyo’s dad), you are directed to a series of faraway places. Locations and directions get marked on your map, but it’s a long way from Oblivion’s open space full of fields and secrets. Collapsed buildings and twisted piles frequently block off most of the ways to go above ground, but there is an alternative in the metro system, an interconnected warren of tunnels and stations full of more nasties.
Each trip underground is a matter of careful preparation, map-reading, eking out ammo, and hoping that resources will stretch far enough to get you the unknown distance to an exit. On getting there, there’s not just the heightened joy of survival, but joy in discovery and seeing how all these places fit together. Despite the immense tonal differences, the confinement to defined routes put me in mind of Pokémon Red, and it does a similarly great job of making moving from A to B appealing. Plus, I suppose, there is an implied shared starting point: all kids leave home some day, even if there’s no TV to say so.
The world you leave into and make your way around isn’t just any world, but a future version of Washington D.C. complete with familiar landmarks. It is the way of post-apocalyptic fiction to comment on the past and present, and the game’s wasteland is a specifically American one, with old-timey patriots on the radio and guns absolutely everywhere. It takes you through museums and monuments but uses a relatively light touch when it comes to the mistakes and downfalls of the previous society. It’s more interested in what humanity might come up with in its place, and in the consequences of the destruction rather than its process. I appreciated that despite some similarities in themes, this makes it basically the opposite of Bioshock.
The wasteland has many things to do and small mercies to help support (or to snuff out to your own benefit), so many that I probably didn’t do more than scratch the surface in my time with it. More than any of the possibilities or even the exploration, though, just being there felt meaningful in a rare kind of way. The silences and spaces leave a lot to fill in, and the limits to the signs of life leave those left with a particular kind of dignity. It’s not just the crumbling Washington Monument that feels like a monument, and Fallout 3 gives emotional weight to just witnessing what was.
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