I once stumbled upon Fallout in the 90s by sheer luck. Don't look at my time, I still know how to solve its quests and game its systems. If this is your first rodeo, add another 10-50 hours of figuring things out or trying a genocide run. And, for your sake, leave the difficulty dials alone. Fallout doesn't hold your hand, yet it's sensible for an old title. But let's rip some band-aids first. The game doesn't hold up in all places (didn't know about Fallout FIXT patch, dammit). Make notes and save in different slots! Expect broken dialogues, journal entries, quests, annoying bugs and alt+tab crashes. Besides, it's the kind of game where a sarcastic remark during an innocent conversation might lead to a brawl with a town full of people, their dogs, and their... Hold your horses, cowboy! Child-killing got cut by Bethesda. That's all they did... Hey, some of these brats carried grenades, alright?

Welp, no way but up from here! On October 23, 2077, a global nuclear war between the US and China defiled the planet, laying waste to civilization. One century later, you emerge. A Vault Dweller, born and raised in an advanced fallout shelter under the mountains of Southern California, Vault 13. You're not the Chosen One, just a goof who got the short end of a stick, tasked with obtaining a new water chip for the alma mater. Akin to a lost house cat, you're now free to find your own trouble in the bumf%ck nowhere. What shall become of you is to be defined by your ways with words and guns in relation to the many tribes of new Californians. A bunch of ruthless and rude madmen who use bottle caps as currency! See, in their world, the nuclear night is young. What's a century to half-life? The communal nightmare is still an open wound.

Fallout stuffs it chock full of clever homages and the joys of violent existentialism. Throwing together Dr Strangelove and Mad Max, fusing Day of the Triffids with Monty Python, it soaked up every drop of popular culture and spat it in our faces. Stylistically, Fallout is a post-apocalyptic Spaghetti Western set in a retro-future. Its prairies and canyons are a morbid eye candy. Smooth animations, great sprites, quality renders, and detailed backgrounds only punctuate the surrounding desolation. It sounds the part. Mark Morgan's music adds a sting to the bleak appeal, reflecting the scorched barrens dessecated by famine and blight. Poetically Jungian writing follows suit by driving heartbreaking narratives across a radioactive world while posing ethical dilemmas concerning the nature of mankind and death.

At that, Fallout is on pace with a movie, which always distinguished it from other CRPGs. There aren't that many personal quests or dialogue branches, but characters and morbidly wacky conundrums shine bright without outstaying their welcome. You can usually solve and create all problems in any given town in a matter of one or two hours like in an action flick. And it's all about you looking badass in a starring role, even your companions are but temporary sidekicks. These redshirts can be memorable, however, they also can't be directly controlled, so their stupid ass eats a burst of lead from someone's SMG point-blank before you know it. But hey, never refuse an offer to join! You can legally shoot any party member in the eyes and loot the corpse.

"Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?"

We're talking serious pacing in a game that has a turn-based combat system with Action Points at its core! Combat goes by quite fast most of the time. However, if a fight breaks out in a crowded place, you'd have to wait for every junkie in the vicinity to make a move. Go boil a kettle, save your nerves for the dicey rolls. Devastating crits, misses, and brutal takedowns with gory animations also apply to you in all of their isometric glory. You'll be slaughtered by people, rats, horrifying Deathclaws, and all kinds of abominable Cronenbergs. Blast their arms off, shoot them in the nuts, watch them drop to the ground squirming. Location-based damage allows you to put your victims in a world of pain before putting them out of their misery.

Now, spread that grim jam on top of iconic armour and guns of all types and sizes. At first, it would be hard to imagine anything louder than a .14mm. Then you'll find That Gun! A .223 hand cannon, which RIPS. And there's so much more. Pick a pulse grenade, a Molotov, or even a throwing knife - they all work in capable hands. Good old pistols, SMGs, and rifles are reliable, but it's not on until you hear Gatling miniguns singing rhapsodies over the violent parades on the streets of ruined cities. Where laughing mutants burn each other with flamethrowers and tear bodies apart using Ripper electric blades, power fists, and super-sledges. Living a dream! The spectacle is flavoured with a pinch of vivid text descriptions: "It knocked her over like a bad blind date", "his eyes popped like overripe grapes".

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. progression system in place wasn’t designed to give you "a balanced experience", it's here to deliver all of the above while also providing all the hilarious ways dialogs and ending cards can go. This thing is the bomb! Don’t be overwhelmed by its red herrings. It merely teases you to break the game and have a good time. S.P.E.C.I.A.L. involves several main things: Karma, stats, skills, and the most fun part - diverse traits and perks, basically passive abilities. You pick a perk every few levels from a list or receive freebies for certain in-world actions. Those aren’t always positive! Say, not everyone likes a graverobber. Your Karma goes up or down, depending on the ways you interact with the game’s world and often defines how badly certain characters or whole factions want to kick your ass.

"That's right. I've killed women and children. I've killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill."

Morality is the spice of it all. You can make a man angry or drive a whole city to extinction. I role-played as a good guy for a long time but kept salivating over the fun lines I can't say, the crimes I can't commit. Since then, I aced a murderhobo turbo-junkie, a boxer porn star, a prostitute slaver with a heart of gold. I made badass entries, used my friends as meat shields, lied through my teeth, and doomed whole communities! I saw that one can play sub-optimally and still find a way. Say, raiders hold a hostage you need and they're too strong. You can bluff your way through bloodlessly or have enough Unarmed to beat their leader in a duel. Maybe just inject yourself with two doses of Psycho and slip a fistful of dynamite into his pocket? Or come back with a Stealth Boy device, turn invisible and gaslight the leader by pretending to be a ghost! Try, die, experiment with drugs, find workarounds. That's the sh#t!

Fallout is as much about freedom as it's about war. Lurking in its shadow, you are sometimes a mediator, sometimes an instigator, always a profiteer and a stranger by design. What a sandbox! A grave world to quench your God complex. Walk the path of a messiah, be the scourge of the wastes, end up a junky, or a grifter's grifter. Each lonesome road you take shall stay imprinted on your mind. Fallout's influence never goes away. It's the son of the regiment, a by-product of a pop-cultural orgy, bearing its progenitors' genius as well as their flaws. Sure, it coughs up blood nowadays, but it still has the power to slip into your dreams. Don't let some petty grudges take over when dealing with a marvel that turned the tables on the whole industry. Of course, it isn't perfect. It's janky, it's vulgar, and it bleeds over everything. Because Fallout is quintessential punk.

My curator Big Bad Mutuh

SIGNALIS applies a classic mix of German and Japanese to its oldschool anime aesthetics reminiscent of Ghost in the Shell. It's a sombre sci-fi full of loving homages to Lovecraft, shivering monstrosities from Silent Hill, and System Shock's synthetic horror of self. It draws from many playbooks, but there's no unerring formula holding it together. Dedication is the only adhesive, the rest is ether. Prepare to get spellbound by a backtracking-intensive contraption performing on par with Resident Evil. Extending game-wide, a captivating logistical loop at the base of all mechanics magnifies your perception of places and things, being a philosopher's stone that turns scarcity and nuisances into high-class entertainment, a romance of desperation and ruin.

To start with the little things, the UI is great, especially the map that you can rely on. Until you can't. For controls, I used keyboard and mouse, which lend themselves to the task perfectly, making the game feel like an intentionally handicapped SHMUP. The default keybinds actually make sense, imagine that! I liked the look of the CRT filter, too bad it also makes fonts barely readable. But the mix of high definition and crunchy pixels is appealing without enhancers. Cute touches like visual glitches make it seem like the world is torn at the seams while lo-fi POV sequences give off a vibe of a VHS Horror game. Isometric landscapes aren't that varied or picturesque, but crispy shadows playing in the lights as well as striking colour accents of kitschy propaganda posters liven things up.

The levels themselves are well-structured, sporting complex looping layouts. To cruise their depths, you take control of a sophisticated android, or Replika, named Elster. She's looking for a woman, her ex-commander, in the mines and corporate infrastructure around them on the planet Leng situated on the outskirts of a system inhabited by the nation of Eusan. Their "wonderful Nation" is at war with the Empire. None of these sides is a light side, it's more of a Sadako vs. Kayako engagement. Eusan's regime used to be monstrous long before its subjects turned into ones. Cameras all over the place follow you silently, enforcing the feeling of being under ever-present totalitarian surveillance. You'll find all the lore in pompous pamphlets and sad diaries, most of which are censored in one way or another. It's a joy to get familiar with, the precise writing delivers a world of misery to your doorstep.

The game starts building its unsettling world subtly even before introducing its first enemy, quietly slipping under your skin. You'll be soaking in contemplative cutscenes and bits of dialogue with rare characters, their tone ranging from melancholic to desperate. Going up against a devastated world of mad cyborgs, you can barely see what they represent visually. Just silhouettes of shivering horrors in the dark. Listen, let the sharp sound design complete the picture in your mind instead. It goes hard. From unnervingly quiet ambience to demonic screeching. The musical score is used sparsely to emphasise special moments and incite terror during combat encounters by blowing your ear drums out your ass. The shots shrill and the hits rip. It's satisfying to end their pain. Yours persists.

The real headache is deciding what to do with droves of different puzzle components taking up inventory space. Make sure to always have at least a couple of slots open for them. Puzzle-solving itself won't take much of your time or brain energy, yet it infallibly serves as a solid incentive to progress through the game. Local brain-teasers perfectly fit the genre's standards by not being too dastard or insultingly easy, keeping the tradition of mostly revolving around collecting stuff to slide into slots. SIGNALIS has struck a balance here, all that decision-making and problem-solving beget gratification. Another good design is the way it gives you gameplay hints, masquerading helpful advice as propaganda. Like that "no running in the hallways" poster telling you to be sneaky.

It goes further than that. The Rule of Six, one of the in-game laws, says that you can carry no more than 6 items on you, justifying a mechanic while showing private property as a privilege. This severe limitation can be remedied. Consider stepping into the unknown territory surveillance, don't drag health items and surplus ammo around, never hope to grab everything in one go. Dedicate separate runs with an empty bag to snatching everything that isn't nailed down and hauling it back to a save room. These greed trips that can go very wrong are part of the fun. Also, saving is free, so nobody stops you from abusing it. I admit that it dilutes the spiciness coming from gambling with your life, but the thrill of potentially losing a chunk of progress to the monstrosities still remains.

Those are rather slow, although, they strike rapidly and have a long reach, so it isn't easy to just avoid or bait their attacks. Elster can't evade fast and gets easily cornered in cramped spaces. She pushes nearby enemies away, but it does little when they're piling on her. However, screwing up is seldom lethal, our girl is made of titanium. And she's packing. Pistol, SMG, shotgun, rifle, revolver, a grenade-launching flare gun. All the classics. Ammo isn't even that scarce but killing is a temporary measure since enemies get up after a while. It's a long while, but this constant threat makes you think strategically, teaching to stay low and pick your fights. You can also use thermite to dispose of the most annoying corpses for good. These are rare moments of solidifying dominance and establishing a semblance of permanence. Burn, baby, burn.

To ensure that its convictions are feasible, SIGNALIS introduces an effective, if rudimentary, stealth system. If you keep your distance, you can slowly walk by the monsters when they're turned away. It's a reliable mechanic unless you get cocky. Clinging to the wall, you can sneak past that neighbour's poodle for years, it's all bark and no bite. But you know these bastards, one day it's gonna go crazy and try to taste your flesh. Similarly, here you may walk back and forth unnoticed forever, but forget to turn the flashlight off just once and get chased by a crowd of eldritch androids while running low on ammo, then jump into a hole and get rekt by a boss. But this is probably the only way for one to kill you, those are easy when you catch on to their gimmicks.

Past the early game, I caught on to the game's Zen flow. Don't try to have it all, don't jump into holes unprepared, don't kill if you don't have to. My victims were the ones patrolling narrow passages or places I had to visit often. The rest gave me enough room to slip by. One can go through the whole thing with a minuscule body count. I spent my resources quite frivolously and wasted tons of ammo and health in panic romps, yet I was still left with some to spare at the end. Thus, I disagree with anyone claiming that the game doesn't provide enough sustenance. You should've seen my collection of healing sprays alone! But even when I died, losing progress, to circle back around more efficiently felt rewarding.

The same can be said about my experience at large. SIGNALIS is cyberpunk, biopunk... all the punks! Whatever happens, a strong underlying message of non-conformity is always present. The plot begins intentionally obfuscated but doesn't leave you hanging. It's an emotional story that eventually becomes crystal clear, at least after one of the normal endings I got. Akin to their counterparts in Silent Hill, each ending provides closure, albeit with a different aftertaste. "Taste" is the word here. Playing a game created by true connoisseurs of the genre was an exquisite treat.

My curator Big Bad Mutuh