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

World War I is a perfect fit for the survival horror setting. For the most part, a soldier trembled in a trench under artillery fire while his feet went rot. You are private Henri Clement, a resilient man and a loyal friend. You begin in the trenches, surrounded by sorrowful sights of the no man's land. You fight, you fall, you wake up alone with amnesia. In a place compared to which the war overhead will soon seem serene. Reading your own notes doesn't inspire confidence. The same goes for a pile of burnt corpses in the nearby closet. Burnt and mutilated, as if one of these things isn't enough. It's so cruel that your freedom is so close you can practically reach it with your hand! Just beyond that impassable landslide. All you need is to find some dynamite and a detonator. Sounds simple, but there's quite a conundrum that will force you to solve problems under pressure in a dark labyrinth where a Behemoth from Heroes of Might & Magic 3 runs the show.

Make yourself at home in these gloomy corridors. This game is every survivor horror fan's favourite discomfort food. With a pair of sweaty palms for dessert. The oppressiveness spreads to the elaborate control scheme Amnesia games use for environmental interactions. Pushing and pulling objects around isn't just another way to deepen one's immersion. Wait till it catches you in panic with your hand motions unreliably clumsy! Your WWI gear is jank as well. Take the noisy flashlight that you have to rev up or your tiny bag that quickly gets crammed with bulky tools. On the bright side, your stash is limitless. Just drop items on the ground, object permanence is a thing. Sad to say, you can only look at the maps on the walls in some rooms, not take one with you. But I found memorising the layout of the bunker an easy task. It's surprisingly varied and harbours morbid events. Fear is the best teacher.

The bunker could look plain and we would allow it, but the artists and sound designers had a different idea in mind. The weather-beaten colours reminded me of Wayne Barlowe's works. The lighting is creatively hand-placed so that you could back away from your own long shadow and blow yourself up on a booby trap. I loved all the fine detail: the dust in the air, the torn bodies and dark blood smeared on surfaces. It's a lively place filled with grim stories and its soundscape instils paranoia. The ruckus never stops, your every action seems too loud. You crawl around, anxiously listening to the creaking of old support beams, your echoing steps, bottles rolling on the ground, the rasping of the flashlight, and the rattling of your teeth. The dirt crumbles, following the tremors from distant explosions. Meanwhile, the creature constantly shambles behind the walls and above the ceiling, stomping and wheezing... Dad?

You return from a raid to your hideout, scarred for life, with two rags and a stick. Then carefully plan a route to your next heart attack. You scavenge for ammo, fuel, inventory upgrades, healing and quest items, explosives. It's all about bleeding for your little victories. Exploring smarter, not louder. Expanding your territory by finding tools that allow you to unlock shortcuts and new passages. Further and further away from safety. It's a clever way to raise the difficulty and make you feel like entering outer space every time you undock. It never becomes a "You're locked in here with me!" situation, the stalker isn't a joke. I only called it Harambe-ass Karen motherf#cker once or twice. It never lets you hustle in peace, your trips often get out of hand in a cavalcade of chaos. However, its malicious presence begets fear, not annoyance. The creature wears a grotesquely bloated face and its howling is deafening. Its sadistic rage is fuelled by more than just hunger. Its behavioural patterns aren't sophisticated, yet they don't feel stale.

And it made cutlets out of my ass until the very end. After a few violent encounters, it was easy to suspend my disbelief and accept that the necessity for stealth is well-founded. You can't compete with the behemoth. Hell, you can barely compete with the rats! Granted, an average bunker rat is as big as a dog. A lone one would flee, but they are a menace in groups. Try to abstain from the alluring prospect of limping around wounded. They smell your blood, chasing you around, staring with their glowing eyes as you stumble in the dark. You can lure them away with meat, but it's a temporary measure. You know what isn't? Grenades. Those are good for everything, including blasting through doors or scaring away the monster. After getting your hands on the lighter, you'll also find that Molotovs and torches work as advertised. And don't forget the tear gas! It helps to cut the stalker off briefly.

It enables your agency in many ways. One can spend only so much time sitting in a wardrobe, clutching a revolver and breathing heavily. The game knows that, so you can't always sit it out. If you make a sound in the same place and hide there twice in a row - it will maul you. Be more inventive. Sometimes the bastard won't go away easily and you'd have to poke your head out to make your way past it in the dark, whispering prayers to every god you know. Being hunted by it always feels tense with how it forces you to act. It's better to try and leg it or sneak around than be paralysed with fear. It's a good thing that the creature plays fair. To boot, it makes lots of noise, the lights blink and Henri's heart starts pounding when it lurks nearby. You can trust these signs. But you can never be sure since it uses a net of tunnels, sprawling throughout the whole bunker, popping in and out at will. Always be ready to put up a fight. It's how boys become men.

Even men need friends. An electric generator is a good one to have. The lights help big time by allowing you to make less flashlight noise, but it also makes you feel naked. The creature still comes eventually, but now it can also see you better. It's a clever trade-off. You'll have to use the generator to accomplish certain goals either way. Fuel isn't exactly in short supply, so I eventually stopped trying to save it. Anything to keep that rascal off my back for longer. Other means to temporarily interrupt the hunt are even more wasteful. And there was no reason to overthink these matters anyway. Playing on Normal, I could've sponsored my own little war with everything I got out of the bunker by the end. That said, I still preferred to skulk in the dark because I'm a Scrooge who'd rather die than squander. My carbon footprint was minimal.

Once, I got caught off guard in the local chapel, a dead end! I heard it coming and had to improvise a hiding place out of a confession booth. Barely managed to patch myself up next the mutilated body of a priest. The beast can smell blood. It didn't find me this time. I waited out, then headed home. The fiend was right around the corner! It swept me off my feet, cutting some part of me open. Concussed, I somehow got up and ran downstairs, shot the lock off a metal door, shut it right in front of its face, gaining a second of advantage. Then took off, followed by its echoing roars. My heart was in my throat! I crawled back to the office on my last legs... but laden like a beast of burden. The stakes are high. You risk losing the haul to one rash decision. The Bunker thrives when it forces you to make them for survival. It's slow-paced yet its explosive power is immense when sh#t hits the fan. Dying is upsetting while returning in one piece feels orgasmic. I crave these contradictory sensations only true horror can provide. This game's design is clear-cut, scrupulous, and intoxicating. On top of it, it's a heartfelt little story with one cathartic climax!

My curator Big Bad Mutuh