This review contains plenty of spoilers.
I said in my Monster Hunter: World review that perhaps my next review should be Fallout.
So here we are.
There are three games I could start with.
Fallout 3.
Fallout: New Vegas.
Fallout 4.
I'm starting with Fallout 4.
The opening scene of Fallout 4 takes place at the earliest point in the timeline.
That seems like a reasonable place to begin.
I'll get to Fallout 3 and New Vegas eventually.
Probably.
I do still have actual horror games to review.
Anyway.
There is one thing I should probably establish first.
I don't personally read Fallout as simply a game about how terrible war is.
War is terrible.
I know.
Thank you.
And I don't really take War Never Changes to mean nothing more than:
"War is bad."
To me, it feels closer to the idea that the human desire to dominate, destroy and fight one another, along with all the misery that follows, hasn't changed very much at all.
The weapons change.
The world changes.
Human beings remain remarkably capable of ruining things.
That's roughly how I take it, anyway.
And this is entirely my own interpretation, but I've always found it difficult to look at Fallout without thinking about the history that came before it.
Two atomic bombs were used against cities during the Second World War.
Then came decades in which the possibility of nuclear war became a very real fear.
To me, Fallout feels like the sort of nightmare that could grow out of that cultural memory.
A world imagining what happens after the thing everyone spent so long being afraid of finally happens.
And what happens afterwards is horrible.
Some of that horror is built into the world itself.
Sometimes, though, it's considerably more immediate.
Once, I was simply following the railway in pursuit of Kellogg, trying to find my son.
Then a Yao Guai burst out of the bushes to my right.
If you've stuck mainly to the main quest, this may well be your first encounter with one.
I suspect the encounter was deliberately placed there.
It was an excellent jump scare.
I'm serious.
Very effective.
The wasteland teaches you another rule fairly quickly.
Don't trust strangers.
Most people you don't know seem to be thinking about robbing you, betraying you or finding some other way to make your life worse.
But then again, this is a wasteland.
Perhaps that's simply what surviving in one looks like.
And then there are the synth stories.
People disappear.
People come back different.
Nobody knows who might have been replaced.
Rumours spread among ordinary civilians.
The frightening part is that these aren't merely ghost stories.
Synth replacement is something that can actually happen.
There was also Covenant.
A surprisingly well-kept settlement.
Defences.
Houses.
People who seem relatively civilised.
It feels almost suspiciously normal.
And, of course, there is something deeply unpleasant underneath it.
That's one of the things I like about the horror in Fallout 4.
Sometimes the monster is obvious.
Sometimes the horror comes from meeting a perfectly ordinary person and wondering whether there is something wrong with them.
Finding a completely sane person in the Commonwealth can occasionally feel more difficult than finding a monster.
Most people seem to have gone slightly wrong somewhere.
The Minutemen are so comparatively normal that they almost seem bland and lacking in character by comparison.
Even Nick Valentine, an older-generation synth, is often a far more decent person than the actual humans around him.
I don't particularly like the Railroad.
They never really felt like a resistance movement to me.
More like a single-issue pressure group for synths.
That does not mean I hate synths.
Nick Valentine is my best friend.
I made plenty of synth friends in Far Harbor.
I helped them.
My own son is respected by synths.
Anyway.
I just don't particularly like Desdemona.
She comes across as arrogant and far too concerned with the interests of her own group.
I did, however, do enough work for the Railroad to get Ballistic Weave.
That was excellent.
I could dress my character properly, keep the outfit I actually wanted to wear and still have very good armour.
Fashion and protection.
Unfortunately, becoming increasingly difficult to kill also creates a problem.
Fallout 4 becomes less frightening.
This is where V.A.T.S. becomes one of the game's greatest strengths and, at the same time, one of its weaknesses as horror.
V.A.T.S. is fun.
It makes combat more satisfying and gives the player an enormous amount of control over a dangerous situation.
And that is precisely the problem.
Control tends to make things less frightening.
Without V.A.T.S., I think Fallout combat could have been considerably more horrific.
Super Mutant Suiciders are a good example.
A huge mutant carrying a Mini Nuke starts running directly towards you.
That's practically a chasing sequence.
And yes.
It is frightening.
Glowing Ones are excellent horror enemies too.
So are Mirelurk Kings.
Deathclaws are obviously frightening.
But personally?
Assaultrons and Sentry Bots frighten me considerably more.
I really don't like those things.
Then you start getting better equipment.
Better weapons.
Ballistic Weave.
Power Armour.
And if you spend enough time with the Brotherhood of Steel, you can wander around heavily armed and protected inside a walking metal suit.
The Commonwealth becomes considerably less frightening when you're that well equipped.
Of course, the Brotherhood of Steel are hardly the most normal people in the wasteland either.
None of the major factions really are.
Which brings me back to the Minutemen.
Preston Garvey.
He calls me General.
Very respectful.
Then he puts another location on my map and gives me more work.
Thank you, Preston.
There is surely no greater evil in the Commonwealth.
I'm joking.
He is still one of the more reasonable people here.
Settlement building also gave me another kind of anxiety that I actually enjoyed.
Every settlement exists in a world where hostile outsiders might turn up and attack it.
So I wanted proper defences.
Turrets.
Walls.
Armed settlers.
Preparation.
Making sure that the people living there wouldn't immediately die because I had wandered off somewhere else.
That constant possibility of invasion made settlement management considerably more interesting to me.
There are more obvious horror locations too.
Pickman Gallery is basically a little slasher story hidden inside the open world.
I thought I would enjoy it more than I actually did.
The problem was that Pickman and the Raiders were already busy slaughtering each other.
There wasn't much of that particular slasher feeling of confronting a killer who had decided that you were the prey.
It felt more like walking into a fight that was already well underway.
Interesting.
But it didn't leave a particularly strong impression on me.
Nuka-World worked better for me as horror.
Because of the setting alone, the amusement park has effectively become one enormous horror park.
A place once built for entertainment has spent two centuries decaying in a radioactive wasteland.
There are ghouls.
There are monsters.
There are Raiders.
Entire sections of the park have become hostile, grotesque places in their own right.
And then there are the Disciples.
Their home is grotesque.
Human remains.
Human skin.
Furniture that really shouldn't have been made from the materials it was apparently made from.
They seem very committed to their aesthetic.
Of course, my own character probably wasn't helping the atmosphere.
My boyfriend installed mods for me.
So I spent a considerable amount of time wandering through the Commonwealth as a rather attractive woman wearing a Ghostface mask.
I went for something of a slasher build.
It was fun.
Anyway.
Fallout 4 is a very well-made RPG, and an excellent example of nuclear-apocalypse horror.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/377160/Fallout_4/?curator_clanid=46578905