Pretty much every review of this I see now is someone saying either: I can't get into this because it's an ancient relic passed down through the hands of our ancestors and my computer turns to dust the moment Steam loads it or how dare any human being ever not play it because this and its sequel are unequivocally the best Fallout games ever made and people who haven't played it are heathenous traitors to the Fallout cult. And so let's get it out the way. Yes, this game is as old as time itself. Every animation or character close-up looks like it's been sat in vinegar for a century and learning how on Earth you're actually supposed to play it is like playing a game of riddles with a troll sat under a bridge who never even explained that he wanted to play a game of riddles in the first place.

The first hour of this is just living in sheer fear of massive molerats and searching every nook and cranny for some rope to progress the story. If you're like me and grew up in an era where the CRPG had died, you're gonna get cooked over and over until you figure out the essential rules of navigating its world. And even then, 15 hours in, you'll suddenly get hit with a new problem the game never explains. When you visit the Glow for the first time and try to leave with like 3 trillion radiation particles coursing through your body, you can almost hear Interplay laughing at you from behind the screen for not reading some ancient, long-forgotten strategy guide buried in a crypt somewhere. It's hard to just pick up and play, and you have to become a scholar in old GameFAQ guides and be resilient to make it over the early hump.

But when you do manage to get it down and embrace the experience for what it is, this is genuinely some of the best Fallout you can play. I love Bethesda and can't deny their work on the series has made it a household name. But damn, Interplay's take on this universe is a lot different and, to me, slightly more compelling from a narrative standpoint (up there with Obsidian's work on the series, for sure). It just throws you into a harsh, morally devoid world where capitalistic greed has eviscerated everything. From the gameplay to your interactions with characters, nothing here is easy. Everyone and everything hates you, to the point where it feels like the wasteland itself is conspiring against you. And while it has the hilariously bleak sense of humour and colourful characters of later entries, the much darker tone makes the whole experience feel like a morbidly, dog-eat-dog take on the apocalypse.

And the moments that come out of that, even years later, hit like a truck. Debating the philosophy and logic of the Master's plan as an alternative to just blasting him away in a gunfight is such a fitting moment for that villain, and searching the ruins of Necropolis for a working water chip after hours of hearing nothing but rumours genuinely feels like a massive weight off your shoulders, because as small a victory it is, you goddamn WORKED for it. Even down to the way the game portrays factions, like the Brotherhood of Steel actively refusing to engage in conflicts and highlighting how they're essentially just hoarding potentially life-saving tech for themselves in a world full of those who need it, has so much nuance and truly cements this as a world where morality exists purely in shades of grey.

I could get on its case for a lot of things that haven't aged particularly gracefully. Most of the quests rely on you digging for story in long text chains and nearly all its systems are unintuitive in today's landscape, but overall, some of the most fun I've had playing an RPG in recent memory. If you can't get along with it, no one's going to blame you. But if you can stick with it and learn how it works, this is genuinely some grade-A, top-shelf post-apocalyptic storytelling. And I say that as someone who has literally never been a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre. Just be prepared to spend the first six hours begging for mercy from pretty much every enemy you could just twat with a baseball bat in Fallout 3 and 4... the Radscorpions' ancestors were absolute chads and they'll throw hands like you just murdered their wife and kids and they're the lead in a Chad Stahelski directed revenge flick.

We've got our first contender for the most unintentionally genius game of the year. I knew I was in for peak when David Harbour stumbled across a magical talisman that teleported him to an eldritchian nightmare realm where the streets were always night and massive scum-covered flesh creatures were watching his every move, and he was like, "huh, now this is a predicament. Anyway, I have a mystery to solve!" And then proceeded to keep that exact air of extreme disinterest about discovering that cosmic, supernatural magic was a tangible, real part of his world for the next four hours.

To be clear, this game is a mess. While the environments are stunning and the sound design is top-notch, It's glitchy as hell, the combat is broken and feels awful to play, the dialogue is stilted and the puzzles are your pretty standard "wacky key" Resident Evil affairs. But there's just something about a scuffed game that lulls my bargain-bin-ass right in like a moth to a flame. Whether it's a bowl of soup in the background of a cutscene just freely stirring itself or one of the final bosses stopping mid-fighting me to reflect on his sins, this was some Grade-A jank.

If we're being real, probably best to wait for a sale or avoid it completely; it's not really worth your time. But my god, with the combination of two lead characters who seem to not give a single shit about being trapped in a Lovecraftian nightmare and combat where enemies will just walk through gunfire like your lobbing fruity pebbles at them, this whole thing is an essential one to play drunk with the homies.