After finishing this game with each of the protagonists, I can say confidently that I really did just find more and more to appreciate on each playthrough. I know it's been said to death, but this game is something special, even if it's a complete slog to get through sometimes. If you have way too much time on your hands and have a high level of tolerance for jank, I think the game is worth playing.

It's true that the vast majority of this game is walking from place to place, but I think what's often glossed over is just how many things you have to manage while doing that walking; having to plan out the ideal route through town to get from place to place most efficiently, weighing the risks of walking through an infected district to get somewhere quicker or taking the long route to avoid danger, checking what roads are safe to go down using the plaguefinder, and doing all this while soaking up the thick-as-fuck texture of this town, which is, I think, genuinely interesting to exist in. It's true that it's mostly varying shades of brown, yellow and green, but it never got boring to look at; infected districts are always sickening and genuinely uncomfortable to be in, burned districts feel less immediately alien while still immediately presenting themselves as dangerous, and safe areas are, in their own way, haunting beautiful, made even more so later on in the game where they become small, precious pockets of breatheability surrounded by disease and danger. The way the visual danger of hazardous areas is accompanied by notably more sickly versions of those areas themes does a lot to make the world easier to get lost in, and I will fucking fight the guy in the comments section for the YouTube upload of Utroba Night who said that this game's soundtrack "is nothing compared to Akira Yamaoka's work on the Silent Hill games" after someone (kind of bizarrely?) invited that comparison. How fucking dare you even suggest that Most Main and Stone Yard aren't god-tier mood-setters.

I also implore you to not make the mistake I made on my initial playthrough of loading a save after getting infected. This game is at its most engaging when it's a desperate balancing act, and having to find or make antibiotics to keep the sickness at bay another night made my second play-through all the more interesting. I will be the first to admit that I initially played this game in Coward Mode but speaking as someone who has renounced my ways: catch the plague if you can't avoid it! When in Rome/The Town On Gorkhon do as the locals do ya know (slowly and agonizingly rotting from the inside out)

If you've heard someone say that this game isn't worth playing for yourself and that you'd be better off just not bothering and looking up a summary, I implore you to at least give it a try if it goes on sale for cheap. Maybe you won't like it, and that's fine, it's understandable. But I think you owe it to yourself to at least try it out.

I first played this when I was like 11 and didn't grasp the concept of MOBAs at all and I thought Ashe's utility arrow that grants sight along the path it travels was capable of doing legitimate damage to the enemy's nexus so I would just sit at spawn and shoot arrow after arrow at the other side of the map while my teammates screamed at me to play the game, all while I was convinced I was single-handedly carrying the team. About 8 years later one of my friends was like "okay everyone we're all gonna play League" and over the next week I quickly learned that this game is actually better if you're a sub-80 IQ child who doesn't care about actually engaging with the playerbase and can delight in watching the pretty ice arrows go swoosh

Vividly imagining a sickly Tiny TIm-esque child in 1995 slowly withering away due to a terrible illness who goes to the arcade every month with his loving father to play this game. They're too poor to finish it by just feeding it quarters but this kid is absolutely obsessed with Aerosmith, and so every week the father and son team up to stop The New Order from re-educating the nation's youth by going through shitty gimmick level after shitty gimmick level, each time getting closer and closer to the end. The love of Aerosmith in the heart of this ill little tyke is pushing them on, he desperately wants to save them from the clutches of the evil leather conformity witch. Eventually the family gets bad news. It's not looking good. He's got a month left to live at most. His final wish is to beat Revolution X. One last trip to the arcade, the father sparing no expense. They've been training for this for over a year. They blast through all 5 action-packed levels, and during the final boss fight, down to their last continue, the father gets KO'd and it's up to this little boy to save the day. He pulls a huge clutch, firing every CD he has into the final boss until it finally screams out in pain and explodes. In that moment, the screen fades to black, and rainbow text pops up, announcing that they've won... but Aerosmith will NOT be performing for them, because they failed to collect the 4 Aerosmith Gems hidden throughout the game. The boy bursts into tears. They have no more quarters, and no more time.

anyway uhhh I did not care for it but it was cheesy and lots of fun to play through with a friend at a pay-by-the-hour arcade with infinite continues!

One time 3 years ago my brother-in-law asked me what my favorite Fallout game was and I said "New Vegas" and he said "ah, I can't play something that old" and now once a week I spend like 5 minutes imagining a version of that day where I ruin my dad's birthday dinner by giving a detailed explanation of why that betrays a deep lack of appreciation for games as a medium. Anyways I feel pretty confident saying that New Vegas is the only consistently fantastic and interesting Bethesda-published RPG that came out after 2003 or maybe ever