I've followed the creative output of Shigatake for what is coming up to fifteen years now after seeing their sexy Shadow of the Colossus girl fanart as a kid. Who knew they had solo development of a game as furious and pristine as this in them? I did, I never doubted him, real recognise real.
Just such a ludicrously well-executed game that I’ve been massively enjoying bashing my skull through. Refreshingly uncomplex and a relatively short runtime, but densely populated with a daisy chain of unique blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gauntlets that keeps the warpath fresh. The kind of leanness you can only find in workhorse passion projects like this. Absolutely gorgeous too, polygons are so washed literally all you need is a diorama of parallaxed sprites.
The star of the show for me is this game’s Berserk mechanic. It’s one thing to reward the player with a score multiplier bonus for aggressive play - that’s to be expected, that’s boring - it’s another to reward the player with the opportunity to style on your enemies so hard they glow beet red and bounce around their cockpits in a fit of animalistic rage, adding new layers to their attack patterns akin to a soft difficulty boost. You couldn’t get me to care about high scores if you put a gun to my head, but you can get me to engage with your multiplier gimmick if you make engaging with it this expressive and heart-poundingly risky.
Fun as all fuck, short as you’d like it to be, Shigatake of course drew a cute human version of their ship and a ton of big-name guest artists chimed in to do their own renditions of her and you can set the main menu wallpaper to them. The release of Devil Blade Reboot coincided with a health check-up of his and he's constantly been making jokes about white poop from the white drink they gave him. The human condition.

Dead on arrival.

Dear god, this game had a budget of $125 million. Immortals of Aveum is one of countless misfires in the gaming industry that makes me wonder if anyone with access to as much money as this has any idea what they're doing with all of it. You can see the underlying mentality of use-it-or-lose-it with regards to the budget — celebrity cast lists, particle effects so dense that you can't see through them, Unreal Engine 5 tech demo scenery — and how little it actually goes towards making a game that's fun to play or a world that's interesting to engage with. I was certain that this was a small-scale AA game that EA was publishing simply to make a little cash on the side; finding out that this is one of the most expensive games ever made just confuses me. It's a complete and utter squandering of basically everything that it had going for it. We're witnessing a gaming failson being created in real time. It's like Victor Frankenstein made a monster that emptied the family bank account on a timeshare scheme.

This might be the most poorly written piece of media I’ve ever sat through. I’m extending this beyond only video games. Immortals of Aveum is written the way that people who don’t like Marvel movies think Marvel movies are written. There is no moment that cannot go un-quipped, no revelation nor death so important as to prevent every nearby character from rolling their eyes and cracking a joke about it. This refusal to hold anything as sacred can work — most comedies pull this off just fine — but this game exists in that 2000s-era Adam Sandler dramedy hellsphere where, despite the fact that none of the characters are taking this seriously, it’s clear that the viewer is expected to. Immortals of Aveum wants to be a story about wildly differing people coming together in the face of adversity, a story about betrayal, a story about racism, about ancient world-ending prophecies and secret orders desperate to keep the balance. It also has a character say, verbatim, “he’s right behind me, isn’t he?”. He is, in fact, right behind them. Holy fuck. Michael Kirkbride is the lead writer.

Speaking of, every character is such a potty mouth. I know that’s the most Melvin thing imaginable to complain about, but it really does clash with everything that’s set up here. This feels like a PG-13 movie. The best comparison is that it’s an adaptation of a young adult novel that doesn’t actually exist, but it’s not a good adaptation, and the YA novel in question was written like Divergent instead of Hunger Games. This is some bootleg bootleg garbage. This is stepped-on Noughts and Crosses. Characters in this universe ought to be saying “crap” or some made-up fantasy curse like “stars and bolts!” instead of shouting “fuck” every other sentence. Everything and everyone is so flat that you can only reasonably conclude that it was written to appeal to children, but the constant swearing reminds you that they actually intended this for adults. The ESRB gave this an M rating, and I think it’s almost exclusively because of the strong language. There’s barely any blood — hell, barely any actual violence beyond shooting little flashes of magic at people. Harry Potter is more hardcore even in its earliest parts, when the cast is made up of fourth graders fighting ogres in the school bathroom. Michael Kirkbride is the lead writer.

I want to take a moment to complain about Devyn, who might be the most annoying character I’ve ever seen. I cannot fucking stand Devyn. He even spells his name like an asshole. They very clearly want you to be annoyed by Devyn — he’s a Claptrap figure of sorts, placed here by a cruel and uncaring god solely to torment you with his quips — and this is probably the greatest triumph that the writing can manage. In a world where nobody is the straight man and everybody seems desperate to be the one who gets to say something “funny” next, Devyn stands out for his ability to fuck up every single conversation by inserting himself directly into the middle of all of them. Some character will start complaining about the Immortals being isolationists who only care about themselves, and Devyn will cut them off to go on a John Oliver-esque rant for a straight minute to mock them. The player character sets up an uneasy alliance with a member of a discriminated race, and Devyn hops on the holo-orb to joke about how much he hates the entire filthy lot of them. The player character starts telling a story and Devyn fucking burps like a cartoon character to cut him off. God, fuck him. I’d say that I hope he dies, but the game actually pulls through and obliges me. The lead villain blows a hole through his chest like Piccolo and we’re expected not to instantly start rooting for him. People mourn Devyn. He’s the first name that our heroes drop when they give the villain the “and this is revenge for...” speech once he’s defeated. Michael Kirkbride is the lead writer.

Devyn is really only as annoying as he is because his actor is as annoying as he is. This is a common thread throughout the entire cast; all of the actors here are performing like this is their first time in front of a camera. Hell, I thought it was. Turns out that the entire cast is comprised of actual fucking screen actors who do this shit for a living, and none of them seem to have a clue what they’re doing. This is doubtless a directing problem — Gina Torres is delivering a career-low performance, far beneath even the worst projects she’s done elsewhere — and it seems like Ascendant believed they could just hire professional actors and tell them to "start acting" as their only point of reference for what they ought to be doing. Charles Halford as Rook crushes it, though, and I have to wonder if it’s solely because his character doesn’t look like a human being. They were apparently doing some weird hybrid face-scan/mocap setup where the actors would have their faces scanned while they were doing voiceover in a booth, and then their heads would get pasted onto the bodies of whoever was doing the mocap. There are scenes clearly intended for big emotions, or that expect the actors to at least raise their voices a little — when they see their friends die, when they give speeches on the battlefield — and they just can't seem to muster them for this. Everyone just talks. Nobody in Aveum has ever heard of an outside voice.

I've gone this long without mentioning the gameplay because it's about as much of an afterthought as this paragraph. You get three types of magic, creatively named Red, Blue, and Green, and Blue magic is so ridiculously good that you only use the other colors when the game forces you to. Blue magic is a semi-automatic rifle that gets a stacking percent damage bonus on critical hits, which are guaranteed on headshots and weak spots. It has virtually zero recoil, infinite range, hitscan, and does obscene damage obscenely quickly. Red magic is a slow shotgun that deals a solid chunk of damage but has low DPS, and Green magic is a projectile-based submachine gun with some homing capabilities that serves mostly as a shitty shotgun that misses more often than it hits. Since all of your basic magic has infinite ammo, there's little reason to do anything other than keep your Blue magic in your hand and spam bolts at enemies so far away that they're using their low LOD models. Consider binding your fire button to the scroll wheel to spare your index finger from a repetitive stress injury.

What I do like, however, is that there's actually some emphasis on platforming and exploration. While this isn't an especially interesting world to poke through, there are all sorts of goodies scattered throughout, and they're all more or less worth collecting. Grabbing lore notes will always reward you with XP even if you don't read them, and actually getting to them can be fun. You've got a double jump to start out with, which is already a plus, and you'll eventually graduate to a hookshot and a glide that you can use to get basically anywhere you want to be. Chaining air dashes and hookshots with your glides to get across a massive pit with a treasure chest at the end of it might be one of those gameplay systems that's inherently rewarding. Even though most of what you'll get for doing these mini challenges amounts to little more than a lump sum of XP or a buff to some of your damage numbers, it's the act of platforming around where the tiny kernel of fun is hidden.

There's really not much to say about Immortals of Aveum besides the fact that, were it not for being the worst-written thing I've ever seen in my fucking life, I would have completely forgotten about it in the two weeks it's taken me to type this out. I'd almost say that it's worth playing if only to see how ridiculously bad the characters are, but you're better off watching someone else play it on YouTube at that point, and you'd be watching it for way too long to get a laugh out of it. At least bad movies usually have the courtesy of ending in two hours, not eight. Part of the problem with "so bad it's good" games are the amount of time that they demand you invest in them, and then you've gotta reckon with the fact that you're putting in work for something that isn't going to be worth it. I don't regret playing Immortals of Aveum. That's faint praise, but it's all the praise I can give it. The studio isn't going to exist by this time next year. It's hardly worth thinking about beyond the thoughts I've already had. People probably won't even remember that this existed, and what a sad thought that is. Try not to think about what they could have done with that money instead.

What are we, some kind of Immortals of Aveum?

I've recently concluded that the shell (har har) of a Soulslike is not nearly as flexible as this industry wants it to be. This is bad timing since this same industry has just crowned the ""genre"" (I will not yield) as the future of AAA productions, and everyone and their mother is scrambling to churn their own one out. Inevitably, then, we'd get games like Another Crab's Treasure. A sixth-gen platforming throwback that inexplicably ties itself to the Souls combat system and format, exclusively to its deficit.

A struggle with reviewing Soulslikes is how quickly they revolve into bullet-point lists of what they get 'right'. "Oh, the healing is too slow, and the roll is wonky, but the changes to shields are really fresh and exciting, but bosses are a mixed bag, and the main weapon is lame blah blah" and so on and so forth. But this seems wrongheaded when looking at a game like ACT. It's a cutesy gimmick platformer that uses the shape of a Souls game to more naturally hook in commentary and break up the flow of the levels. Does it need razor-sharp combat, skillfully designed bosses, or massive game-defining challenges? I'd say no, but this is where the rigidity of Soulslikes come in. What's the point of having this combat system without those things? Why play a 12-hour game of sloppy, slow, imprecise and volatile combat when you can play a better version of the same thing? Especially when the Big Daddy of the style plans to release the most anticipated entry ever in less than two months?

(To be clear, I don't imagine this was an accident. I applaud the decision to release the game just far enough away from Shadow of the Erdtree that people won't disregard it for Elden Ring replays and the like but close enough that people will be itching to play a similar experience. Whoever did the math on that is very clever. Or maybe it's dumb luck, but w/e)

Well, let's investigate. What does Another Crab's Treasure actually offer us that is its own?

The first port of call is the setting. Staging the entire thing underwater gives complete freedom to freshen up the library of enemies and aesthetic tricks used in similar games. While they still include a couple of hallmark classics (poison swamp, sure, but this has the single laziest "I guess we have to have a gank fight somewhere" ever conceived), they do carve out some completely original ideas. Fighting crabs is a nice change of pace! As eye-roll-inducing as the name 'The Sands Between' is, the boss-as-stage-hazard situation is something I've been curious to see in one of these games for a long time, and this is a pretty honourable attempt. And once you get to 'The Unfathom' (equally eye-roll-inducing name), it's lights out. Only a few areas are left, but they take full advantage of the setting and carve some immense atmospheres. In fact, for the first and probably the only time ever in a Soulslike, they environmentally tell you which boss will have a surprise second phase. It's pretty cool, as are the other puzzle boss situations. Even with a mediocre batting average, they make some solid strikes!

It is also, just as crucially, a classic backtrack-heavy, vaguely Sly Cooper adjacent 3D platformer. Everything nice about the aesthetic and setting is doubled operating in this form; it's a really fun hook for one of these games. The literal hook, the one for grappling, is also really fun! But this is where Souls-isms start to bite us in the butt. Why does this game have such a spiky difficulty curve (even if it isn't that hard)? Why do some random enemies and boss attacks one-shot you through a shield? The damage output feels absurd sometimes! Sure, it's nothing new for a Soulslike, but it feels even more out of place here. The two wolves inside this game are incompatible, especially when one is such a sloppy version of itself. Dying in the middle of a cool/unique platforming set piece because you get caught in a net of weird hitboxes, input buffers and attack animations sucks! I know we all go "Fuck Off I Totally Rolled There!!" playing every Souls game, but we all know it's a lie. You can tell you inputted slightly too late or didn't fully push the button down. Not here. Input drops galore. Here I go again! I'm ranting about how this isn't functional as a 'Souls' game when it needn't be one at all! Why chain yourself to this?

The writing has been getting a decent amount of praise, and I can sort of see why. It has a lovely conclusion. I like the climate change hook, and the game does well to pull it into a decently compelling humanist story, even if it drags its feet for a handful of hours to get there. But I'm mixed about the goals here. There are many attempts at 'having something to say,' and the specifics all come across as incoherent. Stopping the accelerationist tech-bro, who will destroy the world in his attempts to save it, was the wrong thing to do because doing so will cause the same outcome? I doubt this is an intended interpretation, but this is what happens, right? I'm 99% sure Sam Altman's sudden disappearance would bring tangible benefits. But that's the risk you run stuffing stock satire together so carelessly. It's also a risk you run by being terrible writers! Sorry to bury the lede so deep here, but my god, the dialogue in this game is bad. It's the worst I've seen this year, all lame arched comedy and po-faced capital-c Commentary. The voice acting is even worse! I want to crush Kril with an anvil. I hate his stupid voice so much! Don't even get me started on Firth! Michael Reeves, get out of my fucking game!

This is a game thrashing around for an identity. If you want nothing more than to swing at people in FromSoft-style melee combat, you could do worse. But I can't muster any enthusiasm for it. As an object of storytelling, it struggles. As a combination of aesthetics, it's winning, if unspecial. As a video game, it distracts from its strengths by needlessly pulling itself into a framework that doesn't fit with the rest of the experience. The game is fine on whole, but what's even left to recommend? I have high hopes that someone somewhere will be able to prove me wrong regarding the Souls formula. I'd really like to see a game that doesn't feel burdened by the difficulty curve and combat system and can make legitimate strides in pushing the level design philosophy forward. I just don't think there's as much room to grow as the money men seem to believe.

I spent a lot of time trying to write a long and smart intro to this kind of tying things into the current state of corporate IP crossover stuff but Final Fantasy is more of an anthology series crossing over with itself constantly so it doesn't totally work. I wanted to do a bit where I call Multiversus a knockoff of Eirgeiz: God Bless the Ring. So I'm putting that there because really that was the main reason I wanted to write it.

Seriously though, there are so many 'all the finals fantasy mashed up' games. They remade a bunch of them on GBA and added crossovers. They did Dissidia and then Theathrythm as a spinoff of Dissidia. They made FF4 the After Years and gave it like a whole plot that tries to put all of the mainline games into a shared universe. I haven't even gotten to Kingdom Hearts.

Stranger of Paradise is so many things. It's the Dark Souls ripoff Final Fantasy game. It's another attempt at putting all the mainline games in a shared universe. It's the unofficial sequel to Brave Fencer Musashi. For as svelte as the game is, there's a ton of just, SHIT in here. Ideas. You've got turning enemy attacks back at them, and hitting the button to power up your pals, and the fake devil trigger, the job system, command abilities, setting up your combo enders like mini God Hand, all kinds of stuff. I was always forgetting two or three basic mechanics and having a hard time, and I'm sure the couple of actually hard parts could have been easier if I knew something about one of the systems I didn't care to engage much with. The loot, in particular, is like come on. Fuck off with that shit I'm just hitting the auto-equip button periodically.

But other than that! Other than the loot numbers, SoP feels like a throwback to the lost days of B games. It's even in the little things, like everybody saying "Hey look, cubes" whenever you see save cubes. Or the fact that the characters seem to decide if they thought you did well or poorly in a fight based on a die roll. Or the many, many cutscenes that end with everyone walking off only to fade back into another cutscene in a slightly different location where they all resume talking about the same thing. It's so good. We should never have given them budgets to do more than this.

I basically haven't said a thing about the actual game or story or anything yet, and that's all fine. It lets you keep everything when you die so it's breezier than real Dark Souls. There's a ton of jobs to level which is always fun because I like unlocking a new one and finding out it has Runic or whatever as its ability. I was pretty firmly in team Sage by the end but there's plenty of customization even within that framework. The plot is not particularly profound but the cast is charismatic and enjoyable, with Jack fully deserving his meme status. There are scenes and bits I'm going to fondly remember for a long time to come. I'd say two bosses were a giant difficulty spike for me but that's fine. They were pretty fun. There's a bunch of DLC I have but you can only access on mega super duper secret CHAOS difficulty which is so absurdly evil I kind of respect it. So maybe I'll try it and maybe I won't I dunno. They put a Frank Sinatra song in the game for some reason.

I haven't played FF16 but I bet this is better. I bet it'll piss me off when I do play it because the FF14 people wrote it. I'm all in on Team Jack and that's that. Raises paw to the fistbump position

Within the first hour of Hades, I rolled a boon that gave me +2HP regeneration per hit at the expense of half my health, plus another which healed me by a certain amount if I dodged after being struck. I coasted to the third boss, where I finally ate shit while getting sandwiched between a minotaur and Theesus' hot, oily body (video games are all about wish-fulfillment, you see.) I figured there was no way I wouldn't knock this out in a single sitting if I was able to get 75% of the way through the game so early and with so little equipment and abilities unlocked, so I settled in and started thinking about what I'd play next.

It took me another 20ish hours to beat up my dad.

Chaos is down here, but I feel him everywhere. I sense him in the damn walls, because in true roguelike fashion, my ability to claw my way out of the underworld is largely determined by blind luck. Did I get the crystal turrets this run? No? Well shit, I guess this has become an exploratory mission, a grind to get as much crystals and keys as possible to buy stat upgrades and equipment to mitigate some of my misfortune. Oh good, I managed to get a boon to pom upgrades so everything is doubled now, surely I'll beat Hades this time and-- what do you mean he has two health bars, what is this Lies of P bull shit?

Each failed run sends me back to the main hall, where Zag can chat with his friends, colleagues and family, or pet his dog, maybe do a little interior decorating... it's a place to pause, to breath and collect oneself before the next run. Only problem is, I'm not built like that. I'm a sick little goblin freak and for the past eight hours I've been able to consistently make it to the fourth layer of the Underworld, where rats with a billion HP pick at my bones. No time to talk, Nyx. Go suck yourself, Hypnos. I don't have time for your sharply written dialog and I've run out of patience for picking out different colors of drapes, this is the run.

It's not the run. I can't be mad, though. The worst parts of Hades are tropes so quintessential to the genre that if you didn't expect them going in, then you aren't really being honest to yourself about what Hades is. The lack of predictability is a feature, one that comes with some great highs and abysmal lows, which at times made me feel like Hades is deserving of its praise while also making me want to put it down. Ask me how much I like Hades and I'm going to say "it depends."

And, in perfect fashion, I finally kicked my old man's ass not because I collected enough keys to unlock every weapon so that I could gain access to the upgrade system, or because I had maxed out several stat upgrades I felt might help keep Zag alive - as was my plan - but because I happened to roll a +900% damage perk against armor, perfect for making short work of those rats. With that, level 7 crystal turrets, and four full charges of Death Defiance, I could've taped my eyes shut during the fight against Hades. The cool thing about roguelikes is they can either favor you too early and trivialize the whole game or dick you over so much that you're just miserable. The truly fortunate land somewhere in the middle and get a more satisfying sense of balance amid all the dice rolls and chaos.

Despite the rogulike trappings of chance and repetition, I don't think Hades is a bad game, so much as it's a perfectly alright one. In fact, the bits that are more unique to Hades, like the writing, character designs, and even the way Zag feels in combat, are all great. If this genre is more your thing than it is mine, then this is probably a must play, maybe one of the best of all time. For me, it's a "shelved" that I'm giving a 3/5 because 20+ hours later, I can't imagine another run with modifiers actually turning the needle much at all. I'll probably get back to it someday, but for now, I need to put this down and play something else... Like Prey: Mooncrash!

Unlike more recent entries in the Megami Tensei mega-franchise that use the occult as largely aesthetic backdrops--a sort of calling card that "This Is An MT Game" that serves little other purpose--you can almost believe Shin Megami Tensei is cursed. There is still a sense of danger to this one thirty years later, a sense that it was developed by people genuinely deeply immersed in the spiritual and occult.

And that makes sense! The creators of SMT all but certainly grew up within Japan's occult boom of the 70s which also happened to experience a second life around the time of the game's release. Shows on spirit photography, magazines about urban legends and UFOs, the reemergence of yokai as pop culture staples...it wasn't exactly a challenge to be swallowed up by it all.

Which is what it feels like playing this game--being swallowed up. From moment one it is obtuse and strange; you press start and immediately know: something is wrong. The moon hangs over the world map; obscure net boards share occult programs; serial murders lock the streets down with no answers and dreams seem to seep into reality. It presents a Tokyo of ley lines and crimes, where this monumental metropolis we have constructed is a suffocating, diseased machine we choose to rot in. Playing SMT is, I imagine, what it feels like to genuinely believe in conspiracies and spirits.

And then the twist happens. I won't say what it is on the off-chance you haven't been spoiled, but it is a stunningly bold move that hasn't lost a single ounce of its power and which completely flips the entire game on its head. Suddenly history and politics and reality come crashing headfirst into the spiritual and the skin is peeled off. It is no longer a seedy world of mysteries. It is a nightmare made real. It is, for my money, one of THE great moments in games.

Sure, as the series has gone on the gameplay of this original has been bested, as have the graphics and the music and even the story. But there's nothing else out there quite like this, a masterpiece of video game feeling.

There's little fat to Valkyrie Elysium. It barely even has skin. In the place of a body is a bony, muscular action gauntlet, an exhausting marathon of violence acting as metaphor for the deeply entwined relationship of soul, body, and place and reflecting the protagonist's self-actualization as they come to understand this. Story creeps in slowly and lightly, hiding much of itself to incurious players in an effort to reflect the player character. They are born as the game starts, given fully and unquestioningly to their singular mission, that mission that defines nearly all games: save the world through force and violence.

Except that world is already gone. Largely thanks to budgetary constraints, Midgard is cold, ruined, and empty; a world like an overcast day, when rain is in constant threat of falling. It is populated not by people, but by spirits and memories that have become one with the land they occupy. Just as the fallen kingdoms around you defined these long gone people, so too do they define the ruins. And yet either way it goes, no matter what happens, the soul is never free, not really. It is constantly in servitude, perpetually a slave to individuals and moral constructions of societies and ideas of duty and honor.

Valkyrie Elysium does not give a terribly easy answer to this suggestion that we all exist in mutating webs of master and slave. The game is at once hopeful towards the power of connection and the profundity of giving yourself to others, and incredibly sad about the exact same thing. But then, maybe the answer was always there, in what the game exhaustingly asks of the player. Even if there is no way out, maybe sometimes you just have to try. Maybe sometimes you have to fight.

more thoughts here: https://baxtersmono.medium.com/valkyrie-elysium-a-spiders-web-of-control-63c7a1c9b2de

Being the "least bad" Fallout 3 DLC is a bit like being the "most moral" person in a trial at the Hague, but given how bad everything Fallout 3 related is it needs all the accolades it can get.

Point Lookout isn't really more than a pocket-sized other Wasteland to explore, a brief main quest that doesn't have much to it beyond you killing ~tribals~ in droves, some decentish sidequests aaaand some loot. Yay.

The main quest isn't anything to write home about. A guy named Desmond conscripts you to kill and infiltrate some Tribals which are just... Uncritically placed into FO3's setting with all their uncomfortable tropes and occasionally you-no-take-candle style of speech in all its offensive. You get part of your brain removed (this doesn't mean anything) by a boatman and then you kill more tribals. Then you kill a lot of tribals. Then you kill a brain in a jar.
The only emotion this stirs in me besides apathy is mild annoyance, because on my main Fallout site circa 2009 I knew a guy who made Desmond his entire personality and was really annoying about it.
Desmond is an English pre-war ghoul who swears a lot and is a massive dick despite being good-aligned. I didn't really find him funny back then because the Bit is very one-note and nowadays I mashed through his dialogue after reading the subtitles because hoho wow this is some immature humor even for Fallout.

The main sidequests aren't going to make any Best Sidequests Ever lists but they're servicable compared to 3's.
One sees you taking up a Chinese spy's mission to destroy evidence of their espionage long after their death, and while it's not exactly rife with choice or even combat it's a nice little vignette with a decent tone to it - also it gives the Backwater Rifle, one of the game's better 10mm weapons.
The other is a thinly-veiled Lovecraft reference that's not very deep but it is relatively atmospheric and does utilize the scenery well. Apparently it was meant to be a lot deeper and better, but as is the norm with Bethesda games this was cut super late in development.

But I'll admit PL's setting does kind of irk because it's very superfluous. Like sugar candy. The parts near the pier honestly don't look much different from the Capital Wasteland and while the idea of setting a Fallout story in a swamp is neat, the terrain is incredibly repetitive and not very interesting.
Same goes for the Swampfolk, inbred cannibal killers, who were very obviously inspired by The Hills Have Eyes - such was admitted outright. They even used to be called Hillfolk, c'mon.
They're very much just there, making effigies and killing outsiders because that's what they do I suppose. The Lovecraft-lite quest gives the vague insinuation that they do it because this is supposed to reference Shadow over Innsmouth, I guess. Happy to see people from Cumbernauld show up in a game though!

Outside of the main quest and two big quests, though, Point Lookout just isn't very interesting. It's the first of the DLC maps to be nice and ~open~ but it's also so small that it only took me 3-4 hours to clear it of meaningful content.

Considering Mothership Zeta is next, let's just call this calm before the storm.

I don't like the descriptor "self-obsessed" to describe art.

Both because I think the mere act of creating art requires a little bit of benign self-obsession, and because it's often used by luddites to shout down art they perceive as 'pretentious' or somesuch nonsense.

With that in mind, Fallout 3 has a moderate problem with being self-obsessed.

It is a game that mostly consists of hallway shooting galleries, quests where the moral choices are "basic decency" and "laugh in a child's face after tricking him into putting on a bomb collar", and doesn't really possess much in the way of clever jokes beyond pop culture references and human suffering- hey wait

It's juvenile, to put it briefly.

But between the constant invocation of the Bible, the main story rapidly becoming about some grand purpose, your birth and childhood being the introduction, Three Dog endlessly praising a good/neutral player for being the singular hero that'll save the day, and thousands of other little tidbits, it's clear as day that the writers have an overinflated sense of how profound they think this is.

Before we continue, I think it's prudent that I go back in time for a little bit, and talk about both myself and the game at launch.

I'm a very old Fallout fan. So old in fact that I can't even talk about the sites I visited in any depth; they're all still around and their history entirely public - it'd be tantamount to doxxing. My opinions on the series are coloured by about 17 years of discontent and relative loathing for Bethesda Fallout as a creative force.

Fallout 3 dropped in October 2008 - exact date is beyond me - and it was much beloved by everyone except me and my fellow embittered old fans. At first this discontent was merely "they changed it!" but for me, at least, it's only grown due to far more valid complaints.

There is, however, one complaint that Fallout 3 fans and haters alike had back in the day.

See, it's profoundly difficult to stumble upon the base version of Fallout 3 these days. Microsoft sell the GOTY edition for cheaper than the basegame on Xbox, and on Steam it's the only option available to buy. If you purchase Fallout 3, there's a 99% chance it's the whole package.

From the game's release until it's 1st anniversary, Broken Steel did not exist. Without it, the game's main story simply ended. This seems inoffensive on the surface and when spoken so plainly the idea of it being contentious must seem ludicrous.
The catch here is that Fallout 3's story is very short. If one decides to dabble in it, they can easily reach the end in a couple hours potentially by accident. This in itself often poses a problem, as it's entirely possible to be locked into that ~endgame state~ and corresponding building just by chasing the main story as a diversion.
It's the story itself that's the draw here, though. Fallout 3's writers were obsessed with how grandiose, spiritual and hashtag epic the story was, so it ends with either you sacrificing yourself to turn on a water purifier or making someone else do it as the token evil option.

If you use social media a decent amount and are either in or adjacent to game circles, you might've seen the companion reactions to being asked to go into the Purifier. They're bad, and the radiation-immune companions give the most asspull reactions possible.

About a month or two after Fallout 3's release, Bethesda announced a trio of DLCs: Operation Anchorage, The Pitt and Broken Steel.
Broken Steel drew a lot of curiosity pre-release for one simple reason: A promise of being able to play past the ending.
It's somewhat "common knowledge" that this was Bethesda violently backtracking and while we'll never know the truth, I personally make it a point to remind people that Fallout 3's DLCs were planned before release and the development only wrapped the same month it released.

Broken Steel, for me, is a bit of a morbid curiosity. I would love to know more about it and I'm eternally sad that the developers at Bethesda are so culturally and creatively exsanginuated, for it makes finding out their influences/objectives/desires so much harder compared to, say, New Vegas characters.

To break it down for you: I don't know what the fuck Bethesda were thinking with this DLC.

Sure, Fallout 3's base ending is terrible. It's incredibly overdramatic for the game it's in, utterly defies and resists any attempts to interrogate it, reeks of Great Man Theory, and railroads the player in an already railroad-y game.
But when you swing for the fences and hit manure, the most noble thing you can do is commit. I have respect for plenty of creatives who make something terrible, stand their ground and go "Fuck you. This is what I wanted to make." It's why I take few potshots at indie projects and millions at Bioware.
Broken Steel's greatest sin is its existence: It's a backtrack. It's Bethesda flinching. It's a wordless apology. Cowardice in megabyte form. Doesn't matter if it was a planned move or a reactive one, because it simply is, and that's the worst part. There is simply no winning here: If it was planned, then surprise! Bethesda don't really care about the products they make and will cynical lobotomize them to sell DLC. If it wasn't planned, then within a month of release they hastily scrabbled to lobotomize their game so they could scramble to regain the mild amount of goodwill they lost.

...But you know what? Even if we ignore that it's ideological wafer, or that I'm an ornery old Fallout fan who's distrusted people with Enclave avatars since before my nieces and nephews were born, Broken Steel is just... bad on a design level.

For starters, it adds three new enemies to the Wasteland: Feral Ghoul Reavers, Super Mutant Behemoths, and Albino Radscorpions. These are... Remodelled and higher level variants of the three most common enemy types in the Wasteland. They have significantly higher health pools (the largest behind Behemoths) and get a passive +35 to their damage output that bypasses all of your armor. Besides this they're not very engaging to fight. You either kill them fast or they kill you fast. Riveting.

The 'main story' of the DLC is horrifically grim even by the standards of Fallout 3's own main story. Having given up all pretense of even telling a story, the player is shoved into a military campaign against the Enclave which moooooooooostly just manifests as more hallway shooter segments and another lackluster, somewhat cringe section with Liberty Prime. If you've not visited Old Olney yet, the second main quest awkwardly pushes you there to collect the associated loot. After that, another shooter segment that's even easier than the ones from past DLCs because it's 80% open fields - and the game hands you an absurdly powerful weapon that uses ammo so plentiful even casual players can amass thousands. Bang bang bang, make a 'moral choice' (nuke the Enclave or the BoS) and off you go.

That's... Basically it? Besides some inconsequential side quests, some loot that's mediocre for how late it appears, and the level cap increase, Broken Steel really isn't all that substantial despite the implications of its name.

Maybe the real Broken Steel was the antipathy we made along the way.

Yeah, it's bad. Who'd've seen that coming, right?

Arguably even more of a theme park ride than Operation Anchorage, in part because it doesn't even pretend you need to have leveled skills for it.
Weapon skills too low? Don't worry, the DLC has its own ammo type which you get thousands of and the weapons given to you deal so much damage. Just shoot away!
Medicine too low? Don't worry, Alien Biogel is everywhere and regenerates a load of health - you can even beg the local twunk to upgrade it!
Repair too low? Don't worry, Alien Epoxy is found by the bucketload and it'll repair your weapon for you!
Need money? No you don't! But just in case there's a ton of Alien Crystals lying around for you to sell in the Wasteland!

The other DLCs are badly designed, I hesitate to even imply this one is designed at all.

It's so very nakedly a cynical loot dump, the closest you'll get to a cheat DLC. It reminds me of XCOM: Enemy Unknown's much-maligned Slingshot DLC.

There isn't much substance on display here. Fallout 3 is already a dim and unwieldy corridor shooter but here it's doubling down on the corridor bits. Even the other DLCs let you use stealth sometimes but here? All combat, all the time.
You'd think that with the vast array of pulp fiction influences in Fallout they'd dig a bit deeper to make their alien mothership look cool but it's mostly just colour-coded hallways and doo-dads. There's not a lot of visual consistency either; the main aesthetic is something you'd find in a PS3 FPS game that nobody remembers, the weapons are distinctly 50's sci-fi, the drones look like they're from XCOM, and there's a bunch of 70s sci-fi stuff thrown in for good measure. It's a very uncoordinated and bland mess of stuff that makes me wonder if the devs gave up towards the end so they could go work on Skyrim.

Also, this isn't a Mothership Zeta exclusive issue, but it did exacerbate it:

I think I'm starting to suffer from Murder Fatigue in my RPGs.

It's really prominent in base Fallout 3 due to its relative lack of settlements and overabundance of trash mobs/shooting galleries, but it's also alarming to me that it's the sole method of engaging with the DLCs.

There's just not much going on here besides killing, and more tools to do more killing. Fallout 4 at least innovated on it by trying to make it enjoyable, but here in Fallout 3? Handles like ass, so the endless violence is even more of a slog.

I must be getting old.

I have this annoying problem where, whenever I play a truly transcendental videogame that wows me from head to toe, I enter a state of post-masterwork malaise where even other good games just look worse.

And Library of Ruina was phenomenal. Truly the best game I've ever played, which naturally meant playing anything else was an impossible task.

But I'm old now, and I know how to cure this: I need to play something terrible. Something that, top-to-bottom, inside and out, is just irredeemable. Something not only indefensible, but laughable.

Every brilliant light casts an equally dark shadow, and as Library of Ruina stands at the zenith of gaming, I must look to the nadir for guidance.

Having slogged through the entire game and it's DLCs, I think it's time to put the pin in this journey.

It's interesting to consider just how much Bethesda lucked out with this game.

Soon after its release Fallout: New Vegas would be birthed in a haste at Obsidian's hands, proceeding to dominate the overall population's idea of "Fallout" for a good few years before Fallout 4 came out and the conversation became an eternal NV vs. 4 debate, underscored by endless quibbles about voiced protagonists and that one "yes/yes (sarcastic)/no (yes)/no" meme about FO4's dialogue. In the midst of all this is Skyrim, a game so influential and popular despite its flaws that Bethesda are "The Skyrim People" to a not-insignificant number of people on Earth.

All of this is to Bethesda's benefit, because it means people have forgotten about Fallout 3.

Not me, though. That's my curse; I'm a career hater, I can't forget bad games.

But let’s put 3 on the backburner for a moment.

Let’s talk about Oblivion.

Even a decade on from its end, people are still trying to figure out which games defined the 7th generation of consoles the most. I’m going to throw my 2 cents into the ring:
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was, by far and bar none, the most defining title of 7th gen.
Not to say that other titles weren’t influential, of course, but even though we live in a time where the words “Ubisoft open world” have entered most people’s lexicons, I think the progenitor of said open worlds was Oblivion and Bethesda.
Oblivion was a game with a very clear message: You don’t need to meticulously design every part of a game for it to sell well or be beloved. You don’t even need to meticulously design a small part of it. All you have to do is make a big empty bowl, put in some markers that allude to it being bigger than it actually is, and then give it a clutter pass before dotting some reused fortresses/caves/mines into it. There’s no need for a personal touch in every corner, merely the illusion of one.

But I can forgive Oblivion for a lot of things even if it is terrible. It was one of the earliest titles released in 7th gen, and the first of its scale. It took four years to make in a time where that was an incredible abnormality.

Fallout 3 gets no such mercy from me.

In part, because it’s worse.

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

F3 opens with you, the player character, being born and causing your mother to die of postpartum cardiac arrest. This is already a horrific indicator of how obsessed it’s going to be with its own unearned sense of profundity and much like the actual act of being born, it gets infinitely worse.
Just to get this out of the way: This sucks. It sucks on a creative level - Bethesda clearly couldn’t figure out how to stoke player investment without giving you a dead mom, a sad dad and showing your birth - but it also just sucks as the opening to a Fallout game?
This observation is so common that even comparatively normal people who don’t engage with Gaming as a culture often make it: Fallout 1 and 2 open with “oh yeah some shit’s fuck, go save your home”. Fallout NV starts with you getting shot in the head, and sends you off after a brief intro.
Fallout 3’s intro, then, sticks out like a sore thumb even compared to its more immediate sequel.
Afterwards you get warped to a birthday party filled with named NPCs who share voice actors and who you don’t care about. After that you get warped to a school test with the same named NPCs who share voice actors and don’t actually speak more than one or two lines, who you still don’t care about.

After that most of them die and the game tries to make you feel sad about their deaths I guess, but it’s moot because you finally get to leave the Vault and I’m incredibly confident 99% of people regardless of age or maturity felt elation at not having to wander through boring, visually bland corridors anymore.

Unfortunately, that’s all Fallout 3 has to offer outside the Vault too.

Over the years I’ve started to take incredible amounts of umbrage with the establishing shot of DC the player is greeted with upon leaving the Vault.

It promises a grand, open world - a reprieve from the suffocating Vault you just slogged through!

Springvale School is just down the road. It looks like this. Walk a bit further and you can find a metro. It looks like this. You can even find some sewer tunnels. They look like this.. Maybe, if you go a bit further, you’ll find an office building. Looks like this!.

Okay. You’ve now seen 99% of locations in Fallout 3.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s just have a little design chat.

I’m not a game dev, but I’ve played so many open world games and developed a fondness for them that I’ve managed to figure out some criteria that helps measure how good these games are on a technical level.

To wit, a ‘good’ open world is dotted with areas where one or more of these applies:

A visual reward, in the form of a lovely view.
A progression reward, in the form of loot that directly makes you stronger.
Something you can’t see or obtain anywhere else in the game world.
Depending on the world structure, it should lead to somewhere else that’s only accessible via a specific location.
At the very least, for more out-there or hidden areas, there should be some acknowledgement that you made the journey successfully.

Right, all that is out of the way.

Fallout 3’s open world is badly designed, but to really dig into why we need to talk about the other parts of the game that’re badly designed, and I think the topic of loot is perhaps the most pressing.

The first shotgun the player can acquire in Fallout New Vegas is the humble Single Shotgun. It does respectable damage for how early it drops, but true to its name it only carries a single round and its short but frequent reloads can leave you wide open against hordes or particularly tank enemies. It also uses 20 gauge shells as opposed to 12 gauge, so while it hits hard early on it ultimately stops being useful fast.
Later in the game’, the player can luck into possession of the venerable Riot Shotgun, an absolute beast of a weapon that boasts a 12-round drum magazine with 12 gauge shells as its primary ammo type, on top of a high rate of fire and respectable reload time.

Meanwhile the first shotgun the player can potentially find in Fallout 3 is the Combat Shotgun). It is, like the Riot Shotgun, a veritable moment that can dish out respectable damage and uses 12 gauge ammo. In the Capital Wasteland, this is an extremely common weapon with an extremely common weapon type - 20 gauge does not exist, so all shotgun wielding enemies are walking topups.

To really illustrate this issue, we need to talk about damage.

New Vegas uses two types of defensive stat: Damage Resistance (percentage-based) and Damage Threshold (flat reduction).

All incoming damage taken is reduced by the DR value at a percentage. So if you, for example, take 100 damage and have 50 DR, you take 50 damage.
Next is the DT value, which is a flat reduction. Seeing as we’ve just taken 50 damage, let’s imagine we have 20 DT. Since it’s just a flat subtraction, all in all we’ve taken 30 damage. This goes both ways.

This hypothetical only involves a single instance of damage. Shotguns, as they fire multiple pellets per shot, have the formula applied to each individual pellet. The end result is that despite high damage stats and seeming to be catch-free, shotguns in NV do a lot less damage than you’d initially think - though, as NV is a competently made game, this can be circumvented with alternative ammo and perks.

Fallout 3, however, only uses Damage Resistance. This is alarming on its own, but it gets worse as you learn that DR in Fallout 3 rarely if ever gets above 40. Most non-humanoid enemies don’t even have any DR stats, just health.

This is where the problem really starts to take shape.

While this does still impact the individual shotgun pellets, the reality is that a 10% reduction applied to 10 damage is incredible miniscule, so the Combat Shotgun becomes a weapon sent down by the gods to smite anything with a pulse.

The Combat Shotgun is incredibly powerful, uses bountiful ammo and is incredibly common. As are the Hunting Rifle, Missile Launcher, Assault/Chinese Assault Rifles, and Laser/Plasma Rifles.

Final result?

Most loot rewards are utterly worthless and incredibly unsatisfying.

99% of Fallout 3’s generic, copy-pasted dungeons end with you getting little more than some sellable stuff, a few caps, a handful of consumables, one weapon which you already have 15 of in stock, and a surplus of ammo that you’re probably already overflowing with. Fuck dude, even a lot of main story stuff just dumps excess on you. The final ‘dungeon’ doesn’t offer anything you don’t already have assuming you’ve bothered to go for a walk between the midgame and then.
I can only really describe this game’s world design as a sort of maniacal creative ADHD. You’ll find a marker or something to gawk at every couple of minutes, yes, but in actuality all of the stuff you find is superfluous gunk that at best rewards you with thirty 5mm rounds and a stimpak.
A couple of years ago I replayed Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While that game has many issues, the only relevant one is: Loot scarcity. In a sort of dim, artificial attempt to keep the player ~on their toes~, Deus Ex HR frequently has players break into hidden vaults and armouries only to find at best a weapon they already have and some ammo.
Fallout 3 has both this exact same issue and the opposite problem: Loot excess. Because there’s so little of it, and because it’s all so strong, the simple act of finding things is simultaneously unsatisfying and unneeded. What am I going to do with some leather armor and a knife? I found a weapon to kill god in a bin.
Lastly, there’s a very strange issue running through Fallout 3 wherein loot containers that need skill investment to unlock often have worse loot than random bedside cabinets. In the game’s final dungeon I cracked open a Hard-difficulty terminal, and behind it was… 19 10mm rounds, a Stimpak, some drugs, and one missile. Opposite, in a random footlocker, was a useful amount of money and a significant handful of Microfusion Cells.

Truthfully, though, all of that isn’t the actual problem - New Vegas also has its fair share of dud locations. The actual problem is that there’s a lack of loot progression. You get a Combat Shotgun or a weapon of your choice and you’re basically set for life. Besides Mini Nukes there are no rare ammo types, and caps are plentiful - in part due to loot itself being plentiful - meaning it’s easy to just cycle around each vendor and empty their ammo stock if you need .44 Magnum or .308 ammo.

There are some unique pieces of equipment here and there, but they run into a teensy tiny little problem:

They’re overkill.

Fallout 3’s greatest sin, looping back to that discussion about damage earlier, is that it’s an easy game.

Most enemies rarely have health in the hundreds, and basically everything besides the .32 pistol and the Chinese pistol is capable of outputting that with impunity. Conversely, unless the player cranks the difficulty right up, enemies don’t deal enough damage to be a threat unless they’re in large groups and even then it’s incredibly rare to fight groups of enemies in open terrain. Indeed, the first real swarm most players will find during the main quest is fought with tons of cover and chokepoints to exploit.
It’s not until the DLCs that enemies start appearing with difficulty attached, and said difficulty is little more than them getting a +30-40 extra damage for free. They do have bloated HP, but realistically if you’re at the recommended level for the DLCs then you have enough damage output to ignore that.

In most other open world games where loot is a frivolous, tacked-on system with no merit, usually exploration is its own reward. This sentiment carried BOTW to many people’s good graces, after all.
Fallout 3 has no such luck: The Capital Wasteland is a horrifically unappealing place. There isn't much in the way of landmarks and the ones that do exist are so… American. I suppose it may be resonant and even disquieting if you’re an American with any degree of patriotism but I’m an embittered Scot that views the entire country as a disease that’s gone on too long. The sight of the Washington Monument in disrepair makes me feel about as much as the styrofoam box I get my chips from.
It’s easy to throw up one’s hands and say “Oh, but this is a post-apocalyptic game, Mira! Of course it looks like shit!” which isn’t an entirely unworkable stance, it just ignores that pretty much every other famous piece of post-apocalyptic media - especially the Fallout game released immediately after this one wrapped - managed to nail this while still being ‘ruined’.
I have a relatively good sense of direction, to the point where my friends instinctively put me in charge whenever we need to find somewhere in Glasgow. With that said, I find it incredibly easy to lose where I am on Fallout 3’s map, for once the player leaves the downtown DC region the Capital Wasteland is little more than a grey/brown wasteland dotted with the same 4-5 ruins for miles upon miles. Most of the notable map markers are in the southeast of the map anyway.

Not helping this is that, as opposed to having regional spawn lists to spruce up the act of exploration, Fallout 3 uses a global spawnlist which deposits the vast majority of enemies into the world at random.

Which sucks because there’s not that many enemy types. Humanoids, Radscorpions, Radroaches, Yao Guai, Deathclaws, Botflies, Feral Ghouls, Super Mutants, Centaurs, Dogs, Mirelurks, Mole Rats, Ants, and robots. There, that’s basically every enemy in the game. You will most likely encounter all of them within 20 minutes of following the main path.
Oblivion has a similar problem of dropping random enemies all over the map, but that game’s level scaling is kind enough to replace enemies rather than simply dropping reskinned versions of them with higher HP in the same places.

The enemies, I feel, are where every issue I talked about up above comes to a head. Bad loot variety? Human enemies attack with the same 5-6 weapons. Bad location variety? You kill the same enemies with the same gear in samey locations. Bad quest variety? Regardless of context, you’re hitting the same things in the same gear in the same locations for only slightly different reasons.

And, as is the trend for Fallout 3, enemies being miserable to fight is both a culmination of other issues and introduces its own!

Namely: Combat is, at a very base foundational level, deeply unsatisfying.

Normally I wouldn’t repeat criticisms that other people have said uniformly for decades, however as a career Fallout 3 hater I reserve the right to do so.

It’s accepted by now that Bethesda games lack weight in their combat. Melee feels floaty and impactless, and every gun regardless of caliber or damage feels like using a BB gun. Nobody reacts to damage besides the odd grunt and maybe a canned stagger animation until they die, at which point they either limply collapse like a puppet with severed strings or explode in a shower of gore which is… Honestly, kind of juvenile? And I say this as a certified gore whore.
This in itself is an extension of the game’s nauseatingly childish fixation on gore; raider camps have dismembered corpses impaled on hooks, many areas are filled with random bits of internal organ, and Super Mutants carry entire fishnet bags filled with gore.

But on a technical level, shooting things in Fallout 3 is both deeply unsatisfying and badly designed.

FPS games were some of the first to really crystallize as a genre, and by the time Fallout 3 ripped itself free into the world there were already certain ground rules that not even outsider games dared to break.
If a gun sways, it’s accepted that it should aim where it’s pointing. If a gun’s projectiles have spread, it’s commonly accepted that the gun itself should be steady. Easy enough, right?
Fallout 3, for some asinine reason, does both.
On some level I can vaguely maybe kinda possibly appreciate the attempt to recreate the experience of trying to fire a gun in Fallout 1 with low stats at a target far beyond its effective range, but the problem here is that that experience was temporary until you powered up and here it’s a permanent fixture of gameplay. Weapons have less sway as you increase their respective skill, but unless your Int stat is high (because skill points are asininely tied to it) then that’s a relatively slow crawl - doubly so when there are other skills to increase.
What really hurts shooting is that hit detection is wildly inconsistent. The hitbox for projectiles is seemingly tiny, and it often gets caught on terrain or misses ‘direct’ shots by one thousandth of an inch. Said terrain seems to be poorly constructed, as wafer-thin bits of rebar will obstruct bullets around them and cause them to seemingly clatter off of thin air.
Call of Duty is terrible yesyes but this game came out a year after CoD4 had already introduced the average person to snappy, responsive and satisfying shooting which also lets you shoot through chainlink fences. I have no idea what was in the water to make people believe this game’s shooting was enjoyable.

As a brief aside: I discovered only now that oftentimes projectiles in third person mode don’t even go where you aim them. My metric for how good shooters are at a base level revolves around how good it feels to fight in close quarters, and because of this Fallout 3 feels even worse.

“[Developer] made a competent [genre] and didn’t bother to make the rest of the game” is a phrase that popped up a lot around the late 00s and early 2010s as more and more people began trying to blend genres together. See: Alpha Protocol.
Fallout 3 is unique in this front because Bethesda not only failed to make a competent shooter, but the corpse of an RPG around it isn’t very good either.

Let me just quote myself, from earlier:

Most RPGs either force a goal onto you but let you pick your motive, or they force a motive onto you and let you pick your goal. These are streams that’re best left uncrossed. Fallout 3, for some reason, attempts to do both.

Fallout 3 gives the player a rigid, established backstory and also an annoying rigid, established goal. It’s quite alarming to come across as an NPC related to your father and see every dialogue option be variations on “where my dada :<”.
But even beyond that, there isn’t much room to actually roleplay in this game. The Lone Wanderer as a protagonist is painfully straight forward, and their two forms are “person with human decency” and “guy who condemns kids to slavery.”
Fallout 3, like any other RPG, has quests but I hesitate to call them that. They’re more like guides towards shooting galleries that sometimes stop and ask you if you want to be a nice person, if you want to use a perk/skill to bypass a third of the quest, or if you want to be unfathomably and needlessly cruel.
Even within the main story, there isn’t much framework to roleplay because the Lone Wanderer assimilates their father’s purpose without even giving the player a morton’s fork dialogue choice.

As for the actual main story… I’ve always hated it for the same reasons most other Fallout 3 haters dislike it - it’s flimsy, way too short, has no room for player choice, is entirely linear, etc etc - but as I replayed it, something stood out to me.

Do you know what the Great Man Theory is? In short, and in layman’s terms: The GMT is the belief that Great Men aren’t necessarily nurtured or cultivated, but are simply great from birth. It is these Great Men, and only these Great Men, that are allowed to dictate the course of history. It sucks, I hate it. We don’t use the phrase “product of their environment” for nothing.

I’m gonna take a hard pivot here. Bear with me.

When you think of the word “fascism” you likely have a strong image in your mind. Goose-stepping Nazis, death camps, red hatted Americans screaming in hordes, the most boring European men in suits putting uncomfortable emphasis on the word “superior”, that kind of thing.
Those aren’t invalid. Good on you. Fascism sucks.
But my mental image is defined by a lot of uncomfortably up-close experience with these kinds of people, and it’s boring.
My mental image of Fascism is the dark underside of the Great Man Theory. Of people who believe that, if Great Men are simply born, then Un-Great or ‘Degenerate’ Men are also born. If there are enough Great Men, why shouldn’t they rule? Why should the world cater to Degenerate Men when Great Men can be classified? We should keep Degenerate Men from usurping our Great Men! So on, so forth.

What I mean to say here is that Fascism as a belief system often manifests in incredibly boring ways that’re so banal they often go unnoticed even by people that’re otherwise keyed into such things - at least when they’re not like. Insane.

Fallout 3’s main story is passively Fascist, then.

I don’t think Bethesda Game Studios’ writers are Fascists. I feel you could probably convince Todd Howard to write “1312” on his shirt with a mild amount of transgender Charisma. There’s enough queer people in this IP that I don’t think they hold any real malice for anybody, albeit in much the same way I don’t think they hold any beliefs at all.

But they are incompetent writers, and they’ve accidentally made a story which has awful undertones.

Your first real hints as to the game’s nature come up if you take a walk around DC. There’s a lot of veneration towards the USA Founding Fathers that at first seems quaint and in line with the setting’s propaganda, but…
As the story goes on, it’s made abundantly clear that the player’s father was a Great Man, being the only one capable of rallying a team of scientists and the only one capable of actually putting Project Purity into motion.
When he inevitably dies thanks to the Enclave delaying the ending of my suffering by 2 hours, it falls to you - only you, nobody else - to follow in his footsteps. Because you’re a Great Man too!
In the original version of the game, you die activating the Purifier, and a statue of Thomas Jefferson looks down at you - unmoving, yet seemingly approving… BECAUSE HE’S A GREA-

There’s also the matter of Three Dog’s radio commentary which gets a little… Suspicious, I’d say? It starts out innocently enough, but even a neutral Lone Wanderer starts getting referred to as an actual saviour, with such overdramatic gestures such as Three Dog admitting you cured his misanthropy by being a saint. It’s rather telling that the Very Good Karma icon is a Jesus caricature.

RPGs as a genre do admittedly have a problem with sometimes accidentally stepping into the Great Man shit, it’s just the nature of the genre; to have things occur without the player’s influence or awareness is unsatisfying from a design perspective, so of course things have to be up to you. Wiser RPG devs go out of there way to ensure you’re just an everyman, or you’re woven into the setting in such a way that it avoids such pitfalls.
Fallout 3, unfortunately, leans a bit too into it. Especially with the way Raiders are portrayed, and how often Three Dog talks about them and other wasteland randoms as if they’re actual animals.

It always did strike me as odd that handing total control of Project Purity to the Enclave is rightfully seen as a mistake but handing it over to another authoritarian organization - the Brotherhood - is fine. Yes they’re allegedly benevolent but even in Fallout 3 they show a distinct disgust for ‘wasters’ and it’s stated outright they shoot Ghouls on sight. If you have a more holistic view of franchises (as opposed to my individualistic one), then Fallout 4 confirms they’ll go on to be an actual Fascist organization.

And what better topic to add into this mix than slavery?

In invoking many prominent figures from America’s history, Abraham Lincoln naturally gets brought up a lot, and so do slaves. Slavers make up a decent number of the Capital Wasteland’s population, and they’re everywhere. The few settlements dotted around the map have an eternal fear of them, and their base is perhaps second only to the Brotherhood’s in size + population.

But slavery in this game isn’t really substantial. It isn’t something to be commented on or observed or interrogated, it’s basically another vessel for quests. There’s one liberation faction, and one enslaving faction. Kill slavers, or enslave people. Enslaving people is 100 negative Karma, giving two bottles of water to a beggar is 100 positive Karma. Ethical slavery, yeah!
But even though there is a faction dedicated to the emancipation of slaves, that’s your job - if you want. The slave liberators are tucked away in a corner of the map, easily missable because there’s frankly not that much out that way. Their fate, and the fate of all slaves, is up to you.
I don’t like Fallout 4 all that much but even that game was willing to create the idea that people other than you were working to liberate the Synths.

All of this really compounds the banal and straightforward design: Arguably more than any other Bethesda game, or indeed open world game, Fallout 3 is the one that feels the most static. It is your playground because only You can do anything.

With that all said, there is one part of the game I admittedly think is decent.

Vault 101, the player’s home, is like almost every other Vault in the Bethesda Fallout canon: A social experiment under the guise of a shelter for humanity. Note that this concept basically doesn’t exist prior to Fallout 3; Vaults in 1/2/Tactics/Van Buren were simply shelters.
Vault 101’s experiment was simple: Stay closed. Never reopen. Compared to other experiments in Fallout 3 and subsequent games, this one was incredibly merciful.
Naturally, like other Vaults, 101 faces a violent reckoning when your father leaves - violating the experiment - and the Overseer reacts harshly.

When you return, the Vault has split into people who want to keep the door closed and people who want to go outside.
Uniquely for Fallout 3, there is no right answer here; barring ‘destroy the vault’, each branch of the story offers a degree of good Karma and neither are explicitly better than the others.
You could side with the rebels and open the Vault. They’d be free, and the resources of an active Vault could do good for the surrounding area and settlements… But the Wasteland is filled with a lot of people who’re pure evil, and while you might be able to survive out there there’s absolutely no guarantee anyone else will besides Butch.
Or, you could side with the Overseer and keep it closed. Despite the Overseer being authoritarian, the Vault did run fine until your dad leaves at the game’s proper start and considering future games it’s one of three depicted on-screen that actually were completely fine. Every negative about opening the Vault is a valid reason to side with him, but… It’s quietly brought to the player’s attention that the Overseer’s control over Vault Security isn’t as tight as he thinks it is, and they’re all too willing to take drastic measures to enforce compliance. Not to mention that while he might be able to end the conflict, the Vault still needs a doctor and families have been either destroyed or split asunder.

This is the only quest of its kind in Fallout 3.

Unfortunately like every quest in Fallout 3 even potentially poignant moments are ruined by the voice acting.

I have to commend Jennifer Massey (Dr Madison Li) and Erik Todd Dellums (Three Dog) for being the only voice actors who’re even pretending to give a shit about this script, because everyone else is phoning it in. This game only has a small handful of voice actors and pretty much all of them are audibly reading the script for the first time as they’re saying the lines.
More often than not, the subtitles carry a tone that the actual voice acting doesn’t. It’s marginally improved in the DLCs, but only slightly. In the base game, the same 5-6 voice actors will mumble out their lines with zero enthusiasm or variety. It does, to an extent, turn into accidental comedy when you walk into the Rivet City Market and have three different NPCs greet you in an identical voice.

There’s a somewhat sad irony to the fact that Fallout 3 can be played through New Vegas via Tale of Two Wastelands and yet it doesn’t make it better - it makes it worse. That’s really this game’s legacy, isn’t it? It needs sunlight to grow, but New Vegas is the sky and it won’t be having it.

With everything I've said, observed and read in mind, I'd ultimately argue that Fallout 3 shows more signs of a rushed, ramshackle development than New Vegas. Of the two, it's infinitely buggier, rife with cut/scrapped content and saddled with an omnipresent feeling of "this game isn't done".

As I reach the end of this review, I find myself struggling to answer a question: Why do I keep playing this game every couple of years?

It's not Schrodinger's Game, I don't need to observe it to find out if it's shit or not. Not once has my opinion on this game gotten even SLIGHTLY more positive over my various replays - which, as of writing, is the only game this sentiment still applies to.

But yet, like clockwork, I return to it. I install Fallout 3, then New Vegas, then Tale of Two Wastelands followed by the same QoL/maintenance mods I always get. I boot it, I beat it, I hate it. We're sitting at like ten full replays over the last decade. It defies all sense to me. Is this what a manic compulsion is? Something my body craves but the brain cannot comprehend? It's so very eldritch.

In typing that, I awakened a memory of the day Fallout 3 barged into my life, a week ahead of schedule thanks to a shipping error. My father text me while I was on my way out of high school for lunch: "Yer game's here". Wanting to play a shiny new game and not wanting to read The Cone Gatherers, I opted to make the lunch trip into a trip home.
Having a lot of free time these days, I decided to retrace my steps and walk that route again.

I boarded the train to my old town, and as trains do it came to a stop at the end of the route. I departed and made my way to the route I once took - mercifully, the train stops right behind where I went to school. Following my steps, I did everything as it was; popped into a cafe for a hot roll, got a can of juice from the (still open, yay!) newsagent, and took the long way around to what used to be my home.
I grew up in one of the many, many towns in Scotland whose only real purpose was to house poor people and host an ironworks/coal mine - and those were shut down decades ago. As a result, going back during the quieter hours fills me with the same kind of discomfort one can also vaguely experience in the remnants of Fallout 3's depiction of Washington DC. My old town, too, is a place mostly occupied by shambling zombies and people that might kill you if aggro'd.

You're perhaps expecting me to admit that returning to Fallout 3 is secret nostalgia, right? That I hold a soft spot for it and have been denying that?

No, I still think it's terrible, but I did find out why I keep coming back to it.

On my walk I passed by a bus shelter that, in my day, was little more than a standing rail encased in bricks with a sheet metal roof. Nowadays it's been renovated, with a bench, windows, and a bus timetable.

Looking back at it, I recalled a discussion I once had at that old bus shelter with a good friend of mine who we'll call Gary. We'd been out that day for quite some time, poking through forests and trails with our friends. It was a long day in the middle of a mild Scottish summer, something we no longer experience. By the time we were due to go home, both of us were exhausted.
Exhaustion, for teenagers, is often the harbinger of naked sincerity. The kind you can only really experience in that time where your 'golden years' are in their twilight and their end seems closer and closer every time you turn, trembling, towards the horizon.
I offer to walk Gary to his bus and he accepts. On the way, our chats are about normal things, nothing heavy. When we sit down, though, the silence around us creeps in. A busy town center, now without a soul save for the odd car. We sit by ourselves, wordless, as the last breaths of sunlight choke and die beneath the coming night.

I whip out my iPod Nano and, on the screen, is the last thing I was listening to: A song from In Flames' 'A Sense of Purpose', which at that point was two years old.
Gary scoffs, and we begin the ritual that teenage boys do where we rib one another for our tastes over and over.
But we're both tired, it's just past 8pm, and we were kinda enjoying the silence. The jabs and japes soon end without much fanfare, and silence falls in.
The bus was late. This I remember clearly. So late that Gary, a jovial and relatively stoic lad, was getting antsy.
Apropos of nothing, he turns to me.
"Mira," He asks in a surprisingly cold voice. "You know, I hate A Sense of Purpose, but I love it at the same time."
This so dumbfounded me, it did. My thinking was so very binary back then: Things I liked were good, things I disliked were bad. How and why would one love a bad thing?
"Gary, that makes no sense." I croak out, bewildered.
"Aye," So he says, like he just confessed to a murder. "Wanna know why?"
Of course I did, and nodded in assent.
"Things keep changing, and I'm scunnered [tn: tired] of it. But that album," He nods to my iPod as though it were a child - not a creature of sin, but innocently misguided. "That album is always shit. No matter how much time passes, it's always shite. I like that."
I didn't have an answer in me, much as I wished I did. It was my first introduction to the concept of 'terrible but I love it'. We sat in silence for another few minutes before the bus pulled up. I wished him well and we saw one another off.

Coming back to this memory 14 years later, I get it.

Fallout 3 and A Sense of Purpose were both 16 years ago.

In the intervening years, my tastes have changed. My top 25 from 2019 looks alien to me, the same list from 2015 utterly unbelievable. My walls are no longer adorned with band posters and game memorabilia, but shelves and stuffed rabbits I collect. While I once longed to work in the IT field, experience has made me pray that I never wear a shirt and tie again. I no longer live in the old mining town, the sun does not hit my face from the same angles while I rest. When I exit my house I do not see fields of green and distant towns, but endless houses, apartment blocks and industrial estates.

It is, suffice to say, rather obvious that not only have I changed, but so has the world around me. Indeed, I often wonder if I'm the same person as the one in these memories, or if they were simply taken from another when I was constructed at the age of 21. The changes I describe have occurred over what is now half of my entire lifespan, a period of so many years that not even my pristine memory can keep those years from occasionally blending together or faces from getting blurred.

But Fallout 3?

Fallout 3 never changes.

there are cathedrals everywhere for those with eyes to see :-)))

rlly makes you FEEL like ur 19 again and still experiencing religious delusions/paranoia. which is like such a specific feeling and thought process and not one I wouldve thought a video game could nail. but nah this took me right back to 2019 and how ill and scared i felt back then. loved any moment where indika was able to sit down and u would be able to cycle through all these beautiful camera angles where each one is centered on her through these like far away creep shots,, like she’s being stalked and looked at w hatred by some unknown figure. idk the feeling of being totally alone but still being watched and like ur never alone even when u want to be is ultimately like an entitled and self important one but it’s crazy to me that a game can get across these v specific feelings.

reminded me lots of i saw the tv glow,,, both ultimately about how living inside ur head and through fantasy is like a v unhealthy lifestyle and bad for mental/physical well-being. how any kind of fantasy whether a positive or negative one is end of day bad for u if it’s all consuming and u can’t live without the fantasies that play out in ur head. u end up seeing and hearing what’s inside ur head rather than what’s actually there in front of u.

religious horror team ico game (tho im sure a case could be easily made that that’s exactly what those games already are) or like alice madness returns w more contemporary aesthetic pretenses. kind of shit that yorgos lanthimos would be making if he wasnt a fucking coward and freak loll and im NOT just saying this bc there’s a disorienting usage of fisheye here tho more things should def use fisheye. zulawski vibesss here too for sure. love this,, finished all in one sitting,, had me in a trance fr
(which the gendered violence had more of a statement or take before the ending and not just in the final section but yk oh well play the cards that im given)

ok but where’s sativa tho😭