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.