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What the developers clearly intended as a joke hit me with unexpected force: I couldn’t help but imagine a life’s last moments spent sitting on the floor of a bathroom, munching on the final mediocre pleasure he’ll ever experience, patiently waiting for the end. I discover a skeleton in a bathroom stall, next to his ragged bones a single can of potato chips, yet to expire after 200 years. At some point, the initial unexpected hopefulness that characterizes the spectacular introduction of “Fallout 4” begins to wear thin, and its world becomes progressively, and unintentionally, bleaker. Or, you can simply remain indifferent, enjoying the exploration and adventure at every turn, playing mercenary seeking payment for your joyful journey.īut I chose to save the wasteland anyway. Download an extra content pack and you can become a pirate king, exploiting innocents and rebuilding society as a mob protectorate. There’s a shining city built inside of an old baseball stadium, a quaint town to provide a safe haven for misfits and outcasts, and any number of factions that seek to redeem the wasteland and reawaken civilization within the Boston ruins. Even among the carnage people have carved out lives, their dirt-worn faces revealing their pride in stocking a small, stable family farm instead of succumbing to the temptations of raider anarchy.

The premise of “Fallout 4” screams destitution and loss, but the game itself abounds with optimism. You’re free to attack civilians, to steal everything that isn’t bolted down, to leap and jump through abandoned labs, crumbled homes and ghostly playgrounds. This isn’t an end-of-the-world scenario where you’re the victim of circumstances outside of your control, but where you’re instead liberated by the sudden collapse of everything around you. There is freedom in the hopelessness - absent a clear objective or a society to whose rules you must bend, you’re suddenly able to be the powerful character you’ve always dreamed of. It’s a very different version of the apocalypse than the one we’re living through. Your character’s spouse has just been killed, their child kidnapped, and now the world they knew is broken beyond repair, but the first thing you are meant to notice when you first step out of your protective underground vault is the vast, perfectly blue sky, stretching infinitely into the distance.Īnd unlike my real life, in “Fallout 4” I can sprint into that endless pale expanse for as long as my character’s mediocre lung capacity allows. The sad remnants of buildings litter the horizon, while a housekeeping robot bumbles among them waiting for an owner it never expects to return. At the game’s beginning, your character, the messianic Lone Survivor, steps blinking out into the sun 200 years after a nuclear apocalypse reduces Boston to a crumbled wasteland.