Let me tell you about my trek through the Glowing Sea. It's bad enough wandering around the post-apocalyptic ruins of the Commonwealth—formerly known as the greater metropolitan area of Boston, Massachusetts—what with the roving bandits, braindead ghoul packs, and other mutated nightmares stalking about. The Glowing Sea gives true meaning to the word "wasteland," a place where nothing grows and you don't need a Geiger counter to tell you the radiation levels are off the charts. And yet it's deep inside this no-man's land, beyond the square boundaries of the mapped territory shown on your Pip-Boy 3000 portable computer, where you—the protagonist of Fallout 4—must venture at least once in order to find a genius scientist who can help you locate your kidnapped son.
It wasn't so much the journey there that proved nigh impossible, notwithstanding my close encounter with some automobile-sized radscorpions hiding out near an abandoned Red Rocket gas station. The real trouble was the journey back. I had crouched about almost the entire way, sniping or avoiding what creatures I happened to see and trying not to be noticed. I'll never forget the moment when, finally close to a save point, I crested a small hilltop. In my attempt to steer clear of the roaming monsters I'd spotted off in the distance, I inadvertently stumbled upon a legendary deathclaw. I heard the creature's snarling scream before I even saw its towering form lurch toward me. One swipe from the bipedal mutant would have ended me, exposed as I was without any armor, dressed only in a hazmat suit so as to protect me from the aforementioned radiation. I had just enough time to switch on my Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.) and blast the bastard with two explosive rounds from my pipe pistol—hitting it not quite at point-blank range but close enough to suffer near-fatal blowback as its corpse toppled right to my feet. I'd survived.
When discussing Fallout 4, it's important to distinguish which version of the game we're talking about, because there's Fallout 4 and then there's Fallout 4 on survival mode, a hardcore difficulty setting that was added to the game shortly after launch. I've only played the latter version of the game, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Fallout 4's survival mode introduces much more than just tougher and hardier enemies, although it certainly does that. It also switches on a number of game-changing features that enhance the simulative aspects of the game and heighten the tension throughout. Fast travel is disabled, turning large stretches of the game into a high-stakes walking simulator. The player's carrying capacity is severely reduced, and the game adds weight volume to all forms of ammunition. It becomes essential both to eat and drink regularly as a means to stave off stat-altering thirst and hunger statuses. Not only that, most food and water will increase your radiation level and susceptibility to disease. Most challenging of all, the player can only save their game by sleeping, and the only way to sleep is to find a bed, mattress, or sleeping bag—hence the epic challenge of surviving the Glowing Sea, where no such save points exist.
As a huge fan of the pre-Bethesda Fallout games of the late 1990s, there's simply no getting around the fact that the series is not what it used to be. While it retains many of the classic Fallout trappings we know and love—the Nuka Cola bottles, the underground vaults, the power armor, the whole 1950s retro-future aesthetic, and so much more—it lacks the wit, imagination, and basic writing chops of the original games, which owe a huge debt to the ideas set forth by the likes of Harlan Ellison and Richard Matheson.
And yet that still takes almost nothing away from the incredible world Bethesda has crafted in Fallout 4. It's a game to which I've lost hundreds of hours trekking back and forth, exploring and scavenging its beautifully decrepit cities and buildings, cleansing the ruined wastes of the creatures and marauders who inhabit them, and slowly working to remake the world into a more habitable place by way of the game's clunky but robust settlement system—a new mode for the series that lets you craft and manage your own shantytown villages. It might be Bethesda's finest offering yet.
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"On the List" is a series where I talk about games that could conceivably appear on a best-games-of-all-time list.
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