Goal	Status
🏆 Finished game	✅
💯 Completionist	✅
📋 High Score	N/A
📺 Video	❌

Review

Like The Binding of Isaac, this is a game for which my regard sharply declined as I got older and developed a better grasp on the difference between enjoyment and compulsion. When Fallout 3 came out, I was 23, I had never played a Bethesda-style open-world RPG—I had missed out on the Elder Scrolls train until years later—and I found the formula almost supernaturally compelling. As you may have been able to glean from my other reviews on this site, my most valued video game quality is exploration. Give me a big world with lots of stuff to find and I'll give you hours and hours of my life. And buddy, FO3 has more miles of collapsed subway tunnels to explore and tons of bent tin cans to find than you can shake a radioactive stick at.

If any game I've finished could unironically be called a "murder simulator", it's this one. The main point of Fallout 3, the reason all the other stuff exists, is to put the player in as many situations as possible where they get to kill other human beings. Sure, it's "self defense", in the most paranoid right-wing castle doctrine libertarian American power fantasy way possible. Scumbags—you know they're scumbags becaue they show up as red dots on your compass instead of green—will charge at you with tire irons and switchblade knives, oblivious to or apathetic of your heavy combat armor and military assault rifle. They won't run away if you fire a warning shot. Trying to mug you, the player character, the most heavily armed person on the planet, is the hill they're inexplicably ready to die on.

The game makes sure to scatter a bunch of fictional superdrugs around their lairs (environmental storytelling!) to give the impression that they aren't in control of their actions, that their superdrug addictions have turned them into mindless killing zombies; but you, the player character, can take these same drugs and they won't have the same effect on you. You can take so many superdrugs that you become heavily addicted and experience multifarious withdrawal symptoms, but you never lose control of your actions. Your vision goes momentarily blurry every now and then, and you have minor stat penalties. You can go into any town and find a doctor who will instantly cure multiple debilitating addictions for pocket change. The scumbags could enter any abandoned building and find enough bent tin cans to trade for immediate wellness in about 30 seconds. But no, they will suicidally charge at the player by the hundreds, because the player needs hundreds of humans to blow apart with their realistic assault rifle. That's the point of the game. It is technically an RPG, there are charisma and speech stats, and there are characters you can persuade, but it's totally perfunctory. You can never talk to the scumbags and offer them help. They're in the game to be murdered, by you. That's why their compass dot is red instead of green.

When you blow the scumbags apart with your realistic assault rifle, the camera zooms in and goes into slo-mo so you can see their heads separating from their bodies. The camera lingers on the gore, almost lovingly. The gore is so finely detailed that you can clearly see their carotid arteries. This detail didn't appear from the ether; the game artists sat down and carefully rendered the carotid arteries so you, the player, will feel like more of a badass when you blow them apart with your basically-an-AR-15, a gun functionally identical to the one that was used in whatever the United States' spree killing of the day is.

What does the game have to say about all this horrific violence? Well, not much. About 5% of the game is devoted to a quest where you're trying to help the people of the wasteland have clean water, presumably even the scumbags. No one really comments on all the human life standing in your way, no one ever points out how weird it is how many people are on a suicidal quest to end your life for no reason. Any attempt at a hopeful or humanitarian message is completely toothless, at odds with the constant realistic bloodthirsty sadistic gun violence the rest of the game exists to facilitate. All of the characters are uncanny. Nothing that happens makes sense. The only real message is that there are only killers and victims in this world, other people can't be trusted, and in the absence of rule of law, all you can rely on is your brutality, your arsenal, your willingness to kill the other guy before he inevitably kills you. Fallout 3 is a game I've played for hundreds of hours, and I could play for hundreds more. It makes me feel dead inside.

Score

N/A

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