It wasn't love at first sight. Trust was earned. Boundaries were broken, new frontiers discovered. The first go-around, the curve seemed too steep for a (maybe) half decade ago me. My genre greenhorn brain slid right off of the opaque UI design and archaic map-tiling of this world I did still recognize as conspicuously sticking out from the noise, as an obviously full-bodied, end-to-end realized creative vision. Through osmosis, I knew it was hard to stick with, but rewarding. That its extinct design choices were long in the tooth for a gamer weaned on contemporary titles, but ultimately only tallied up to a few nasties of the time in a waterskin, whose sustenance was to die for... that wasn't the experience I had, though. Blanketed by the blinding bluelight of my computer, I tried to engage. And tried again. And again. It was tiring. I left frustrated, but mostly ashamed. This was, I would soon come to learn, one of the greats, belonging to the venerated house of literary epics in the medium, whose greatness would still be diminished sans interactivity. I wanted to enjoy it. That night, I practically needed to. It was nerd homework, and it sure felt like it. I did not enjoy it.
... and then we whip zoom to the present, and I don't know what to tell you. The nigh hundreds of hours I have poured into this game and its sequel on multiple platforms are saying a lot, very loudly. Chalk it up to mentally maturing, to the passage of time softening my vitriol, to one day waking up cognitively rewired... I wouldn't know either. Let me ask you: what makes a game a sore enough thumb to not only be understood proceeding the first playthrough and be capable of practically overwriting a player's personal history with it, of overriding their primal, long-standing, emotional predilections? An answer, if any, is magic.
Where to begin unmaking the tapestry? I could talk about the spellbinding hook, the cruel imperialism of the power armor on its cover and in its late-game, the sheer presence of Ron Perlman, the mobius strip of possible character synthesization, the openness of its frontier, the gentle hand-holding caress of its town-to-town progression, the expanse of its prose, the webs of its dialogue, the quaint sheen of its pre-rendered environs, the sprouts and the rotting, the rises and the falls, the beginnings and the endings in either sense, the guns, the mutants, the struggle, the humanity. But given the foot we started on... I'd still talk about it as a companion, not something need render into words. In the pursuit of analytical critique, the thanks are rarely exchanged. Thank you, Fallout. Thank you, Tim Cain, and every last person who worked on this game.
And, one day... maybe you'll ask me to come back again... and maybe, just maybe...
I'll say maybe.
