I once stumbled upon Fallout in the 90s by sheer luck. Don't look at my time, I still know how to solve its quests and game its systems. If this is your first rodeo, add another 10-50 hours of figuring things out or trying a genocide run. And, for your sake, leave the difficulty dials alone. Fallout doesn't hold your hand, yet it's sensible for an old title. But let's rip some band-aids first. The game doesn't hold up in all places (didn't know about Fallout FIXT patch, dammit). Make notes and save in different slots! Expect broken dialogues, journal entries, quests, annoying bugs and alt tab crashes. Besides, it's the kind of game where a sarcastic remark during an innocent conversation might lead to a brawl with a town full of people, their dogs, and their... Hold your horses, cowboy! Child-killing got cut by Bethesda. That's all they did... Hey, some of these brats carried grenades, alright?

Welp, no way but up from here! On October 23, 2077, a global nuclear war between the US and China defiled the planet, laying waste to civilization. One century later, you emerge. A Vault Dweller, born and raised in an advanced fallout shelter under the mountains of Southern California, Vault 13. You're not the Chosen One, just a goof who got the short end of a stick, tasked with obtaining a new water chip for the alma mater. Akin to a lost house cat, you're now free to find your own trouble in the bumf%ck nowhere. What shall become of you is to be defined by your ways with words and guns in relation to the many tribes of new Californians. A bunch of ruthless and rude madmen who use bottle caps as currency! See, in their world, the nuclear night is young. What's a century to half-life? The communal nightmare is still an open wound.

Fallout stuffs it chock full of clever homages and the joys of violent existentialism. Throwing together Dr Strangelove and Mad Max, fusing Day of the Triffids with Monty Python, it soaked up every drop of popular culture and spat it in our faces. Stylistically, Fallout is a post-apocalyptic Spaghetti Western set in a retro-future. Its prairies and canyons are a morbid eye candy. Smooth animations, great sprites, quality renders, and detailed backgrounds only punctuate the surrounding desolation. It sounds the part. Mark Morgan's music adds a sting to the bleak appeal, reflecting the scorched barrens dessecated by famine and blight. Poetically Jungian writing follows suit by driving heartbreaking narratives across a radioactive world while posing ethical dilemmas concerning the nature of mankind and death.

At that, Fallout is on pace with a movie, which always distinguished it from other CRPGs. There aren't that many personal quests or dialogue branches, but characters and morbidly wacky conundrums shine bright without outstaying their welcome. You can usually solve and create all problems in any given town in a matter of one or two hours like in an action flick. And it's all about you looking badass in a starring role, even your companions are but temporary sidekicks. These redshirts can be memorable, however, they also can't be directly controlled, so their stupid ass eats a burst of lead from someone's SMG point-blank before you know it. But hey, never refuse an offer to join! You can legally shoot any party member in the eyes and loot the corpse.

"Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?"

We're talking serious pacing in a game that has a turn-based combat system with Action Points at its core! Combat goes by quite fast most of the time. However, if a fight breaks out in a crowded place, you'd have to wait for every junkie in the vicinity to make a move. Go boil a kettle, save your nerves for the dicey rolls. Devastating crits, misses, and brutal takedowns with gory animations also apply to you in all of their isometric glory. You'll be slaughtered by people, rats, horrifying Deathclaws, and all kinds of abominable Cronenbergs. Blast their arms off, shoot them in the nuts, watch them drop to the ground squirming. Location-based damage allows you to put your victims in a world of pain before putting them out of their misery.

Now, spread that grim jam on top of iconic armour and guns of all types and sizes. At first, it would be hard to imagine anything louder than a .14mm. Then you'll find That Gun! A .223 hand cannon, which RIPS. And there's so much more. Pick a pulse grenade, a Molotov, or even a throwing knife - they all work in capable hands. Good old pistols, SMGs, and rifles are reliable, but it's not on until you hear Gatling miniguns singing rhapsodies over the violent parades on the streets of ruined cities. Where laughing mutants burn each other with flamethrowers and tear bodies apart using Ripper electric blades, power fists, and super-sledges. Living a dream! The spectacle is flavoured with a pinch of vivid text descriptions: "It knocked her over like a bad blind date", "his eyes popped like overripe grapes".

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. progression system in place wasn’t designed to give you "a balanced experience", it's here to deliver all of the above while also providing all the hilarious ways dialogs and ending cards can go. This thing is the bomb! Don’t be overwhelmed by its red herrings. It merely teases you to break the game and have a good time. S.P.E.C.I.A.L. involves several main things: Karma, stats, skills, and the most fun part - diverse traits and perks, basically passive abilities. You pick a perk every few levels from a list or receive freebies for certain in-world actions. Those aren’t always positive! Say, not everyone likes a graverobber. Your Karma goes up or down, depending on the ways you interact with the game’s world and often defines how badly certain characters or whole factions want to kick your ass.

"That's right. I've killed women and children. I've killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill."

Morality is the spice of it all. You can make a man angry or drive a whole city to extinction. I role-played as a good guy for a long time but kept salivating over the fun lines I can't say, the crimes I can't commit. Since then, I aced a murderhobo turbo-junkie, a boxer porn star, a prostitute slaver with a heart of gold. I made badass entries, used my friends as meat shields, lied through my teeth, and doomed whole communities! I saw that one can play sub-optimally and still find a way. Say, raiders hold a hostage you need and they're too strong. You can bluff your way through bloodlessly or have enough Unarmed to beat their leader in a duel. Maybe just inject yourself with two doses of Psycho and slip a fistful of dynamite into his pocket? Or come back with a Stealth Boy device, turn invisible and gaslight the leader by pretending to be a ghost! Try, die, experiment with drugs, find workarounds. That's the sh#t!

Fallout is as much about freedom as it's about war. Lurking in its shadow, you are sometimes a mediator, sometimes an instigator, always a profiteer and a stranger by design. What a sandbox! A grave world to quench your God complex. Walk the path of a messiah, be the scourge of the wastes, end up a junky, or a grifter's grifter. Each lonesome road you take shall stay imprinted on your mind. Fallout's influence never goes away. It's the son of the regiment, a by-product of a pop-cultural orgy, bearing its progenitors' genius as well as their flaws. Sure, it coughs up blood nowadays, but it still has the power to slip into your dreams. Don't let some petty grudges take over when dealing with a marvel that turned the tables on the whole industry. Of course, it isn't perfect. It's janky, it's vulgar, and it bleeds over everything. Because Fallout is quintessential punk.

My curator Big Bad Mutuh

Finally, it has come full circle! The original game made me who I am today - a compulsive hoarder. Only in virtual worlds, thankfully. I was so traumatized by all the panic and creature horror, but most of all - the inventory horror! Unprecedented for the time, the scarcity angle caught me off guard, and, for better or worse, it was never repeated to the same degree within the main series. To this day, I always have oodles of consumables left unused in any RPG, boast Amazon storages of ammunition in shooters, and I've beaten Silent Hill 2 into submission by primarily using a nail board. Bless your shivering, shrieking core, PTSD! Here I am, sinking my teeth into the necrotic pudding once more. Rich and creamy.

In the light of what I just said, it may sound weird, but RE sort of calms me down. There's no other way - you pull yourself together or get pulled apart. Collected, I tune in to its rhythmic pacing and calculated tension. I soak in the atmosphere, flow with the ambiance, and appreciate how the game treats its ripe horror tropes. While my love for Silent Hill is high-functioning, cerebral, what I feel for this franchise is visceral, almost carnal. Undeniably, I'm a die-hard fan. The last time I could call myself a fan happily, I was playing Fallout 2 while listening to Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water. But it's coming back now, it's coming back. Happiness, not Limp Bizkit.

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I suppose I need to start this thing off properly with the game's story? I don't even think I need to give you my take on it. Who gives a crap about my thoughts on Mozart, for example? Okay, here you go: virus bad, Barry is my hunny bunny, mansion traps, monsters Cronenberg, your inventory is full, Salieri was falsely accused and then the fallacy was sung by poets for drama points. Not that sophisticated of a premise by modern standards, but a trendsetting classic nonetheless. I would never think of adding or subtracting anything like I wouldn't change a thing about a cat. Here, the golden cheese of outlandish voice acting got fixed, however, the old one remains out there forever, so I don't mind.

With a few notable exceptions, backtracking-intensive puzzles boil down to "I can't wait to get rid of this thing to save up some inventory space" kinds of entente. To boot, every so often, you're welcome to die after failing to figure out the logic behind a strict sequence of steps to perform on the double. No hard feelings though. Each time I inserted another object into another slot and heard the satisfying *click* or took the right course of action, it echoed inside my weary soul. I made some progress, I freed up some space, I lived, after all! Indulging an important relieving pause, my mind starts racing again, I'm on the move. I definitely saw a herb and some sweet shotgun ammo during my last impetuous scamper through the eastern wing.

The remake has added an "Alternative" movement type as an option, but I initially went for tank controls anyway. The keyboard lends itself fine to this scheme, this is how I played the original. Yeah, yeah, you can't just lounge back and enjoy yourself while playing, but I'm okay with hunching like a true nerd. Tank controls have their charm, even some nostalgic value to me. Besides, horror only gets juicier the more uncomfortable it makes you feel... so I told myself until I finally found a spare mini-USB adapter, plugged in my gamepad, and tried the alternative. What can I say? Nothing beats instant turning, tank controls have no chance against such an obscene advantage! Although, they deserve to be honored for serving us faithfully - like horses before the age of cars or spittoons before the age of swallowing our phlegm.

Speaking of paradigm shifts, they did a number on this remake's presentation. The competent use of dynamic lighting and crisp shadows makes certain moments even more dreadful than before, and locations - even more memorable, despite being somewhat drained of color. The detailed body horror of smooth models, headsplosions, and grimy pre-rendered backgrounds look fantastic, getting emphasized by the cinematic camera. In professional hands, dramatic camera angles really tie it all together! Nothing can set things up and create meticulously controlled experiences for a player quite as they do. And thanks to them, the perfect 80's horror sets that are this mansion's intricate, interconnected environments are the scariest character in the game.

Remember the room where you see a zombie around the corner in a mirror or these infamous hallways with cracking windows? Such well-manipulated scares! And you don't always need a threat for things to get eerie - like with these menacing staircase shots snatched directly from Alone in the Dark. Creating tension where there isn't a thing otherwise (as yet) and sustaining it is high art where, needless to say, the masterful sound design does half the job. Sure, clutch angles also cause such jarring issues as obstructing your vision when it's least appropriate, ending up with you getting blindsided by something that your character should've noticed from a mile away. I brush it off by saying that beauty requires sacrifice and sometimes it's chunks of your face.

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You know what would be dakka? To just push-kick a zombie. Could one possibly catch your foot? Then again, hit too hard and you'll get stuck in its rotting guts. Zombie theories! Many of us are wired to always loop back to those in moments of respite. Anyway, it took me a while to learn how to evade properly, and even then, I wasn't exactly a floating butterfly, so I died a lot. In RE, however, losing a whole hour of progress is not a huge tragedy since redoing everything in a more efficient way is a treat in itself. To a degree. It's a genuinely hard game full of devious beginner's traps. After 3 hours of rapidly snowballing collapse, I swallowed my pride and restarted on medium difficulty, amply lubing the inverted difficulty curve.

Even with the new controls and the addition of defensive items seen in recent remakes, the game stays challenging, which is appreciated by veterans and amateurs alike. As for me, I'm happy with my humble "easy" victory for which poor Jill had to die a thousand deaths. I can't say I'm dying to experience an even smaller inventory, so, Chris, my apologies. Jill is the one who's packing. But enough about dying! Killing here is pleasant... and punitive. So cathartic, gory, fairly gratuitous, though simultaneously discouraged by sensible ammo shortage and fast Crimson Head zombies who start spawning later in the game from the bodies you made, but didn't burn or decapitate. It sounds like a nuisance, but no enemy is worse than dogs and birds anyway, trust me. The same goes for their in-game counterparts.

Being restricted and weak lends itself to the genre perfectly. Resident Evil knows how to play these cards expertly, it's confident enough to make you cooperate on its terms. I loved every predicament that it put me through! Making someone enjoy a thing they predictably would is admirable, but to think up mechanics that are repelling on paper and make them work in that someone's best interests I call pure brilliance. Every time you have to leave the safe room, you feel the taste of iron in your mouth, lick your lips that suddenly went dry. Thrilled, you tense up, wondering if you have the willpower for the constricting adventure howling in the corridors beyond. Inhale. Clench that shotgun, focus your senses. Turn the knob. Exhale. Run back in because you forgot to put the damn ink ribbons into the box.

My curator Big Bad Mutuh