Radioactive Adventures With Fallout 4 - Part 1

Radioactive Adventures With Fallout 4

Part 1 - Nice Knowing You, Nate!

I want to start this entry by saying that I am an obsessive gamer. By this I mean that when I buy a game, I play it obsessively until it's pried from my withered, gnarled hands and I'm forced by those who love me to acknowledge the outside reality once more. So for those thinking 'wow she's late to the Fallout 4 party', you are correct, I am, and there's a reason for this. That reason is Skyrim. I have literally been playing Skyrim too much for anything else to get a look in until now. I regret nothing.

Anyway, my friends managed to go on about Fallout 4 enough for me to finally buy it, and I'm chronicling my first play-through here so I can pretend that this is a constructive, somewhat-adult use of my time. It should be noted that I've never played a Fallout game before. As mentioned above: too busy playing Skyrim.

Opening cut-scene:

'War never changes...' says a very tired-sounding dude over some flash-back footage of his grandfather fighting in a conflict that literally changed the face of warfare forever. I'm not sure if this grizzled dude is supposed to be me? Anyway, he's from the year 2077, when America has embraced the wonders of nuclear power and this has kept society frozen in some kitschy 1950s aesthetic for some reason. Also there's robots, and that's cool. But unfortunately all is not well in retro-nuclear America. Apparently even though everyone has robot butlers, social unrest still rears its ugly head, and uh-oh! The threat of atomic warfare is on the horizon...

I spent about thirty minutes in the character creation screen, carefully bringing my scrappy post-apocalypse adventurer to life. Meet Jinks:

Life goals or wife goals?

Jinks has seen shit. Jinks lived through stuff you couldn't even cook up in your wildest, most underwear-soiling nightmares. She's ex-military. She's part-cockroach. She's the bastard love child of the Artful Dodger and one of those badass old lady bikers from Mad Max: Fury Road. She's also apparently married to a wholesome young man twenty years her junior who keeps complimenting her on her nose, which is nice...

Anyway, once I'm done crafting my new persona, my nice trophy husband (apparently he is called Nate) demands his primping time too and I'm left to explore our house. I count one baby, one affable robot butler and one tasteful family board game:

Hey kids! Isn't trivialising mass murder fun!

My robot butler invites me to drink some coffee it made and then goes to comfort my screaming child for me. Nate ambles in to the kitchen and stands there looking pretty for a while, and I have to say that this is a very comfortable slice of domestic pie. But alas! Even in an atomic Utopia there is no escape from nuisance callers...

Hi! Can I interest you in some plot advancement?

This salesman is not at all put off by the grizzled face of pain and world-weariness that greets him at the door, and this endears him to me, so I end up being quite receptive towards his spiel about underground nuclear bunkers and the coming end of times. I give him my name and my stats (sank most of my points into intelligence, perception and endurance - we'll see how that pans out) and then he's off again, and I'm left to get back to domestic bliss. Except this is when I notice something that horrifies me to my very core, and brings everything I thought I knew crashing down around me. 

It's a law diploma. 

MY law diploma. 

This game is trying to tell me that Jinks is a mere lawyer?????

LIES!!!

I'm still recovering from this bombshell when it turns out that the news is now on in the background, announcing the dropping of actual atomic bombshells all over the country, and now I've got to run screaming for the hills to get to the bunker that I literally just signed up for. Nate remembers to grab the baby (which is lucky because I forgot he existed) and then we're running along with the rest of the townsfolk towards apparent safety. No one seems to want to respond to my attempts at friendly conversation. They all choose screaming and incoherent gibbering instead, which is fair, I suppose, but I'm still offended.
After a bit of panicked running, the hubby and I have reached what looks like a military compound. The salesman is there getting turned away by guards, which seems pretty dickish of the company he's been so desperately shilling for, but they let me in so I don't really care.
We get directed towards a platform, and it starts taking us underground just as everything goes KA-BOOM, which is very dramatic. Nate reassures me that we're all okay (I mean, that was a lot of radiation that missed us by a nanosecond but fine?) I think he's doing that for his benefit more than mine because I definitely didn't ask, but whatever, it's time to suit up and settle in at our new underground bunker. Except...this apparently involves getting shoved into cryogenic freezing chambers. That seems suspicious? Whelp, no time to question it as I'm getting all frozen, so that's happened now, I guess. Me and my little nuclear (heh) family are officially human popsicles...until I conveniently wake up an undisclosed amount of time later just in time to helplessly watch some mysterious workers kidnap my baby and murder my husband!!!

Literally fridged, my poor sweet Nate...

So I guess that's the big quest, then. But first: escape! Unfortunately I get re-frozen before I can bust out of my pod and dole out some sweet, sweet vengeance on those spouse-killing baby-nappers, and another indeterminate amount of time passes before I'm finally freed. I go over to Nate's pod and loot his body like the respectful widow I am (hopefully his wedding ring is useful) and then it's explorin' time! Attempts to open the other pods and free my neighbours prove fruitless, and apparently they're all dead anyway so my hopes of finding allies so soon are quickly abandoned in favour of scavenging. I pick up coffee cups, clipboards, and other useless items that my hoarding tendencies will not permit me to leave behind, until finally I find a baton. This is conveniently just before I encounter GIANT MUTANT COCKROACHES which apparently I can loot for gross cockroach meat after I've successfully smashed them to pieces. So that's a food source locked down, at least.

Accessing various computer terminals reveals the shady corporate experiment it turns out I unwittingly signed up for, as well as giving me the chance to alleviate some of the stress of witnessing my husband's murder and the nuclear apocalypse by playing videogames.

This is definitely the time to be going for a high score...

Once I've had enough fun playing a game inside my game I go back to looking around. The logs revealed some kind of rebellion happening here while the rest of us popsicles were sleeping, but judging by the skeletons I'm finding, this was a while ago. Or the roaches picked the bodies clean, I don't know. Anyway, eventually I find a gun and ammunition. This is good. These are Jinks' tools. Now the roaches really don't stand a chance.

Soon enough, I'm back at the entrance of the compound, armed and ready to get the fuck out. One of the lab coat-wearing skeletons relinquishes his Pip Boy to me, and once I strap it on I can finally open an inventory, which is a profound relief because the fact that I couldn't until now was really starting to irritate. I have a quick flick through to check that my collection of coffee cups and cockroach meat is as bountiful as expected, and then apparently I'm officially ready for the outside world. So. I hop onto the platform, press the appropriate button, and am gradually reintroduced to the surface. But what, exactly, will I find up there?

I hope those cockroaches weren't babies...

Part Two