Why Fallout 4 is my game of the year

I enjoyed much of this year’s crop of PC and console games. I still see playing cards when I close my eyes thanks to Balatro, rescuing bots in the utterly charming platformer Astrobot gave me joy, and hearing the Yorkshire dialect on my Switch with the bonkers Thank Goodness You’re Here was hilarious.

That said, I spent most of my precious gaming hours in Fallout 4, a title I’d already spent days exploring on its 2015 release. Let’s be clear — I already have a huge backlog of unplayed games quietly judging from their libraries. I also don’t make a habit of returning to open-world games, not after already sinking a hundred hours liberating outposts, completing umpteen side quests and collecting 200 blasted feathers.

But something compelled me to the crumbling, nuked Commonwealth to once face all manner of irradiated fauna and collect bobbleheads — this year’s phenomenal Fallout TV adaptation.

Showstopper

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Once the preserve of straight-to-DVD rental bins, gaming adaptations are now generally handled with care and love for the source material (sit down, Borderlands movie). The Last of Us. Castlevania. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Arcane. It’s refreshing to see these franchises thriving on the small screen. The Fallout series perfectly captures the spirit of surviving in a circa 2200s post-apocalyptic wasteland with its signature oddball yet optimistic charm.

It does so unashamedly too, with the show not skimping over goofy game logic like those magical Stimpaks, chonky power armor or Lucy MacLean (played brilliantly by Ella Purnell) referencing her character’s SPECIAL attributes.

As a lifelong lover of the franchise since playing the original game on my beige Pentium, the whole show made me melancholic for that world again, and the only way to scratch that itch was to venture once more into Fallout 4, laser pistol in hand and Dogmeat in tow.

Like the show, we begin proceedings mere minutes before the Great War, with you and your family hightailing it to the nearest Vault before the nukes drop. Minutes later, you awaken from cryosleep and have lost everything. Your spouse has been murdered, and your son kidnapped. 

Shipping up to Boston

The nuked ruins of Boston provide F4’s setting on your search for vengeance and your progeny. And the irradiated Commonwealth is a joy to explore. There’s settlements aplenty, not least the wonderful baseball-themed Diamond City, a transformed Fenway Park. 

There’s also the Glowing Sea, which will give your Geiger counter kittens. And a closed yet friendly community named Covenant that hides a dark secret. You can easily spend 200 hours combing this redrawn corner of Massachusetts and still not uncover everything. 

Combat is also the best in the series, with more than 100 weapons to trouser. It may not have the tight shooting mechanics of a proper FPS, but dispatching enemies with all manner of projectiles — including nukes, cannonballs and railway spikes — in slow-mo VATS is always satisfying.

Notably, I loved F4’s diverse sidequests. The Secret of Cabot House involves a seemingly immortal family asking for help with their supernaturally powerful patriarch. The Silver Shroud has you acquiring a legendary set of clothes and becoming the feared vigilante who dispenses merciless justice. The standout for me was The Last Voyage of the U.S.S. Constitution, which tasks you with restoring a former museum galleon to life at the request of its robotic crew. 

It’s the unpredictable spin of these quests and how you can resolve them your way that makes them among Bethesda’s best side content. 

Notably, F4’s many quest threads fit the urgency of the story. There’s no cataclysmic event or big bad about to ruin your world, so you’re free to wander the wasteland and attend to the most mundane chores with carefree abandon. 

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Wayward son

When you do want to progress the main questline, things eventually come to a head. Your travels bring you to a reunion with your son, now an old man and director of the shadowy organisation, The Institute. Yes, you’ve been on ice decades longer than first thought, giving a gargantuan rug pull to your role as a parent to a missing child. 

Now, the “Dad” genre is pervasive throughout gaming. God of War. The Last of Us. The Walking Dead. All are titles that reflect the older gamer demographic. Where these titles have a middle-aged protagonist protecting some young ‘un from wrong ‘uns, Fallout 4 takes that trope and nukes it from orbit.

Here, your son Shaun is who many view as the chief antagonist of Fallout 4. Sure, the Institute seems like a safe haven for science, free thinking and rational thought, but in true Fallout fashion, the reality is much more twisted. The organization seeks to preserve humanity, but in its own vision. Naturally, that means building a better world by razing the current one to the ground. It means kidnapping people in the shadows and replacing them with synthetic copies. It means recapturing synths who have broken free of their programming shackles and desire freedom. 

This was the rub — some nefariously shady stuff I just can’t get onboard with. But here was my own flesh and blood making a heartfelt plea for my help.

Naturally, I used every opportunity to sass Shaun to the fullest extent of my Charisma stat, stringing along the emboldened tyke and his scientists as a seemingly loyal agent. When in reality, I was playing double agent, relaying intel I’d gleaned to the Railroad, which was offering safe haven to defecting synths.

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Nuclear family

Of course, you can’t swear fealty to multiple factions in the endgame — you need to choose (and never those Brotherhood of Steel mech-bros, amirite?). So, as the blinding light engulfed the Institute’s topside, enveloping its villainous machinations in nuclear fire and rubble, I felt a pang of sadness. 

I’d not only killed my digital son but laid waste to his entire life’s work. When was the last time a videogame let you do that? As a real-life dad on this second playthrough, this course of action rocked me hard and lingers in my thoughts about the game to this day. But reader, you have to understand — Shaun had been a very naughty boy. 

Perhaps he stops being your son the moment he’s taken from that cryotube. Perhaps the world, as fragile and on a knife edge as it is, deserves to choose its own fate. Is there a future playthrough where I might side with Shaun? Perhaps. Like all great science fiction, Fallout has always held up a mirror to gamers as they wrestle with amoral choices, and I’m always here for it. 

Because war, war never changes.