The misadventures of an adult gaming n00b

I was blowing with pent-up rage on a perfectly humdrum Saturday afternoon. Holed up in the black hole that is my boyfriend’s room (mostly because its windows are blacked out, insulated from the rest of the outside world), the cause of my irrepressible anger was my fourth death, in mere minutes, in a Fallout 4 starter level. I could feel my blood pressure spiking through the goddamn roof; my hands were shaking and all I could do, short of smashing the controller into bits, was scream at a pillow. I was getting slaughtered by a bunch of raiders terrorizing a few survivors of a nuclear apocalypse. Outside, there was a massive mutant monster called the Deathclaw — a horned humanoid devil with razor-sharp claws, dropping by to make things even more miserable. I had plenty of ammo and places to hide, but of course I didn’t know what “stealth” mode was yet. My strategy, like in real life, was to wing it: go blindly inside the building, clean it out, and emerge almost unscathed. But on the first few tries, just as I crossed the threshold, there were three dudes waiting to ambush me from the second floor, guns ablaze while the green bar that indicates my health slowly winnowed down to zero and my character got a slow-motion death — bullets perforating my body and all. It was excruciating. At that point, I decided it might have been a bad idea to purchase a P2,500 video game that just defeats me every step of the way.

Many, many tries later, I eventually managed to butcher every last piece of scum in the area — including the Deathclaw. I felt like a badass, just as I discovered a power armor that boosted my stats, effectively transforming me into a killing machine. I walked with the clanking of my metal armor, a warning sound of doom, as my minigun rattled 5mm shells at 60,000 RPM. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” — though in this case, the world has already died and I am walking a wasteland that used to be Boston.

Fallout Boy

Fallout 4 was one of the biggest video games of 2015. It comes seven years after the third installment, which I never played. As soon as I got my PS4 last Christmas, I got a copy of Fallout 4, thinking it would be an amazing game to start my new journey as a video game geek. It sold thousands of copies! And caused a drop in PornHub’s traffic during its release day! Surely this would be a great game to play! It was. But it took several misses, character deaths, and actual rage attacks before I discovered the joys and the pleasures of its open-ended world.

A friend, highly skilled in the wisdom and wonders of video games, did not recommend Fallout 4 as a starting point. It was overwhelming, especially for someone who enjoyed the mindlessness of Plants VS Zombies or the enthralling meekness of Super Mario World 3D. Aside from a Gameboy, I’ve never owned a game console. No SNES or PS that ruined homework for me (which, I guess, was a good thing). Despite the threat of deadlines and, ugh, required interactions with real human beings, Fallout 4 consumed me. I played several hours of it after the Christmas break and well into the workweek of the New Year. I stayed up all night trying to complete quests, butcher more people, and loot ruins for valuable items. I was the lone wanderer, slinging guns and hoarding irradiated food as I exacted revenge.

Plunging Headlong

In a nutshell, that’s what Fallout 4 is: you emerge from a cryogenic sleep 200 years after a nuclear apocalypse has wiped out most of the population, and you are plunged headlong into a quest to recover your son. Survivors are holed up in ramshackle communities (Fenway Park is reconstructed as Diamond City, one of the major settlements in the game), with several factions, including the fascistic, technology-fearing Brotherhood of Steel and the shadowy “boogeyman” scientists of The Institute, trying to take over and instill order in 1950s-era Boston, now called the Commonwealth. The game presents you as an outlaw messiah, helping people and eliminating threats “for the greater good”; but there is something more sinister afoot, something that gives the video game — a lowly form that could never be considered “art,” as Roger Ebert once suggested — a surprisingly impassioned portrait of a dying world trying to get back on its feet. As you move from one quest to another, it will take you through the bitter and strikingly personal aftermath of a Great War: homes left as soulless shells, workplaces, groceries and diners strewn with skeletons of unfortunate humans, portents of emotional struggles that broke families and allegiances, and lives interrupted by boundless greed and corruption. Towards the end, Fallout 4 transforms its revenge narrative into a bleak and heartrending one, wrapping the game up as a “cohesive, compelling, soul-crushing story,” as Forbes magazine declares. I have yet to reach said ending, but I am already reeling from this potential that Fallout promises.

I’ve never expected such depth from a video game. And I certainly did not expect that I would fall in love with its vastness and unbound spirit of adventure. Sure, I may not be as good as a “gamer” should be. I’m a casual dabbler at best, trying to see if I can give this video game thing a chance, a sort of wish-fulfillment thing for the eight-year-old in me who used to gawk at our neighbors playing Super Mario and tennis on their brand-new SNES. In hindsight, open-world video games such as Fallout, or the majestic Journey, which I also recently finished, are natural extensions of my cinematic obsessions: immersive imaginings that at some level let me inhabit these dangerous yet mostly exciting lives that thrill, mesmerize, and leave me awestruck.

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