Few games capture loneliness as well as Fallout.

With Fallout still on my mind thanks to the TV show on Amazon Prime, I decided to restart New Vegas for the first time in almost a decade. Instead of going for something modern or giving Fallout 76 a second chance, Obsidian’s masterpiece spin-off felt like a better way to familiarize yourself with the beauty of the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

First released in 2010, New Vegas built on everything that made Fallout 3 great and then some. Created by a development team made up of people who worked on Fallout and Fallout 2, this project understood this world and how to expand on it better than any other studio. That’s why we look back on this game fondly, and why we’re still playing it almost 15 years later.

I have to make a confession here. I didn’t actually start a new playthrough, but a playthrough I started a few years ago on Xbox Series X and never finished. The game threw me into the middle of a wasteland with a level 12 character and Boon by my side, but one look at the map told me there was still a lot left to see in this game. It was obvious. So I didn’t look back and walked in a direction where I wouldn’t be noticed.

Melancholy is Fallout’s greatest strength

A few hours later, I checked my phone and realized I had spent all night roaming the Mojave Desert, diving into abandoned cabins and power plants, scavenging for loot, and killing any radioactive creature that dared to show up. I had done very few quests, other than a few small NCR favors at local camps, so I felt a bit dirty. These soldiers are just trying to survive, but I didn’t want to be a dirty soldier. So I set off again, eager to spread justice in the wilderness. I’ve also come to embrace the melancholy vibe that comes with it.

Fallout is a lonely series. That’s not because there haven’t been any new mainline entries for the better part of a decade, but because players are placed in the middle of a world dehumanized by nuclear devastation. What was left was hardly enough for the survivors to rebuild, so they instead made what they could with the shattered remains.

The rich forests and natural world that we take for granted today have been replaced by endless barren deserts. Nothing can grow on the ground anymore, and all we have is the burnt husks of dead trees and crops that struggle to grow centuries after the bombing. Although it’s a sad world to exist in, Fallout still manages to bring out some humor through its subversive writing and great characters. I love this part of the game, but what I’ve always loved the most is how hopeless and lonely the game can make you feel, even when you’re doing the simplest of things.

New Vegas has a much brighter feel than Fallout 3, but it’s still easy to get sucked into the open world as you spend hours discovering new locations that have nothing to do with the main story. I walked into countless abandoned buildings, each telling its own story. Objects found randomly in abandoned houses indicate that someone lived here until they were killed or abandoned in the gray meadows. I picked up some leftover supplies before checking out a nearby terminal and digging through my diary entries to help me piece together exactly what happened here.

In some cases, you may not even be given this context and are asked to construct your own story using only the world in front of you. To create characters and situations that were once important, but like you, they saw this place as a broken home and moved on.

There may be smaller garages, workshops, or even entire industrial facilities, and more often than not you’ll only encounter fellow scavengers or cockroaches pecking at the rotting flesh of what’s left behind. It has outdated graphics and gameplay mechanics, which only adds to the emptiness after all these years. A primitive rendition of the apocalypse, where less is more. It reminds me of a moment in Fallout 3 that will stay with me forever.

Ham radios can be enabled in Fallout 3 and New Vegas, but most only emit static radios. But sometimes your trusty PipBoy picks up on superstitions that can be tracked to help point you in a certain direction or hear the fleeting voices of someone long dead. But this particular distress call sounded especially desperate. So I chased it as fast as I could, jumping over hills and killing super mutants until I tripped over what looked like an old sewer grate. The signal got stronger, so I went inside, hoping to find someone who could help me.

Waiting for me was a quartet of skeletons huddled for warmth next to an empty shipping container, and a radio emitting the signal I’d been following for the past hour. Even though they had been dead for decades, a part of me still wished they were alive. Being naive, I turned off the radio, walked away, and re-immersed myself in the solitude of radio.

After a while, you have to ignore that tragedy and find the beauty of small towns and hamlets filled with people doing their best to survive. The best thing about these games is the way they make you feel heartbreakingly alone, with your own melancholy your only companion until you run into a Radscorpion looking to eat you for lunch. It allows your mind to wander and craft events that complement the lore that Fallout gives us. That’s the only feeling that will stay with me forever.

fallout 3

Fallout 3 is set 200 years after World War I in a devastated area around Washington, DC. In this critically acclaimed game, you must traverse this wasteland in search of your father while solving the mystery of his disappearance.