Game EXP: Fallout 4 (VSD)

 

Fallout 4

Systems: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, Linux, Steam OS

Release Date: November 5, 2015 - April 25, 2024

Publisher: Bethesda Softworks

Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Time Spent: 261 Hours, 48 Minutes

I genuinely don't know where to start with Fallout 4 and its accompanying DLCs.  I spent nearly 262 hours, or  210 in-game days, which honestly surprised me because I did a somewhat decent job of roleplaying my character of Jacqueline.  Kind of.  I had Jacqueline have a 100-hour detour from trying to find her kidnapped son to the island of Far Harbor to help a colony of synth refugees, all the while infiltrating a fanatic religious organization, The Children of Atom, while succumbing to frequent near-fatal amounts of radiation.  Before we continue with this meandering article, I'd recommend reading/rereading my First Impressions article from last August, where I do a bit of character introduction and cover my first 47 hours.  

Now, 214 hours later, let's jump back into the end of the middle of Jacqueline's story in the wasteland of the Commonwealth of the former United States, 2088.

Yes, the game starts on October 23rd, 2077, the day the first bombs were dropped in the United States, and your character, known colloquially as the "Sole Survivor", wakes up exactly two hundred years later on October 23, 2277.  I finished Jacqueline's story on May 20, 2088.  During those 210 days, I had her join the reformed Minutemen and helped set up 30+ settlements that pledged loyalty to the Minutemen after completing numerous fetch quests.  Jacqueline also helped a synth detective absurdly named Nick Valentine with a case (that I've since forgotten about) to find out information about her kidnapped son, only to discover that he was being held by The Institute, and quite safely and happily at that. 

As a result of being told that her son was alive and well taken care of, Jacqueline had a brief crisis where she ended up helping another family try to locate their missing daughter, where she ended up saving the synth colony of Acadia on the island of Cold Harbor from the Children of Atom and a handful of fearful citizens in the town of Cold Harbor.  I also replaced the leader of the Children of Atom with a synth with the help of the synth leader DiMA (after doing some batshit-crazy brain hacking mini-games).  The daughter was convinced that she was a synth, but later returned to her family on the mainland with loving and open arms, regardless of whether she was a human or a synth.  

Jacqueline also stopped an uprising of robots from an eccentric figure self-titled The Machinist, whose mechanical creations had deduced that the best way to save the people of the Commonwealth was to kill them all.  She also helped a super mutant scientist recover a serum from The Institute to help him revert back to his human form, and accidentally wiped out a small village of the Children of Atom when she accidentally caused one of the members damage while jumping down from a room while wearing power armor.

Jacqueline later joined the Underground Railroad to help with the relocation of synths who had escaped from The Institute, while also at the same time infiltrating The Institute, only to find out that her son, who was taken recently, had in fact been taken over 60 years earlier and was the leader of said Institute.  While running missions for both factions, Jacqueline made life-long enemies of the Brotherhood of Steel by stealing a fusion-based energy source from the BoS to power The Institute's reactors indefinitely, only to blow it up during an incursion by the Underground Railroad, where her dying son Shaun was caught up in the blast.  But she did rescue, in the dumbest narrative way possible, a synth copy of her son as a 10-year-old boy, so now Jacqueline can be a Mom to a child.

Although I did save the game before I ran the assault on The Institute to see if, in fact, I could save hundreds of lives by killing one person, the leader of the Underground Railroad and then become the new leader of The Institute via the biggest case of nepotism since 2016.  It turned out that I would have had to have killed a lot more people.  However, I wasn't entirely happy with that timeline, or the idea of running fetch quests for different department heads, which is rather an odd feeling since I'd been running fetch quests for nearly the whole game.  But by this point, I had forgone my MO of not fast traveling and was regularly fast traveling, especially if I was encumbered (here's lookin' at you fully leveled up Strong Back perk).  I had felt that I had seen all there was to be seen between the Underground Railroad's HQ and wherever Tinker Tom needed me to place a MILA or wherever a dead drop was, and its subsequent clearing out of a safe house; this was probably around the 190-200 hour mark for those keeping score.  Although I still never fast-traveled to a settlement went they were under attack.  I was pretty hands-off with the settlements, only really having 3-8 people at each one and keeping the recruiter signal off after having it on if it was required by a quest.  I fortified most with a couple of turrets and made sure that each had enough beds, food, and water, but that was about it.  I also did about 99.45% of solo without any companions or Dogmeat.  There were a couple of missions that required you to have a companion and once those were over, I sent them to live at one of the settlements, or they went back to their starting location in case I wanted to pick them up later.  I didn't.

I started the Vault-Tec Workshop DLC, but decided that running a Vault-Tec-style vault wasn't for me, so I turned off the recruiter signal there too and left Overseer Barstow to wallow underground until she leaves or goes feral herself.  I also didn't do the Nuka World DLC, which seemed to focus on creating a raider colony and sending out raiders to raid settlements, and that wasn't at all who Jacqueline was.  She had a 10-year-old synth to take care of; I'd also read that unless you were going in to develop your character as a raider/leader of raiders, that some of the fights were needlessly difficult so I decided to skip that altogether.  I also got over my annoyance with power armor occurring so early in the game simply by not really using it until after getting back from Far Harbor, and only then very rarely.  I probably had close to 100 unused power cores and 15+ at varying levels of power left.  

Obviously, I really enjoyed Fallout 4 and especially the Far Harbor DLC.  Like a lot of western-styled RPGs, I really enjoyed the early game the most when I was constantly cobbling together ever slightly better bits of mismatched armor and there always being a chance I could die from taking on one too many raiders.  After coming back from Far Harbor, I had found all the pieces of the Marine Armor set which I ended up modding to include Deep Pockets to help increase my carry weight, but every other piece of armor I found did not give me a better overall armor rating, so for the remaining 150+ hours, I was in the same armor, which did feel a little stale by the time I liberated the Commonwealth from The Institute.  But roleplaying definitely helped here a lot because it meant that I would periodically change up my armor or weapon to better suit the specific mission I was playing if it called for it.

Yeah, I think having played for 261 hours in the end really summarizes how I felt about this game in how I decided to play it.  Good world, satisfying level progression, too many settlements that I never really felt invested in (so don't worry about them)*.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Would You Like To Be What You Can't Be?

*More On this.  Maybe if each of the settlers had been given a randomized name instead of just "Settler," there might have been more of a connection and reason to feel invested in the creation and maintenance of a settlement.  True, there were some settlements with named characters like Covenant, The Slog, and Greygardens, but all of the random settlers that show up are only "Settler."  It's harder to care about someone if they're only a title.  There might be something there.

P.S.  I also just realized how underutilized the cannon artillery placements you learn from doing the Minutemen questline involving the Castle.  I get the idea of creating cannon placements at other settlements to have a wider range, but it felt like most of my important and hard battles were fought indoors, where the cannons are not going to reach.  Neat idea, but it never felt practical.  Or maybe I just didn't fully understand the in-game mechanics.

P.P.S.  I'm also now just wondering if there was an endgame where the Brotherhood ot Steel attacked The Institute as a final test of your loyalty, or if it would always be against the Underground Railroad.

MIDI Week Singles: "World 3: Into the Warzone" - Booby Boys (DMG)

 

"World 3: Into the Warzone" from Booby Boys on the Nintendo Game Boy (1993)
Composer: Kenji Yoshida
Album: No Official Release
Publisher: Nichibutsu
Developer: Nichibutsu

When you're randomlly pulling up music from video games you've never heard of with hopes that you'll come across some semblance of an earworm, I was really really hoping that I would find something from Booby Boys, if only just so that I could feature a song from a game with this name; I can still be immature sometimes.  Believe it or not, I really liked the music from World 1 and World 3.  The music from World 1 felt too predictable, so we went with "World 3: Into the Warzone" for a couple of reasons.

First and foremost, I do actually enjoy this bouncing melody.  Secondly, while I was doing research and trying to find out a more appropriate name than "BGM 03," being the name of the file, I discovered that this music plays in the third world of the game, specifically a military base or warzone-themed world.  Absolutely nothing in this jovial little diddy has anything reminiscent of a military base (although I've mostly only been to air force bases in the late 80s and early 90s, so maybe the atmosphere has changed since then?) or a warzone (never attended).  Although if I think of this song as being performed by a military band during a proper military parade, then I can mentally insert a drum line, piccolos, trumpets, and maybe a colony of clarinets, then you know what?  Sure, this song could be appropriate for this setting.

Maybe not while one or two little rapscallians is running around setting up booby traps in the form of pits to capture/kill whatever the justification for monsters running around, but there you have it.

~JWfW/JDub/The  Faceplantman/Jaconian
Seems Like Such A Blur

Demo Time: No, I'm Not A Human (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for No, I'm Not A Human through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

No, I'm Not A Human Demo
Systems: Windows, Steam OS, Linux
Release Date: June 8, 2025
Publisher: CRITICAL REFLEX
Developer: Trioskaz
Time Spent: 2 Hours 12 Minutes
Walkthrough Video on YouTube

The best way I can describe the demo for No, I'm Not A Human is that it's a mashup between The Twilight Zone episode "The Midnight Sun" and Papers, Please.  Kind of.  The plot is moderately simple.  You play as a person during a time when daytime temperatures reach unsafe levels for people to be outside.  There are characters called Visitors that the player is warned about as being dangerous, and who look like regular humans.  The player is told that Visitors will often ask if you're home alone, and you should always say that you aren't, otherwise bad things might? happen, and you validate your answer by allowing people whom you suspect to be real humans inside after they knock on your front door, and after you have a conversation with them.  At the start, you are given only one criterion for knowing that someone might be a Visitor, and that is that they have impeccable teeth, but as the demo progresses, more information comes out in the form of news broadcasts about the state of the world and on how to identify Visitors.

The game progresses through two cycles, day and night.  During the night, you answer your door when people knock, which feels like it happens too soon after you turn someone away or allow them inside.  As in literally seconds after you finish one conversation with someone, whether you let them inside or not, and someone else knocks on your door, like there's a literal line right outside your line of vision from your peephole.  This is likely the only negative aspect to the game that I can think of, and that was only since I started writing this article.  You're also able to look out your windows at your neighbors across the field, at the field behind your house, and at a path or street next to your house.

During the day, you're not able to look out of the windows or your front door because the sun is out, and in this world, it has reached dangerous temperatures due to what's described in-game as an explosion on the sun, reaching temperatures possibly 130°F / 54 °C or higher.  If you have people you've invited into your house the previous night, you can talk with them about their own personal stories, and this is where part of the paranoia comes in.  Using the growing information you receive from the news, you can interrogate people, using a finite amount of energy which is used up with each interrogation, and if you believe them to be a Visitor, you're able to pull a shotgun on them and decide whether or not to kill them.

This is where No, I Am Not A Human really shines, because for each accusation you lay against someone staying in your house, they will often have an explanation or an excuse as to why their teeth might be straight and white, or why their eyes are red, or why there's dirt under their nails.  The game does a great job of not specifically telling the player if a Visitor needs to have all of the known signs or if one sign is enough to kill someone because you believe them to be a Visitor.  There does seem to be a psychological effect when you kill someone, which I noticed in my first playthrough; in my second playthrough, I didn't kill anyone.  The long-term effect of killing people is unclear, but I am excited to find out in the full release of the game.

The demo for No, I'm Not A Human lasts only five full night/day cycles and from what I can tell, the people showing up at your door are all the same, although I filled out a survey from the developer that implied that either the order of the people showing up or the people themselves is supposed to be random or will be random at the time of the full release.  You also have a limited amount of space in your house and a limited amount of space in specific rooms, as it seems that specific characters will only stay in specific rooms; eg, the woman whose husband died will only stay in the bathroom.  I am very eager to see how the full game plays out and what the end game is, hopefully not being just a "How long can you stay alive?" mechanic, but I really don't get that impression from the demo.  And this is a really fun demo, it you already like games dealing with apocalyptic scenarios and paranoia about other people staying in your house.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
And We Don't Have The Time

First Impressions: The Longest Tale (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for The Longest Tale through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

The Longest Tale
Systems: Windows, Steam OS, Linux
Release Date: TBD
Publisher: Dev Null Productions
Developer: Dev Null Productions
Time Spent: 71 Minutes
Playlist on YouTube

I have very mixed feelings about The Longest Tale, and most of those negative feelings stem from a mechanics standpoint, with just a pinch of a need to clarify UI.  I admit that if you only watch the videos from my playthrough, it probably won't give you a comprehensive view of the game and even watching them over myself, I kind of feel that I didn't give the game a full and fair chance before I wrote it off as needing some significant improvements before I could manage to find some more fun out of the game.

Let's get some stuff out of the way first.  I liked the visuals and the general aesthetic of the game as it reminded me of that early 2000s Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind vibe.  I didn't mind that the weird pig-man didn't move his mouth or that the draw distance never felt more than a hundred yards or so.  The music, too, while sparse and never feeling grandiose beyond the needlessly long and confusing title sequence, felt appropriate for the game and the referenced era.  I didn't mind some of the janky animations, like the crouch-walking, as that just kind of adds to the visual charm.  I also didn't mind needing to remap a lot of the default buttons in the background on the Steam Deck, as it's something that I've either come to expect or find easily forgivable for an indie game that may not have the budget to take into consideration all possible control configurations.  I was a little annoyed that there wasn't any kind of menu system to invert the y-axis outside of doing it manually on the Steam Deck.  

On that note, there were times when the game used both keyboard and controller prompts to tell the player what to do, like pick up a torch by pressing the A button or the E key "to pickup/drop objects," but neither the default mapped E key or the A button on the Steam Deck actually did anything.  Only later did I manually map E to one of the back buttons and then it seemed to work.  As for why the torch stopped working, I'm going to chalk it up to a glitch, although I'm thankful that I wasn't required to light anything with the lit torch.

While watching my playthrough, and knowing more about the game, I am kinda kicking myself for not picking up on what the pigman said about following the light, because that was kind of what I inadvertently did.  I followed the green light to the carved statue of the fair maiden in the woods.  I am also kicking myself for not fully exploring what the red-hazy light in the large cave was about.  But the yellow light was the goal of the forest area, leading you to the eye-patched man who tells you the tale of the wanderer in the desert, which is where the game then transitions to.

The desert was pretty different from the forest environment, strictly from a game mechanics standpoint.  Through the introductory cinematic, you are given a location to reach, although due to the camera movement and the many vertical shafts of light make locating the exact location of where the carpet flies off to a little difficult to parse out.  On top of that, a new mechanic was introduced without a word of warning to the player, which I was somewhat annoyed by.  It makes sense, though, that there is essentially a hydration meter that causes the player's disorientation the lower the meter gets.  What really annoyed me about this new mechanic was that I presume that each pillar of light was an oasis where you can drink water and recharge your hydration meter, but they are so far away from your starting location, that if you deviate from anything by a nearly straight line from where you start to where you presume the nearest oasis is, you're likely to die along the way and will restart back at the beginning of the stage.

The other new mechanic is your weapon and learning how to fight, introduced through yet another flashback.  I actually don't mind this method of storytelling, though.  The fighting itself didn't feel particularly great, likely because it felt like fighting was meant to feel akin to combat in Dark Souls, but felt more like Neverwinter Nights.  I don't know how to describe it better than, it just didn't feel great.  I knew what to do and how to navigate the buttons and mechanics, although I probably should have remembered about the rolling mechanic, but again, it just didn't feel good.  I made it through the tutorial battle, then through an actual battle that made me worried I was going to die, and finally to a large complex in the desert where I think I didn't need to worry about my hydration meter, either because of the area or because I was in the shade, but then the game froze and crashed on me.

For this particular playtest, I only needed to play the game for 60 minutes and then fill out a survey about my experience.  After playing 71 minutes, I genuinely felt that I didn't need or want to play any more.  That probably doesn't bode well for my overall impressions of the game.  Had there been a 120-minute requisite, I would have played longer, and then maybe I would've gotten further, and maybe by then the game would have stuck with me more than it has.  Maybe when the game is finished and is released, I'll give it another try, hoping that there's something more there that I wasn't able to see.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

I'm Gracefully Bowing in Sorrow

MIDI Week Singles: "Forest Ambient" - Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir (PC)

 

"Forest Ambient" from Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir DLC on Windows & mac OS (2006)
Composer(s): Andrew Barnabas, Paul Arnold, Kevin Chow
Album: No Official Release*
Publisher: Atari Interactive
Developer: Obsidian Entertainment

I think I've started Neverwinter Nights 2 three times at this point, potentially four times after today's article, because I really dig this mysterious forest theme.  I've only made it as far as the starting tutorial village area because I've never been happy with my character, and so I've never seen what's outside of West Harbor.  The only negative thing I have to say about "Forest Ambient" is that the track is rather short, lasting just over a minute, which doesn't really give enough time to get lost in the music and not realize when it repeats.  The song itself also doesn't lend itself too well to being classified as ambience, despite the fact that there is no discernible melody.

That being said, I still enjoy this song in its etherealness, and it invokes an otherworldliness that you would come to expect from a dark forest in the Forgotten Realms setting.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Only You are the Life Among the Dead

* I say that there is no official release, but the music is available when you buy Neverwinter Nights 2 Complete over on GOG.  There is a file download that includes the music, but not in a traditional album format.

Demo Time: Pestilence Demo (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Pestilence through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Pestilence Demo

Release Date: TBD

Systems: Windows, Steam OS

Publisher: Kooky Studios

Developer: Kooky Studios

Time Spent: 33 Minutes

Walkthrough Video on YouTube

I have some thoughts about the Pestilence Demo, in part from a mechanics standpoint, but also from a story point of view, although the latter could be a moot point depending on the perspective of the playable character in-game once it's released.  The puzzles themselves, the setting, the jump scares, and even whatever you call scares that aren't jump scares but still make you not want to enter a room, were still effective.

I was at first a little confused when the game started.  I could hear a clock ticking, but the screen was black.  Maybe I made a mistake by increasing the graphics too high from the default low?  Was this another situation like Unreachable, where the opening cinematic stuttered so much that I couldn't always tell what was going on, except here I was just looking at a black screen?  Once the game started and you walked out into a hallway, I immediately got Silent Hills vibes, which proved true as the door you passed through sent you back to the same hallway, but from the opposite direction.  I get the idea of including something like this in your game, especially in the beginning, but for me, it kinda took me out of the experience, wondering if this was just going to be another hallway walking simulator where scary stuff happened around you.

Thankfully, this was not the case once your playable character blacked out, and then you woke up in a seemingly locked prison cell.  So not unlike Amnesia: Justine, kind of.  You then were able to explore a large garage structure, solving minor environmental puzzles like turning the power on by reconnecting disconnected wires, filling a generator with gas (after locating a gas tank), and remembering where the breaker box was located.  None of the puzzles were overly complex, although I did power my way through one code-based puzzle when I knew three of the four numbers.  My biggest gripe with the puzzles overall was that there were some parts that the game wouldn't let me solve out of order.  For instance, I came across some wires that were disconnected that were very obviously supposed to be connected, but because I hadn't connected the first set of wires located in another part of the room, I couldn't connect this second/third set first.

The story, I was a little less on board with.  Pretty early on in the game, it felt pretty obvious that the character I was playing was supposed to know the dingy garage with its empty liquor bottles, grungy couch, dirty sleeping bag, and blood-splattered footprints.  The voice-over narration that your character would interject with seemed more like the kind of person who would know this place than someone who was kidnapped by the owner of this garage.  And the violent and aggressive interrupting voice seemed too similar to the interior monologue to be a coincidence.  About three-fifths through the demo, a radio broadcast provided significant exposition, specifically directed at the player character, that cemented the theory that you were playing as someone who suffered from some type of schizophrenia-type disorder who had kidnapped and brutally murdered multiple people over an extended period.

I thought that I wasn't particularly okay with taking on the role of someone who violently kidnapped, murdered, and mutilated bodies because it was in his nature, but this isn't an entirely foreign concept in narrative storytelling.  Games like Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs involve kidnapping and mutilation.  In Layers of Fear, the Painter (the player) had previously physically and psychologically tortured his wife over decades while also being abusive towards their daughter.  If playing as those disdainful characters didn't bother me, why does this character in Pestilence?  The only thing I can initially think of is that, because Pestilence is a contemporary story, maybe even taking place as far back as the mid-late 1990s, based on the computer used, but maybe it's just a really old computer.  Maybe if GTA had the option to mutilate bodies in a bathtub after hours of torture, I might be more adverse to the series.

So this is where I lie with Pestilence.  The game ran perfectly fine on the Steam Deck without any modifications or compatibility settings needed.  I enjoyed the setting, the puzzles, the scares, but I'm somewhat iffy on playing as this particular character.  And I think that's really all I can say.  It will be interesting to see where the story goes in the full game and if there's an attempt to make the character either sympathetic or even somewhat redeemable.  Or it will just end with cops surrounding the guy's garage and being shot to death while spirits of all of his victims look on as the last drop of blood leaves his body, nodding in approval.

Roll credits.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Lost in the Fire, the Fire of Hate

MIDI Week Singles: "Dragon Roost Island" - The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (NGC)

 

"Dragon Roost Island" from The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on the Nintendo GameCube (2002)

Composer: Kenta Nagata

Album: The Legend of Zelda -Takt of Wind- ORIGINAL SOUND TRACKS

Label: Scitron Discs

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo EAD

I decided to use this theme for several reasons.  First and foremost, this is just a fun and upbeat song that I easily remember from the last time I played Wind Waker, probably 20+ years ago.  It's easily recognizable, it's hummable/whistleable, and therefore more likely to leave a lasting impression.  Lastly, it was featured on an episode of 8-Bit Music Theory two years ago.

What I enjoyed about that episode, and most of the videos on that channel, is that I can kind of follow along as the dive into music theory goes so much deeper than you might expect.  It also goes to show that music composed for video games is more than ones and zeros on a computer.  The videos also make me feel like every song I've written is just utter trash because I guarantee you that I've never put that much thought into the intricacies of chord progressions and what business do I have even being around a piano, let around a blank sheet of notation paper?  What business do I have even writing about video game music once a week in a way that doesn't do a deep analytical dive into the inner complexities of the song itself to say why I've included it beyond, "I like this song and thought it was good."

But then, after such an in-depth analysis, the question of why this is such a catchy at memorable melody for this particular location at this point in the game remains.  "It's kind of hard to say how this piece of music relates to the island as a whole, though. [...]  To me, it seems this is just a really solid piece of music written by someone who really knew what they were doing" (source).  And sometimes, that's just enough for me too.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental