I was shocked to see how much DNA this game shares with Supergiant's other games and how much stuff mechanically ended up carrying over to Hades later down the line. Honestly, this game feels like such a relic from the time it came out, being pretty early on the wave of games like this, low to mid budget nice looking 'indie' games from tiny studios on XBLA.

The writing in general is good for sure, but it's not really anything super exciting. I think there are some really good touches, the attention to detail on the narration and the pure quality of voice acting as well, is really an achievement. When it comes to environment design, I can't help but feel as though it's beautiful simply to be beautiful but not really much else. It's not really something that feels super well thought out beyond looking pretty. I mean, it sell an aesthetic but I'm not sure to what end. I also don't really find the main character's model to be particularly aesthetically pleasing.

I was also really shocked to see how existential and high concept it ended up getting by the end. It was certainly interesting conceptually, but Dark Souls has done a similar thing narratively to a greater effect. I didn't find it really all that satisfying in general, but I think the music helped to bolster it tonally at the end. I think there are some really interesting pivotal moments, but I think honestly the details are the most interesting parts of the design in the game, the singer only speaking at the very end of the game, things like that were really inspired choices.

When it comes to gameplay it was certainly viscerally fun and didn't overstay its welcome, but nothing really more than that, I think the foundation is really excellent, with the upgrades, god challenges, weapon challenges, etc, and I'm SO happy they decided to iterate on it later down the line.

I also forgot to mention the soundtrack and the general soundscape of the game. I think it's overall competent and Darren Korb's work is stellar as always, I think a lot of the sound is weighed down by stock effects that I see used a lot in other stuff. It's really distracting to me, especially due to how often you hear them. I think some of the music has this problem too, I think it's the combat track iirc. The soundtrack has some really stellar songs, especially at the end, that final track is just mindblowingly great. It's made me so happy to be able to see this studio grow.

But overall, I think bastion is a lot more interesting as a piece of history to me than a game. I'm feeling positively about it, but not sure I'd really recommend it to anyone.

Playing Fallout really felt like playing someone else's D&D campaign after they had already finished it once. Everything had been well trodden, and they very much already knew where they wanted to go in the story, so you're stuck trying to mold your playstyle around them, rather than the other way around.

Surprisingly, I found this game to be inflexible in terms of letting me do what I wanted to do. This mainly has to do with the difficulty and the lack of clear indicators of the rules of each quest, and character interaction. There were so many times where I "succeeded" a roll, convincing a character or recruiting help from a faction, only to never get that help due to me not being able to figure out where I could get that help. I had so many 90% completed quests, and whenever I tried to ask about these quests to other characters, they suddenly forgot all about them. Characters don't seem to have a persistent memory of what's going on and what's happening, until they do. The roleplaying systems in Fallout are inconsistent, and the lack of visual clarity didn't help that. Important dialogue can disappear in an instant, while unimportant information floods the game, there are tons of junk NPCs that look identical to special NPCs, which makes it a chore to retrace your steps and find who you were talking to previously. I had at least 10 occasions while playing where I couldn't tell if the problem was a bug or me not being able to figure something out.

I was taking pretty detailed notes, and I still struggled really hard. The way the isometric perspective was handled also didn't help this at all. Allies, enemies and necessary items would get lost behind walls constantly, forcing me to jank my way up against a wall in order to find an important item or just figure out what building I'm even looking at.

I love old RPG design. I love the lack of quest markers, the figure it out yourself attitude, and the freedom you get to craft your own narrative. I feel like there are glimmers of that here, but clarity is SO important to keep you having a good time in these kinds of games, and it was really lacking.

The balance also threw a wrench into enjoying roleplaying. There are skills that are much more valued than others. Science is on the weak side, while lockpicking is practically needed if you mess up. The enemies are also so difficult, I couldn't imagine getting through this game without power armor or that other armor you find later on in the Cathedral. It made it feel as though I was trying to clear the game rather than engage with the world and characters. It by the end felt like a chore to play, and began to really get to me, especially with the way the combat ends up shaking out.

I like stats-based combat in RPGs, it minimizes the illusion that you can simply outskill an encounter, and puts a clear roadblock in your way that you have to outsmart. In the beginning, this worked well. There were moments where you mess up and are rightfully punished for those mistakes. There were also moments where I had to get creative, going out of my way to scrounge together enough caps to hire a companion. This was really rewarding, but I felt this fell off hard once I started fighting super mutants.

The way this armor class system seems to work feels super weird to me. It results in situations where you're surrounded by a ton of enemies who can seemingly barely do damage to you, and one that can kill you easily. You need to find out which one is the dangerous one, despite them looking the same. To do this, you need to save before the encounter, die to them, then reload and target them immediately and make sure they die. As for the enemies that seemingly do no damage, they have a startlingly high percentage chance to crit and kill you in one hit, despite them doing 0-2 damage to you normally. It's a frustrating system that forces you to rely on the save system do the heavy lifting. Personally, when I have to reload that much, the feeling of roleplaying is gone, and the mindset of min-maxing begins.

This problem is exacerbated even further with companions, that past the midgame become liabilities that block doorways and are addicted to dying. This includes the dog that I got early on that you cannot dismiss. I think this is a totally fine narrative beat to have, having the dog be killed as you play, either by the first mutant or deathclaw you encounter, I just wish it could have been framed a little differently. In terms of the other companions, I really needed them for carrying stuff, which meant I had to watch them die a ton and reload, before I realized I could 'dismiss' them in another room before a fight. I eventually permanently dismissed them, despite the fact I wanted to keep them around for roleplaying reasons. I wish I could have armored them or something.

Although I did have all these problems while playing, the presentation hooked me in so hard. Each session I played, I would accidentally play for multiple hours straight, becoming feverish with my playstyle. I would get so engrossed in what was happening, the world would disappear around me and time would zoom by. My sleep schedule is ruined as I write this.

The art design is brilliant, the Necropolis, Cathedral, and Brotherhood of Steel being major standouts for me. It's unreal to me that this game managed to birth all of these symbols that have remained relatively unchanged over all these years. Power Armor, Vaults, Deathclaws, Supermutants, all of these things have managed to stay the course for so long, and I think it's because they were so well designed the first place, sometimes better designed than they appear now.

I think this can also be seen in the music and general tone that's established here. The music in Fallout can be disconcerting. It manages to strike this weird mix of meditative focus and dread that works perfectly for the flow of the game. The Brotherhood of Steel and Necropolis tracks stick out for me the most. The world out there feels scary, unforgiving and ready to kill you.

As I started my journey, my character went through their own arc that demonstrated this perfectly. When I began, she was innocent, scared, unfamiliar and unprimed. As it went on, her morals started to stretch and the threat of death loomed over her, it's an effective and emotionally worthwhile thing, and I think it was a great way to merge the mechanics of the game with the story they were trying to tell. I credit some of this to the combat design and mostly to the writing/structure. It's interesting to see how much of my character's arc actually ended up mirroring Lucy's in the TV show, which surprised me!

The writing to me is a mixed bag. I think the moment to moment writing is just not very good. It's corny, awkward to read, relatively uninteresting, and full of typos, spelling, and grammar mistakes. They were so frequent and really took me out of the story they were trying to tell. A lot of the dialogue especially read like thrown together D&D quests written by a bunch of nerds from the late 80s/early 90s. Probably because it was. A lot of the writing genuinely reminded me of my college professor's D&D campaign records he would show everyone in his game design class. I love my professor to death, but I can't say much of them were particularly fun to read.

Although the moment to moment wasn't great, I think the overall package and macro storytelling worked quite well in terms of the main quest, pretty much everything involving ghouls or the FEV worked really well for me. I found the master's motivations to be interesting at the very least, even if he is a bit of a cartoon villain. It makes you think about the implication of killing super mutants, and makes the narrative a lot more interesting.

Once we get outside of the main quest, into gang warfare, kidnappings, etc, I think the story on a macro level becomes quite drab. I wasn't hooked in by any sidequests really, although I suspect that was more of a problem with the lack of clarity and reactivity than it was with the concept and plot writing. I think this setting has a lot to offer, and I hope it's expanded upon well in more interesting ways in Fallout 2.

Although it didn't work well for me, I think there's still a lot Fallout offered to me. I'd be curious to revisit it at another time, probably with the Fallout Fixt mod installed, and a guide open on a second monitor. I think this game is probably a lot more interesting to min-max than it is to roleplay in. I think that disappoints me a little, but I bet if I go back in with an adjusted mindset I could have a better time in the future.