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My friend Tim, a fan of the Fallout series and excited about the upcoming Fallout 3, rummaged up a collective package of Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout Tactics as a gift supplement. I fired it up and started playing. I’ve been having a rough time; if Mel Gibson is the “Road Warrior,” I’d be known by the post-apocalyptic handle “Purina Rat Chow.” The fate of an isolated fallout shelter community depends on me, and they might as well find a nice patch of plants to fertilize. My attempts to date to save the residents of Vault 13 from the breakdown of the water system look something like this:

Game 1: Receive mission to recover parts for the water purification system, trekking across a hundred miles of radioactive waste to beg, barter, or steal the parts from distant Vault 15. Exit Vault 13. Meet hostile rats in the entryway. Die within sight of the vault door.

Game 2: Receive mission, etc. Barely escape vicious rats infesting Vault 13 entry. Begin trek. Immediately fall into desert canyon filled with radscorpions. Die.

Discover game manual by accident. Read it. Learn to sneak and how to equip a weapon. Learn that the dots in the information bar are not my health, but my movement allowance for the turn.

Game 3: Receive mission, etc. Sneak past vicious rats infesting Vault 13 entry, forfeiting valuable experience. Trek across the radioactive waste. Arrive at Vault 15, to discover it is abandoned. Search it anyway. Fight every rat in the place in order to search, looking for some kind of indication of anything to do next. Find none. Quit.

Read online walkthrough. Learn that I should be using an elevator somewhere in the vault.

Game 4: Receive mission, etc. Arrive at Vault 15 and kill all rats. Search for elevator, eventually discovering that the isometric view conceals the elevator behind a solid wall. Realize I’ve been playing hunt-the-pixel, and that the game designers didn’t even draw the damn pixel. Fiddle with the invisible elevator shaft for half an hour, eventually to conclude the only way down is with a rope, which I don’t have. Quit.

Read online walkthrough. Learn that rope can be found in some random village whose existence the mission briefing has not bothered to mention.

Game 5: Receive mission, etc. Search for random village. Search village for rope. Find none. Quit.

Read online walkthrough. Learn rope can be bought from some guy named Seth, who isn’t even a merchant—until this moment, Seth’s only apparent purpose in life was to direct me to a cave infested with radscorpions.

Game 6: Receive mission, etc. Go to random village. Talk to Seth. Discover I have no money to buy rope. Accept mission to radscorpion cave without promise of payment in the wild hope that Seth will give me his rope in gratitude. Fight radscorpions. Run out of ammunition. Die.

Game 7: Receive mission, etc. Go to random village. Go to radscorpion cave. Kill only one radscorpion, then run away. Sell the antivenom reward for money to buy rope. Trek to Vault 15. Kill rats. Run out of ammunition. Finish off last five rats with knife. Spend forty-five minutes trying to apply the rope to the invisible elevator shaft. Descend. Using only a knife, fight somewhat larger pigrats. Die.

Game 8: Receive mission, etc. Go to random village, kill radscorpions, sell antivenom to buy rope. Trek across radioactive waste. Stumble on caravan. Accidentally join caravan back to random village, missing the opportunity to buy anything, not that I have much cash. Trek a second time across radioactive waste to Vault 15 while time ticks away. Kill rats. Run out of ammunition. Descend invisible elevator shaft. Die.

Conclude I need more ammunition. Read online walkthrough. Discover nowhere (that I can reach) where I can buy more ammunition.

…
Game 14: Through a combination of sheer bloody-minded brute force and online hint pages, memorize every point of interest between Vaults 13 and 15, including gravel-sized specks, and where to steal enough goods to hire a bodyguard, who proves three times more combat effective than my own heroic self. Receive mission, etc. Strip random village of unwatched goods and sell them back to the former owners. Hire bodyguard. Clear radscorpions. Clear Vault 15. Discover through sheer bloody-minded clicking of every space that there is no replacement part in the Vault. Return to Vault 13; report failure. Receive orders to keep trying. Realize that I will have to wander blindly through the radioactive wastes, hoping to stumble on a location which does have a replacement part, a place which no one knows about, or at least no one is willing to tell me about. Quit.

So basically, I’m still working my way through the first mission, and it’s become clear that the only way to play this game is with a mouse in one hand and a cheat book in the other, which rather defeats the purpose. I don’t think it’s going to get any better; the pervasive game design philosophy is that restoring games is expected, so forcing players to explore everything by trial and error is okay. Finding a little brown fleck against a brown background is “exploration,” ammunition starvation is “part of the challenge,” and it’s only reasonable for the player, on vital mission X and under time pressure, to make decisions like, “Hey, why don’t I wander off to random location Y first, and sell my gear to purchase some random item in Y, just in case I might need it?”