You start the game as a newborn born in a nuclear fallout shelter.  Your dad asks you if you are a boy or a girl, what your name is, and what you want to look like when you grow up.  Your parents are both ecstatic, but then your mother dies.

Jump to one year later and you can crawl and look at books and have your dad read your mother’s favorite Revelations to you.  The game jumps again, a bunch of years into the future, and you are at your own birthday party.  Nobody likes you except the adults, but you get a few presents.  One of them is a sweet roll, another is a poem by some woman about the misery of never seeing the sun.  The coolest is a BB gun from your dad.  He’s really cool; he loves you more than anyone.  Dad shows you how to use it and you kill a Radroach.  Someone takes a picture of the two of you, and then the game jumps again to your 16th birthday.  You take a test that determines what you will be for the rest of your life.

There is a guy who runs things down in the vault and his name is the overseer.  You have to do what the overseer says, or you’ll be killed.  He tells you that you are born in the vault and die in the vault.  No one ever leaves, and no one ever comes in.  So, you must know how you will spend the rest of your wretched days underground.  Your dad is a doctor, maybe you can be like him?

One day, you are woken up and alarms are going off.  People are running around killing each other; your friend tells you that your dad escaped from the vault.  You grab a baseball bat and everything you own (enough to count on your hands) and start making your way toward the exit.  You have to kill a ton of people to get out of here.  The overseer is the last of them.  After you kill him, you leave this horrible place.

Outside is post apocalyptic, retro-futuristic Washington D.C., appropriately dubbed “the capital wasteland”.  This is where the game begins to eat away your life.  You can pretty much do anything you could ever want to do in such a scenario.  Kill anyone you want, eat whatever you want, do drugs, drink, blow up towns and innocent people, etc.  You can also play the good girl and do things for people.

The coolest I’ve done so far is running around an abandoned subway looking for a family of vampires.  You have to negotiate with them, get them to tell you their secrets, tell them not to kill you, etc, and finally convince one of their newest members to come with you.  He was a cannibal turned vampire by the vampire leader against his will.  Eventually, the vampire leader lets you go in return for “blood packs”, a form of restoring health in the game that the vampires can drink from to survive.

The vampire quest is literally one of probably 100 sidequests.  The object of the game is unclear to me, but it seems to be to find your father and figure out why he left.  In the process, you kill bad guys, build weapons, do research, have extensive conversations with characters, and explore houses and cool towns.  The amount of possibilities and time spent playing this game is absurd.  I think about it all the time.

You also have to monitor your radiation intake.  Everything you eat and drink is radioactive, and after a while, you can get horrible radiation sickness.  One sidequest is to venture out and get as sick as possible for a research job.

One of the game’s best features is the environment.  It’s set in D.C. and the surrounding area.  You can go pretty much anywhere.   Below are some pictures comparing the graphics in the game to actual photos.