Fallout: New Vegas (2010)—“Democracy Inaction”
Let’s be honest: Fallout: New Vegas is the Fallout snob’s Fallout game. Created by Obsidian Entertainment—one of two studios to rise from the dissolution of Interplay’s legendary Black Isle Studios, creators of the original Fallout games and other classic RPGs—the Vegas-set spin-off is full of story nods and design decisions hearkening back to the series’ pre-Fallout 3 history. Buggy, fiddly, and occasionally too complicated for its own damn good, New Vegas also offered up some of Fallout’s best writing and storytelling, something exemplified by its best vault—and, thus, the best vault in the entire series—Vault 11.
There’s been a lot of Vault Talk on the internet of late, courtesy of Bethesda Softworks and the slowly growing hype push for its latest post-apocalyptic mystery project, Fallout 76. Although there’s been plenty of speculation about what FO76 might actually turn out to be—with rumors leaning toward some kind of online survival game in the style of DayZ or Rust, which, sure, fine, whatever, if that’s what brings you joy—the focus of the actual marketing has been on the vaults, one of the series’ most distinctive features.
That’s with good reason. Not only are these fortified bunkers—ostensibly designed to keep thousands of people alive during the nuclear war that set up the series’ post-apocalyptic setting—one of the most distinct elements of Fallout’s semi-satirical universe, but they’re also one of Bethesda’s best personal additions to the Fallout playbook. The studio didn’t invent the vaults; the original Fallout starts with the player having just been kicked out of one, and Fallout 2 establishes the all-important twist that the vast majority of them were designed, not as life-saving measures, but as sick psychological experiments of the scientific sadists at the Vault-Tec corporation. But Fallout 3, which saw the studio resurrect the series as a first-person phenomenon, is the game that established the modern vault template: Find a reason to lure the player into a dimly lit, decrepit cave of steel and glass, throw a few monsters in their way to liven things up, and then use the environment and the occasional audio log to tell a tight, tragic little story. But while Fallout 3—with its vaults full of homicidal musicians, mutation-generating viruses, and a whole lot of guys named Gary—set up the basic vault idea, it was up to another game and studio to take it to new heights.
But New Vegas is weirdly reticent about showing off its hidden masterpiece. Situated close to the center of the game’s map, the player will only ever be directed to Vault 11 as part of a late-stage quest from reclusive techno-fetishists the Brotherhood Of Steel. Even then, the item the Brotherhood needs can be snagged after exploring just around half of the bunker. At that point, there’s little keeping you in Vault 11 beyond its fundamental mystery, and designer Eric Fenstermaker is confident enough in the story that there’s nothing but curiosity dragging you to its end.
Things start on an ominous note: When you arrive—decades too late, as ever—the big metal vault door has been inexplicably left open and its interior exposed to the elements. The fact that the only enemies in the vault are wildlife, like giant praying mantises and rats, helps establish an eerie, abandoned feeling as you wander its halls; it also means the focus here is less on combat and more on navigation and teasing the story apart. The first weird touches, visible from the very first room, are campaign posters. They’re slathered on every surface, in the familiar red, white, and blue of the games’ typically uber-patriotic take on Americana. But there’s something weird about them, too.
It’s almost like nobody wants the job they’re campaigning for.
That unease quickly escalates when you check a computer sitting near the door leading deeper into the vault. Its sole contents are a voice recording of a conversation between five people, four of whom judge themselves to have been damned by whatever went on below, and who promptly take their own lives on-mic. (In a nice touch, you can find their skeletons and guns scattered around the room.) Descending into the vault itself, it’s clear some kind of violent conflict broke out; not only is there overturned furniture and bodies everywhere, but some of the posters have been very intentionally defaced, changing the already-weird “I hate Nate” into the even less explicable “I hate Kate.”
Poking around the vault’s still-glowing computer terminals, we get a few more clues: a series of campaign messages from the various “candidates,” each promising to do a worse job than the one before if elected vault overseer; a note, announcing that elections have been postponed; and an order from 11’s latest leader, Katherine Stone (who shares a last name with one of the listed candidates, Nathaniel—a.k.a. “Nate”). Kate’s message is the strangest: Citing her power as vault overseer, she’s declared that elections have now been abolished, and that selection of the next overseer will now be done entirely by random assignment.
By this point, players with even a passing familiarity of The Twilight Zone or O. Henry will be pretty sure we’ve wandered into Shirley Jackson territory. Vault 11 doesn’t spend a lot of time pretending the overseer job everyone is fighting to avoid is anything other than some kind of death sentence. The brilliance, then, is in the specificity and the pacing. The story—which the game categorizes under the quest name “Democracy Inaction”—isn’t some generic, “Ha ha, politics sure are screwed up!” comedy. Rather, it’s a very specific tale about the consolidation and abuse of power, about the way ethical lines erode when survival is on the line, and, in its own way, about the dangers of unchecked optimism from people who don’t have to pay the costs when it ultimately turns out they’re wrong.