Death by way of a 9mm bullet to the head swept you off your feet and into the warm bone-dry dirt of the desert. You had a platinum poker chip to deliver and, hell, it seemed easy enough. As a courier, you were just doing your job. This cold-open of random death at the machinations of a world you’ve yet to understand or even slightly comprehend is in itself a terrifying concept. In the opening moments of New Vegas, the player-controlled courier is shot in the head and left for dead by a man whose face will become familiar, but whose motives remain abstract for a decent chunk of the main narrative’s runtime.
Yet, while these monsters, beasts, and ghouls are scary and threatening in their own right, the real horror of Fallout: New Vegas lies in the world itself-the landscapes, death, the wind, and all of the ephemera that brings Obsidian’s rendition of a post-apocalyptic retro-futurist world to unsettlingly quiet and desperate life. There are other things, too-beasts turned monstrous after centuries of radiation exposure, human bodies wrought unknowable and unfamiliar after many warped mutations that were brought on by radiation and who knows what else. But humanity is not alone amongst the dry wastes of the Mojave desert in Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas. Humanity ekes out a sorrowful existence full of dread, violence, betrayal, and mania.
The old world is dead and the wasteland is all that is left.
