I once stumbled upon Fallout in the 90s by sheer luck. Don't look at my time, I still know how to solve its quests and game its systems. If this is your first rodeo, add another 10-50 hours of figuring things out or trying a genocide run. And, for your sake, leave the difficulty dials alone. Fallout doesn't hold your hand, yet it's sensible for an old title. But let's rip some band-aids first. The game doesn't hold up in all places (didn't know about Fallout FIXT patch, dammit). Make notes and save in different slots! Expect broken dialogues, journal entries, quests, annoying bugs and alt+tab crashes. Besides, it's the kind of game where a sarcastic remark during an innocent conversation might lead to a brawl with a town full of people, their dogs, and their... Hold your horses, cowboy! Child-killing got cut by Bethesda. That's all they did... Hey, some of these brats carried grenades, alright?

Welp, no way but up from here! On October 23, 2077, a global nuclear war between the US and China defiled the planet, laying waste to civilization. One century later, you emerge. A Vault Dweller, born and raised in an advanced fallout shelter under the mountains of Southern California, Vault 13. You're not the Chosen One, just a goof who got the short end of a stick, tasked with obtaining a new water chip for the alma mater. Akin to a lost house cat, you're now free to find your own trouble in the bumf%ck nowhere. What shall become of you is to be defined by your ways with words and guns in relation to the many tribes of new Californians. A bunch of ruthless and rude madmen who use bottle caps as currency! See, in their world, the nuclear night is young. What's a century to half-life? The communal nightmare is still an open wound.

Fallout stuffs it chock full of clever homages and the joys of violent existentialism. Throwing together Dr Strangelove and Mad Max, fusing Day of the Triffids with Monty Python, it soaked up every drop of popular culture and spat it in our faces. Stylistically, Fallout is a post-apocalyptic Spaghetti Western set in a retro-future. Its prairies and canyons are a morbid eye candy. Smooth animations, great sprites, quality renders, and detailed backgrounds only punctuate the surrounding desolation. It sounds the part. Mark Morgan's music adds a sting to the bleak appeal, reflecting the scorched barrens dessecated by famine and blight. Poetically Jungian writing follows suit by driving heartbreaking narratives across a radioactive world while posing ethical dilemmas concerning the nature of mankind and death.

At that, Fallout is on pace with a movie, which always distinguished it from other CRPGs. There aren't that many personal quests or dialogue branches, but characters and morbidly wacky conundrums shine bright without outstaying their welcome. You can usually solve and create all problems in any given town in a matter of one or two hours like in an action flick. And it's all about you looking badass in a starring role, even your companions are but temporary sidekicks. These redshirts can be memorable, however, they also can't be directly controlled, so their stupid ass eats a burst of lead from someone's SMG point-blank before you know it. But hey, never refuse an offer to join! You can legally shoot any party member in the eyes and loot the corpse.

"Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moonlight?"

We're talking serious pacing in a game that has a turn-based combat system with Action Points at its core! Combat goes by quite fast most of the time. However, if a fight breaks out in a crowded place, you'd have to wait for every junkie in the vicinity to make a move. Go boil a kettle, save your nerves for the dicey rolls. Devastating crits, misses, and brutal takedowns with gory animations also apply to you in all of their isometric glory. You'll be slaughtered by people, rats, horrifying Deathclaws, and all kinds of abominable Cronenbergs. Blast their arms off, shoot them in the nuts, watch them drop to the ground squirming. Location-based damage allows you to put your victims in a world of pain before putting them out of their misery.

Now, spread that grim jam on top of iconic armour and guns of all types and sizes. At first, it would be hard to imagine anything louder than a .14mm. Then you'll find That Gun! A .223 hand cannon, which RIPS. And there's so much more. Pick a pulse grenade, a Molotov, or even a throwing knife - they all work in capable hands. Good old pistols, SMGs, and rifles are reliable, but it's not on until you hear Gatling miniguns singing rhapsodies over the violent parades on the streets of ruined cities. Where laughing mutants burn each other with flamethrowers and tear bodies apart using Ripper electric blades, power fists, and super-sledges. Living a dream! The spectacle is flavoured with a pinch of vivid text descriptions: "It knocked her over like a bad blind date", "his eyes popped like overripe grapes".

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. progression system in place wasn’t designed to give you "a balanced experience", it's here to deliver all of the above while also providing all the hilarious ways dialogs and ending cards can go. This thing is the bomb! Don’t be overwhelmed by its red herrings. It merely teases you to break the game and have a good time. S.P.E.C.I.A.L. involves several main things: Karma, stats, skills, and the most fun part - diverse traits and perks, basically passive abilities. You pick a perk every few levels from a list or receive freebies for certain in-world actions. Those aren’t always positive! Say, not everyone likes a graverobber. Your Karma goes up or down, depending on the ways you interact with the game’s world and often defines how badly certain characters or whole factions want to kick your ass.

"That's right. I've killed women and children. I've killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I'm here to kill you, Little Bill."

Morality is the spice of it all. You can make a man angry or drive a whole city to extinction. I role-played as a good guy for a long time but kept salivating over the fun lines I can't say, the crimes I can't commit. Since then, I aced a murderhobo turbo-junkie, a boxer porn star, a prostitute slaver with a heart of gold. I made badass entries, used my friends as meat shields, lied through my teeth, and doomed whole communities! I saw that one can play sub-optimally and still find a way. Say, raiders hold a hostage you need and they're too strong. You can bluff your way through bloodlessly or have enough Unarmed to beat their leader in a duel. Maybe just inject yourself with two doses of Psycho and slip a fistful of dynamite into his pocket? Or come back with a Stealth Boy device, turn invisible and gaslight the leader by pretending to be a ghost! Try, die, experiment with drugs, find workarounds. That's the sh#t!

Fallout is as much about freedom as it's about war. Lurking in its shadow, you are sometimes a mediator, sometimes an instigator, always a profiteer and a stranger by design. What a sandbox! A grave world to quench your God complex. Walk the path of a messiah, be the scourge of the wastes, end up a junky, or a grifter's grifter. Each lonesome road you take shall stay imprinted on your mind. Fallout's influence never goes away. It's the son of the regiment, a by-product of a pop-cultural orgy, bearing its progenitors' genius as well as their flaws. Sure, it coughs up blood nowadays, but it still has the power to slip into your dreams. Don't let some petty grudges take over when dealing with a marvel that turned the tables on the whole industry. Of course, it isn't perfect. It's janky, it's vulgar, and it bleeds over everything. Because Fallout is quintessential punk.

My curator Big Bad Mutuh

Ctrl Alt Ego is an Immersive Sim reminiscent of System Shock and Prey by the virtue of being set on a space station in the future. But here's a defining twist: this is a poltergeist simulator where you play as a disembodied consciousness, a marooned saboteur EGO, in a constant struggle to keep itself together. Your task is to find resource-effective solutions to a constant stream of creative problems while smuggling yourself through elaborate corporate security checkpoints in the middle of nowhere. This game's world is a sandbox done right, with you being the bucket and the spade. Here, player agency is king.

The setting incorporates the humorous tone of Douglas Adams and the high-concept narrative of Stanislaw Lem. It's a touching story that poses morbid existential questions and an effortlessly humorous adventure full of cute robots and cerebral gags. The plot is delivered through notes and sparse monologues, dispensed by Dr. Everyman. "A bit cliché English professor", in his own words. Like you, your guide and mentor inhabits various machines. Being but a sack of fragmented memories at the start, you'll find out more than you bargained for by the end. For now, you can only HOP from thing to thing, which, in the long run, should allow you to take ctrl of the station back from some parasite. It's not like you have better plans for your clueless post-matter existence.

In appearances, this ain't your art deco, local environments sport a jagged utilitarian design. It grew on me after I had some time to absorb the cosmic contrast between saturated light and thick shadows as well as one tasteful retrofuturistic colour palette. Some might say the game looks technologically inferior, generic, and there's nothing more to it. But I find it ambiguously beautiful. Even if its presentation is a product of limitations, the result is positively Kubrickian, which accurately reflects the sci-fi framework in place.

The world of eccentric automaton freaks sounds cute until you bother them to the point when they start screeching and chasing you. One mistake sends you zipping around clanking corridors in panic, with menacing voices thundering from loudspeakers, professing your inevitable demise. With tensions so high, you need to listen to your surroundings to survive. Instead of music, local environments produce humming and buzzing of machinery. The dwelling robots have names, their beeps and cheeps make each type stand out. You could usually tell whom to expect long before turning a corner.

I appreciate the dev's commitment to include as many accessibility options as possible, yet I'd like to suggest a few additional QoL improvements. For one, the game could use a map. Some locations aren’t that visually distinct and there isn't always an antenna with a bird's-eye view to help with navigation. The hitboxes are accurate, but probably exceedingly so in places, leading to objects in the environment having sticky edges, obstructing movement. Finally, spoiling the overall impression, I've had unwarranted framedrops, especially by the end. Update: it got fixed. Done, now let's unpack the best stuff.

You HOP between hosts by interfacing with their EGO sensors, taking ctrl over robots, opening doors, and signing into security networks. Juggling your hosts is a must, for none of them can do everything. One ctrls like a bumper car, another squeezes in tight spaces, and the other one is a tripod with a beam cannon. Each robot has its clumsy charm. They are distinguished by cute acronyms like MUM, GOD, PUP, breathing personality into the world. I'm sure GOD piqued your interest, but it's uncooperative. BUG 22 would be your main body, your upgradeable toolkit, and your only hope in this world. There's no space to describe every entity, so we'll settle for a holistic example.

The BUG I required was stuck in a locked crate between two BUG-repellent force fields on a module floating in space. I had to HOP into a MUM who was patrolling the module. MUMs are normally used to kill stuff and bypass security, but I only got her through the field to push buttons, unlocking the crate. On the roof of the module, stood a lonely DAD, a sentry that shoots a serialising beam I required. I took ctrl of him and used a SHIFT beam to throw the old git through the field. There, DAD serialised the BUG, which meant that its data got stored in his memory. But the slacker can't do much else, even move, so I used MUM again to push DAD out into space where he printed the BUG for me.

Performing such tricks will soon become second nature. Use your cards right and feel like the smartest bot in the room. Be reckless - and face an out-of-hand cascade, leading to your temporary demise. Instead of immediately losing after your host has been broken or serialised, you get a chance to ctrl something else in the vicinity during your disembodied state. From that position, you can always reprint your property using a BUG Printer device or HOP into a thing that serialised you and rescue the body. Hold your horses, though! Killing or seizing stuff comes at a price. Your options are vast, but restricted by certain resources.

Time to talk Egonomics. Just a few things to wrap your head around first. There're 6 pickups: Juice (fuel for abilities), batteries (HP), EGO fragments, Worms, Disks, and MEMs. Use a MEM with an Augmentation Terminal to raise your HOP speed, make enemies less observant, etc. Put a Disc in a BUG to install a permanent ability of your choice, then find Worms to upgrade those. Using that system, equip your BUG with different arms, rocket boosters, invisibility, and other cool stuff. With that, go to town or go virtual, reprint yourself on the other side of an obstacle course or a fence, drop bombs, and fly away.

All hosts have EGO ratings, to ctrl them you need to spend an according amount of EGO that can be found in the wild or by hopping into certain stuff that stores it. There's more than enough EGO scattered around the place, but not so much that you could mindlessly cut through the majority of predicaments, overriding and destroying everything. The going gets tough by the midgame, save up. I was always barely scraping by, yet that didn't diminish the fun I had, making me find unorthodox solutions to problems instead of throwing EGO at them. Granted, the EGO poverty stemmed from me stupidly doing just that when I had plenty.

There's enough Juice if you don't always go guns blazing. Despite some great gunplay with powerful feedback and headshots in slow motion, brute force lacks unless used along with other skills. For what's a shotgun blast when you can shift things around at will, reprint yourself to skip obstacles, or turn any object into a bomb? Even if you crave total carnage, you'll still find a variety of possible abilities irreplaceable. Something new always impedes your progress, it's a challenging ordeal. But most of all - a gratifying endeavour. If you like imaginative secrets hidden across interconnected environments, you've come to the right place.

I opted for the second hardest difficulty because it gives enemies recharging health without making them too tanky. I wanted to keep the option to go Rambo. Like Rambo, I had to sneak and plan my ambushes carefully to single out my prey or break several robots in quick succession. I failed a lot. I don't mind, but that difficulty setting may seem too frantic for some. Keep this in mind in case you want a relaxed playthrough. Mine wasn't, but I enjoyed every minute of it. The colossal ambition behind this sleeper hit is staggering. Its fun conundrums came to be unique and captivating. At the end of the day, Ctrl Alt Ego is a contemplative experience that ambushes you with its penetrating narrative and sharp design.

My curator Big Bad Mutuh