It’s another year, and another extremely long piece masquerading as a listicle dealing with something I’ve been wanting to write about all year but not being brave enough to do without a silly gimmick. WordPress says this is a 37 minute read, so I encourage your to pull out your stopwatch and see if you can beat that time while still digesting all of my unique and potent insights into another year of gaming. Time starts… NOW!
Honorable Mention: Final Fantasy IX
In my massive replaying (and some first time playthroughs) of every Final Fantasy game, I finally came along to FF9; the one I remembered so clearly from my childhood as my favorite, the one I loved more than any other Final Fantasy game. Playing it again as an adult has only strengthened that feeling for me, and has made me appreciate it even more. FF9 artfully handles so many heady themes and topics ranging from the horrors of war to existentialism. I would also be remiss to not mention this game considering how much is coming later about a modded fan experience, since I replayed this game with the Moguri mod.
Moguri is a massive undertaking that used AI upscaling to up-res the many pre-rendered backgrounds of FF9 that were famously thrown out after its production. Thankfully, to keep everything from looking like inconsistent slop, every new background was also overseen by talented artists to help make adjustments and keep a consistent artstyle that is still faithful to the original game. I’m not an AI evangelist by any means, but if you were going to use it, especially for an unpaid fan project in an attempt to make a now 25 year old game look nicer, this feels like the right way to go about it. Outside of redone backgrounds, Moguri also runs FF9 at 60fps and provides a whole bunch of other graphics options, including one that gives the characters a more toonish look with a big black outline, something that doesn’t feel out of place in FF9’s art design.
There are a bunch of gameplay options as well, such as my favorite, the ability to turn on Trance mode instead of it activating randomly. I also doubled dipped in mod support by grabbing one that allowed me to add Beatrix as a party member, and includes extra dialogue from her to help include her in scenes so she doesn’t feel out of place. Some of the dialogue is pretty whack considering it was written by people who probably don’t have a lot of writing experience, but I appreciate the effort nonetheless. There’s other rebalance mods that include new boss fights and reintroducing cut content, which helps make Moguri feel like a real, genuine remaster of FF9. While there are rumors of an FF9 remake along the way, I’m glad I went and revisited the original, especially with a fresh coat of paint.
10. Nightmare Kart
There’s something beautiful about this game spending so much time in development, having so much exposure, having the literal Bloodborne name ripped out from under it, and still coming out anyways. Every little eyeball on the Winter Lantern that was causing another potential spike of frenzy in the collective meter of every single person who ever joked about the existence of Bloodborne Kart, and then the game comes out and it’s just fun. Nightmare Kart’s mechanics du jour, a combination of third person shooting and kart racing, feel flawless, especially as the follow-up to a game like Bloodborne PSX, which has a truly nonsensical mechanical identity as a faithful PlayStation 1 demake. Bloodborne PSX is an abomination of a game (in a great way), which is what made the realization that Nightmare Kart is a game that plays extraordinarily smoothly a much bigger pill to digest.
Digest I did, and I had a lovely time playing through the story mode side by side with a friend, and then switching over to the competitive kart racing that it feels like it was made for. Part of me wishes it was less faithful to its intended PSX limitations, that it included widescreen support for better screen coverage in local multiplayer, or that it had proper online racing. I’m hoping that there will someday be a potential Nightmare Kart “Remastered” that provides such amenities, since as far as kart racers go, Mario’s filthy little fingers hold the genre in a forever-hegemony. Something with such a fresh style as Nightmare Kart, especially on platforms that Mario won’t deign to let his grubby, bloodstained hands touch, would be such a breath of fresh air.
9. Arctic Eggs
This game probably gets my Best Vibes award of 2024. It’s hard not to feel endeared by a dystopic physics based comedy game, even when not every joke lands perfectly. The act of learning how to fry an egg, and then learning how to fry all the other increasingly absurd things it wants you to fry, feels like such a natural progression despite the core gameplay loop being moving a frying pan with the mechanical precision of a Cybertruck in less than an inch of snow. The input is goofy and unintuitive, but eventually you lock in. You learn to navigate the pan. You get skilled at flipping eggs. You’re not missing the mark, you tell that Cybertruck there’s a child 50 feet ahead and it’s ramming that bad boy dead on every time, no matter how many half-inches of snow it needs to get through.
It’s hard not to relate with potentially the last colony of humans in existence just absolutely chilling out while they still have time left. Discussing philosophy, sharing jokes, dancing to sick club beats, and asking for just a little cigarette with their eggs because they like how it tastes. It feels akin to the vibes of Umurangi Generation, where people still try to live in a world with only a few strands of hope. Arctic Eggs doesn’t have hope, but it isn’t nihilistic. The world is over, suffering from full societal collapse in the wake of climate disaster. It posits the question of whether or not it’s worth living when everything is gone, but it does so because it knows humanity will never die out, that to live is, inherently, to be human. It’s also, most importantly, a game about whether or not you can fry an egg on top of Mt. Everest.
8. Helldivers 2
I was a big advocate of the original Helldivers. To this day, I still razz my buddy any chance I get over a time where he inexplicably destroyed my mech that I strategically abandoned in a spot to draw enemy attention away from us as we made our escape. Yet, for some reason (mostly a compulsory need to never leave anything behind), he blew it up anyways. Why did you blow up my mech, Zev? Why did you do that?
When they first showed off Helldivers 2, I was one of the few that knew it was going to be special the exact moment in the earliest trailer when you needed one player to fire a shoulder mounted rocket launcher and another to load more rockets into it. When they showed the return of the stratagem system, where each piece of summonable equipment comes with a corresponding directional input code you need to remember in order to summon your equipment, I felt a rush like no other. Hell yes, Arrowhead is trying to keep the soul of the original intact even while still taking bold swings with the switch to a third person perspective. Even I, though, did not expect it to be as big of a hit as it became.
I’ve taken a lot of joy this year in how the community management of Helldivers 2 has unfolded. It’s had its lows for sure, mostly through Sony’s meddling, but the highs of watching the official Helldivers account gaslight the user base with an excellent use of the satirical in-fiction plot in action have been second-to-none. When people started saying that they saw flying enemies, the official account replied with disgust, saying that players were clearly lying, until eventually revealing in a breaking news report that there were now flying enemies. They would show brand new tools of destruction only for players to quickly realize just how extremely deadly they were to users first and foremost. There’s beauty in how something like Lethal Company can roll out a truck only for players to find out it’s a complete deathtrap. It’s on another level when Helldivers 2 “accidentally” overtunes space-to-surface covering salvos to hit players more often than not, while still being very effective tools at killing tons of bugs. HD2’s combination of slapstick accidental deaths paired with an impeccably well tuned third person shooter make it a far more memorable experience than most shooter slop that comes out nowadays.
7. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth
I have to give credit to FF7R2. Sure, the open world exploration and quest design sucks, the combat can feel pretty repetitive when you have a consistent strategy that works, the elements of the story that I disliked from Remake are still there, but it does something beautiful with FF7 that basically every single person who’s ever played a Final Fantasy game has always wanted: it gives us a ton of great character moments with an extraordinarily well realized cast. This is a game made for anyone who has ever written a fanfiction in their life. You have a bunch of established characters going on a long journey. Why not fill that journey with tons of fun, playful, and beautiful moments together?
I have my criticisms of Rebirth, probably more than any other game on this list, but what it does for the characters of Final Fantasy 7 is truly outmatched. It gives every single one of them more depth, it lets each of them have unique moments with each other, it lets you get a better sense of their personal interplay and why these characters would continue to travel with each other. It somehow does a good job of humanizing Cait Sith, a character who should, by all means, be highly suspect to everyone, even people who already played the original FF7. It wants Aerith and Tifa to get together so badly. It’s a genuine tour de force in character writing and that alone makes it worthy of recognition. Also the soundtrack slaps.
6. MiSide
It’s probably nuts that the scary anime dating sim of the year made it on my list, but I was genuinely charmed by this game top to bottom. I’ve already written pretty extensively about it, but what’s wild to me is that it hasn’t gotten as big of a reception as I figured it would. I’ve seen clips of vtubers playing it, and it’s definitely got a big Russian fanbase, but most people in the west haven’t given it a shot. It’s not hard to see why, since most people have probably already had their fill of cute anime games turning into violent bloodbaths. What I wish more people got to see was how wild of a journey it is. Its plan in getting from Point A to Point B is so much of what makes MiSide an enjoyable experience than just the looming dread of something spooky around the corner. It could have been any kind of horror slop. It could have been a Five Nights at Freddy’s or another by the numbers dating sim. But it’s not those things, it’s a sprawling adventure! It’s a game where you don’t know what you might see coming next and it plays into those expectations masterfully.
5. Dragon’s Dogma 2
While mostly a pretty typical fantasy RPG, what sets Dragon’s Dogma 2 apart is the absolutely bonkers ending. When I first got to the end, I shot the giant dragon with the arrow that kills anything in one hit, and it immediately teleported me to the ending celebration where I had won and everything was beautiful and perfect. And yet a spectre still loomed in the shadows, telling me that something was missing, that there was more to the world and I need only pull back the veil. The ending restarts, I am fighting the dragon again. At that moment, I peel back the veil, and what was waiting for me? The sickest title card drop you’ve ever seen paired with an extremely rad final ending sequence. I shan’t say more in case you want to see what happens for yourself.
4. Mouthwashing
Mouthwashing is a perfect game that I can’t recommend to anyone. If it were simply a narrative game about accountability and what it means to take responsibility, that’d be one thing. Mouthwashing, though, is grotesquely violent in unique and disturbing ways. There’s some sequences that are so utterly disgusting that I’m not able to get the image out of my brain. The narrative blended with the surreal, gorey and violent imagery helps create a deeply tragic story about a small group of people who were doomed before the game even starts. It’s excellent, and if you’re a sicko who can handle some real honest to god body horror, you gotta play this one.
3. Shadow of the Erdtree
I can’t lie to myself. I love Elden Ring and I loved this DLC. This sat at #1 on my running list all year simply because it was such a fantastic time top to bottom. It was nice to get back into Elden Ring not only with something fresh, but with a game that understands just how effective exploring Elden Ring’s world and making breathtaking discoveries over and over again truly is. Traversing through a series of low lying caverns to reach a breathtaking coastline covered in almost dreamlike blue flowers, only to travel even further to find a valley with massive fingers sticking out the ground, as if reaching for the sky above. Nobody does it like From. A lot of people lament Elden Ring’s open world structure as it means we may never see another game from them again that manages to pull off some of the tightest, well crafted levels in the history of video games, but I find Elden Ring’s specific brand of open world exploration so much more enjoyable than any other open world game out there. FF7 Rebirth, please take some lessons from this!
2. Balatro
Balatro rocks. I love rock and roll and I love this game. Balatro!
1. Fallout London
The year is 2291, four years after my Sole Survivor named Boston escaped from a cryopod and set her first steps in the Commonwealth, the ruins of the city of Boston (no relation) in the Post-Post apocalypse. In 4 years, Boston (the person) is level 136 and has built a massive network of 37 small settlements across Boston (the city), Springfield, and one significantly long boat ride up to Mt. Desert Island, home of the fine seaside town of Bar Harbor, or as it’s very appropriately named in Fallout 4, Far Harbor. Boston (the person) has just built and rebuilt several settlements, expanding them out beyond their original bounds and using nicer and nicer building pieces not just from mods, but also from Bethesda’s paid user made add-on store, the Creation Club. Having played some 4 digit number of hours of Fallout 4 over the past decade that it’s been out, I yearned for a more than this simple life. I don’t like Fallout 4 as a story, but as a game about building out cities in a world that has seemingly left human beings behind, being able to build and rebuild where humanity shat itself over rising tide of fascism and corporate greed brings a unique catharsis that even other city builders are missing. It’s not a particularly competent city builder; settlers don’t decorate their own spaces or sometimes can’t even figure out how to walk from one end of a straight line to another. But it clicked with me. When I first started Fallout London, I did it while playing side by side with my existing, longstanding Fallout 4 save. Fallout London was to serve me a different, unique experience while Fallout 4 would still stand as my way to build. If I knew then what I know now.
The year is 2237. Powerstone Dreamcast, level 8, wanders around the Bromley countryside, hungry, thirsty, tired, high as a kite and with multiple broken limbs. She can barely take a few hits before she’s in critical condition from most small enemies, and any confrontation with a larger enemy is a death sentence. Fallout London’s original soundtrack underscores this moment with a uniquely haunting score composed primarily by Daniel Morrison Neil, who has an excellent ability to create sweeping symphonics to evoke feelings of awe and depression and hopeful hopelessness. Powerstone has been searching for a place to call home and rest her head for a while. She’s welcome in the hamlet of Thameshaven where she can sell her wares scavenged from the local Fesco and other nearby abandoned stores, grabbing anything that will fetch a few tickets. She is accompanied by her loyal sidekick Churchill, a real mean tiny bulldog who does a good job drawing attention away from her, can take more than a few hits of his own, and can definitely bite way above his weight class. Churchill’s usefulness does come with caveats, as his dog-born nature prevents him from shooting at enemies with guns, a skill that is useful to have in Post-Post Apocalyptic London. Also, Churchill can only carry 25 kilos of gear, a measly amount of extra space that makes the scavenging lifestyle more difficult.
Powerstone Dreamcast started with less, let’s say, privilege than Boston (the person). In the opening hours of Fallout 4, Boston quickly finds a reliable firearm, another special gun locked up in a wall for later once she gets her lockpick skill up, a place to call home in Sanctuary Hills right outside Vault 111, a robot butler that has been waiting for her to come back home for the past 200 years, a dog of her own named Dogmeat who’s conveniently hanging out in the first stop right after Sanctuary Hills, and then finally a suit of power armor that she uses to fight off multiple Deathclaws in the very first mission of Fallout 4. The player is given everything they could possibly need to survive right from the jump with zero friction. In the first mission of Fallout London, Powerstone Dreamcast gets in a trainwreck and is crippled, with her first objective being Seek Medical Help. Powerstone also has a couple other things that the wealthy socialite Boston who lived in a house with her beautiful husband and baby before the bombs dropped never needed to worry about: hunger, thirst and sleep meters.
Fallout 4 eventually added a Survival mode that I had never played before this, mainly because it added things that felt like they would make the experience less fun, like no quicksaves or fast travel. I wanted something similar to Fallout: New Vegas’ hardcore mode, which adds the need to eat and drink for extra immersion, but doesn’t otherwise hinder your ability to play the game. So, my first act in modding Fallout London was to disable the aspects of survival mode I didn’t like and keep the ones I wanted. Since Survival is a difficulty mode, too, unlike Hardcore in NV which is a different game mode on top of your selected difficulty mode, every single enemy becomes a major threat. And I mean every enemy. A swarm of bloatflies outside of Thameshaven terrorized Powerstone for a while as she was getting in and out of the city. Bloatflies in other Fallout games serve as small, insignificant enemies that you can easily kill. They serve a purpose in New Vegas as being deliberately extremely weak flying bug enemies on the northern end of Goodsprings. They are there to instill a false sense of security, as when you travel further north, you encounter more flying bug enemies that you may think are just as weak and insignificant, only for you to forever be scarred by the name Cazadors.
That first swarm of Bloatflies were my Cazadors in Fallout London. I eventually was able to clear them out with clever use of the only frag grenade I got my hands on and by roping in a nearby group of mercenaries into getting swarmed by them so they could help fight them off. Most of my encounters were this same very desperate struggle of finding whatever resources I could get my hands on. In a police station in Bromley, I found a full set of riot gear that served as my primary armor for most of the early game, which was outclassing the pieces of leather and pathetic chunks of metal that serve as Hooligan (the colloquial term for Raider) armor. This only accomplished so much, though, as one of the main hurdles of Fallout London is that you start the game having just been in a train crash, and you desperately need medical attention, suffering an ever present “extra damage taken” debuff until you get yourself fixed up. Your immediate wounds can be taken care of by a doctor at Thameshaven, the first little city hub in the game. Though they are reluctant to help you at first, on account of being isolationist fish people called Thamesfolk who have an extremely earned distrust of humans as you’ll come to learn throughout the course of their quests.
Despite being a flooded sewer populated by people who’s living conditions are basically toxic to me, Thameshaven quickly became the closest thing to a home I could get so early in the game. I survived on whatever food I could get my hands on by exploring the nearby areas, but if I came back having not found very much, I’d have to invest the small amount of tickets I made from scavenging on some fungus pizza at Lino’s Pizzeria. Several vendors in the Thameshaven Marketplace sold potable un-irradiated water, but at 80 tickets a bottle while I’m making maybe 200 tickets a day, I would have gone broke just trying to stay hydrated. Drinking dirty water is always an option, but radiation isn’t your only concern anymore, as you’re likely to get a disease that you’ll then need to cure with an even more expensive doctor’s visit or some rare, hard to find medicine. That’s when I discovered two major things that would become key to my survival: 1) combining 3 Dirty Waters at a cooking station gives you one Purified Water, and 2) if you look at any source of water while holding any kind of empty bottle in your inventory, you get a Fill Bottle prompt. Bottles became a premium commodity. Anytime I found an unexplored bar, it was a jackpot of bottles.
While figuring out how to eat and drink sustainably in Thameshaven were major hurdles overcome, I still needed a place to sleep. Unlocking the actual decoratable player home in the Thameshaven inn would not come until much later in the game, so the most suitable arrangements I could find for sleeping and storing my extra goods that I wasn’t immediately selling for tickets came in the form in a small home on the Bermondsey dock. While not said outright, this little home was clearly a checkpoint set up by The Mariner, a friendly Thamesfolk who helps you at multiple points throughout the story, for his travels across the Thames. We were friends at this point, I knew he wouldn’t mind if I crashed on an extra bed of his. But this arrangement left a lot lacking. Despite Thameshaven being my central hub at the moment, I was only allowed to live outside of it. One thing became clear. If I was going to survive in this world, I needed to move.
Heading west would mean needing to travel through extremely hostile territory in the flooded Bermondsey abbey with The Mariner. I didn’t quite feel prepared for this trek, since it meant traveling through a flooded town on a small river boat with no cover while all the flooded buildings surrounding our path were filled with Hooligans ready to shoot anything they could see. We would be sitting ducks without much firepower to fight back. So instead, I decided to follow an invitation I received from some passing Vagabonds who found me in that train crash. They also, coincidentally, were the ones to break me out of the lab I was being experimented on in the early in the game’s opening, thought not exactly out of charity. They were there to knock the place over for anything valuable they could get their hands on. Breaking my chains just happened to be a happy accident. Seeing them again after the train crash, their leader, a gruff no-bullshit style gang leader named Sebastian Gaunt, handed me a butterfly knife to help defend myself and then said if I was ever looking for gang work, I just needed to head south into Bromley.
Meeting up with The Vagabonds put me in some pretty favorable positions. Not only did I get to meet a bunch of low level gangsters, all with their own unique reasons for taking up a life of crime in a city ripe for the taking, but I was also allowed to use the hideout just up the road from the Swan & Mitre, the bar that acts as their base of operations. The hideout wasn’t pretty, but it had 4 walls and a ceiling and I could put a bed in there. Not to mention the Swan & Mitre had a water pump just outside, which pumped clean water straight out the ground to drink. Not only that, but I could fill my extra bottles with clean water straight from the tap. Hanging with the Vagabonds also put me on the track to find one of my favorite early quests in the game that solidified how good this game’s writing was to me. One of the old gangsters in the tail end of his life never learned how to read, so he asked me to go to a local library to find some children’s books so he can finally learn. After getting him the books, to my surprise, not only was he learning to read, he was learning to write. Not just the alphabet but learning how to write stories. They start as auto-biographical, trying to write the things he’s experienced, and you can give him tips on how to write and encouragement to keep writing. Checking back in with him every time he had a new story to write was so endearing, and learning more about this one old guy through his writing, and more importantly, watching him learn more about himself, is deeply moving.
The majority of my early game in FOLON was spent scavenging and investigating Bromley, where I would eventually stumble unto Biggin Airport and one of the very few direct references to greater world of Fallout: a treeman named Gordo who just happened to be worshipped by a bunch of peaceful druids. Gordo explains that he became a hulking, hunky tree man thanks to a shady undercover agency, the same agency that was experimenting on Powerstone at the start of the game, experimenting with a GECK, which caused a whole bunch of extra foliage to flourish in south London, very similar to Vault 22 in New Vegas. Investigating the overgrown Pindar laboratory where the incident with the GECK took place reveals that his old boyfriend was actually still alive, and was also a talking tree! A far less mobile tree, and definitely far less anthropomorphic, but he was still alive nonetheless. The two reunite after years, decades, possibly centuries apart, and Gordo is so thankful for being brought back together with his boyfriend that he offers me a plot of land in Biggin Airport to live on.
This is the first of Fallout London’s small handful of settlements that I discovered that you can use to build a home for yourself and random settlers. Biggin Airport has a huge farm with tons of farm animals as well, but they’re all off limits to me. They’re owned by the Druids and are protected by Sleipnirs, a passive friendly animal that resembles a horse, but of course, with several more legs. When I peer into the plane hanger that’s been converted into a range for the farm animals, I see something I haven’t seen in years: Bighorners! Honest to god Bighorners straight out of New Vegas! They didn’t even update the model, it looks like it was ripped straight from 2010, and frankly? It works. I have no problems with this. A lot of those early designs worked really well and there is very little reason to change them. They fit in perfectly fine.
FOLON has some weird inconsistency with animal and enemy designs. A lot of stuff is carried over from Fallout 4 like Ghouls and Radroaches and Mongrels, but there are a lot more new and remixed enemy types of… varied quality. Most of them are really good! My personal favorite are the Famished, which appear to be Deathclaws that are terminally skinny due to, as the name suggests, a lack of food. They’re big, they’re dangerous, they’re definitely scary, but they’re also weaker to their full size Deathclaw counterparts and often rely on very different tactics. Famished typically work in packs while Deathclaws are often solitary creatures (unless you happen to stumble upon one of their nests). Deathclaws are aggressive and will roar as soon as they see you, but Famished seem to have an uncanny ability to stay quiet and unseen when they’re stalking their enemies until they jump them.
But other enemies aren’t as well considered. Ladybirds, the oversized ladybug enemies that hang out in urban areas, look very unnatural. A bunch of new enemies, too, including Ladybirds, appear to have incorrect VATS values, where body parts appear to be improperly assigned and many limbs have zero hit chance while one big part of their body that seems to encompass their entire torso that’s also called “Left Leg” will have a 95% hit chance. Probably the most egregious design are Radgers, which look like an alpha version of said enemy covered in incomplete fur textures. They’re big and scary when you see them but they are a stark reminder that this is a fan mod. If anything, their inclusion is actually an exception to what you would expect from a total conversion Fallout mod. FOLON’s great strength is in its level of polish, how well most of it feels like a complete Fallout world to a degree that you could easily be tricked into thinking it is a new and proper installment in the Fallout franchise. One, too, that’s explicitly not handled by the everpresent eye of the criminal Todd Coward, who is more than willing to shove Vault Boys all over everything. Fallout London doesn’t have a single Vault Boy in it, because Vault-Tec doesn’t exist in the Europe of the FOLON universe. They’re so committed to this that they even rename the VATS system from the Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System to the Video Assisted Targeting System, which draws reference video assisted surgery technology in real world medical science.
Back in 2291, Boston (the person) built a long series of identical modular houses in County Crossing, putting only as much as some lights and beds in each, just to give settlers somewhere to rest their head. One of the things I lament in Fallout 4 is an inability for settlers to decorate their abodes. Settlers do very little for themselves. They go to their assigned jobs, they go to bed, maybe they stop by the bar or any other in-settlement activities you’ve left lying around. They aren’t building a life for themselves, they’re merely living. The appeal to settlement building in Fallout 4 to me was always the ability to rebuild civilization. The Commonwealth is a stupid, shitty place with only a few places where people actually live. My efforts in rebuilding are less so in the joy of simply building, but in the thought that I’m creating homes for people with nowhere else to go. Creating community, making new towns, building a world that I want to live in. FO4’s ability to do this is very limited, and by extension, so is Fallout London’s.
Fallout London, however, has an upside that my PS5 save of Fallout 4 does not: a robust mod scene. Make no mistake, the Fallout Playstation ecosystem has a ton of mod support, a ton of really good mods that do things that they simply shouldn’t be able to do given the constraints they’ve been placed in. Comparatively, the Xbox mod scene has far more accessible features than the Playstation, but it too is still constrained by being on a closed console platform and must go through Bethesda’s moderation standards. If you want some stuff that busts the game wide open, you have to be playing Fallout 4 on PC. And, coincidentally, there’s only one platform where you can play Fallout London.
Enter Sim Settlements 2. SS2 is the sequel to the Fallout 4 mod Sim Settlements, and is not only better optimized and includes a ton more features than it’s predecessor, but is also a story mod. See, Sim Settlements 2 comes in three parts, each one dealing with an overarching story about rebuilding the Commonwealth and going to war against an extremely underbaked enemy faction in The Gunners, who are basically raiders but a little more militarized. SS2 adds new characters, quests, and a sprawling narrative that sees you mobilizing your settlements into a full on army ready to go to war.
Here’s the thing though; I’m not playing Fallout 4. I’m playing Fallout London. Sim Settlements 2 promises that it is compatible with FOLON, and functionally, it is! It promises to be flexible, that you can simply use it and not worry about the story stuff. While it does offer the ability to skip all the story missions and unlock all of the unlockables right from the jump, what it doesn’t do is provide you an option to skip the missions for and get rid of the custom settlers that show up in your settlements. It’s a little immersion breaking when you’re playing Fallout London and some guy shows up with a Boston accent talking about stuff going on in the Commonwealth. In most of these cases, I’ve had to use console commands to complete their quests so I can assign them to my small handful of settlements. If they’re entirely and completely bugged by the time they arrive (something that has happened more times than I’d like it to count), then I’ll usually drag them outside the settlement, put a bullet in their brain, and then go into the console commands to delete their dead bodies. The perfect crime to cover-up an already shaky relationship between this mod and my immersion.
Despite the issues with canon that SS2 introduces, the ability to zone plots and let settlers build how they want to is a tantalizing feeling. The possibilities are not nearly as limited as the mod is pitched: there are a handful of different types of plots with building prefabs that can be built. The prefabs have three tiers of building that your settlers will develop over time, in order to give the impression of a settlement that grows as you play. There are also interior plots in case you want to build the actual buildings yourself. You can be as hands off or as granular as you want with how plots are decorated. The communal nature of modding, as well, means that there are a bunch of extra community made prefabs that you can install as you like.
Sim Settlements 2 reinvigorated a spark for city building for me. I was fully prepared to approach Fallout London only engaging in the bare minimum I needed for my survival, but instead I have spent an inordinate amount of time building up the 6 available settlements into something more. Fallout London’s settlement building is barebones and leaves a lot to be desired, but Fallout 4’s decade of robust modding has turned a rudimentary building and decorating system into a fully fledged city builder complete with adjustable tax rates and municipal infrastructure and even the ability to elect a mayor to your town. I’ve barely scratched the surface of Sim Settlements 2’s more obtuse systems, layered deep in menus upon menus, where you can recruit and build an army, necessary for SS2’s plotline that involves full on combat scenarios and setting up actual headquarters for your entire operation. Skipping all of the story content in SS2 and just using it for building has left me feeling a small amount of FOMO. Something tells me that when I revert my installation, I may have to start a new save in Fallout 4 on PC, bringing Boston (the person) to a fresh wasteland, letting her fulfill an even more grandiose settlement building fantasy. Within Sim Settlements 2 rests systems that let you repopulate and reclaim the more dangerous areas of the Commonwealth, even those that aren’t settlements, making it possible to achieve what once seemed like a distant dream to me that only existed in the tiny amount of fancanon I set up for myself. I could make the Commonwealth whole, an actual stable location and the center of an empire.
But that dream is still distant, and requires an optimism that I don’t necessarily feel towards Fallout 4 specifically. But what makes it beautiful, and what makes Fallout London beautiful, and what makes Sim Settlements 2 beautiful, is what the player base has achieved in creating something completely new out of a now 10 year old game. Fallout London was created by people who deeply care about the franchise and wanted to make something completely new and original. At this point in the game where I am now, level 65 and one of the coldest assassins in all of London, I’ve experienced so much in such a beautifully handcrafted world. I helped what was once a lowly crew of gangsters overthrow one of the worst capitalists in London. I helped the fashion obsessed Roundels fight a war against the skinheads one borough over. I became a card carrying member of the Pistols, a faction of socialist-anarchists who created one of the safest communes in London. I even found evidence to indict one Alistair Tenpenny of conspiracy to commit mass murder, who then evaded arrest by sailing off to the United States, where he would one day ask the protagonist of Fallout 3 to nuke a city full of common people simply because he didn’t like the way it looked.
I’m looking down the barrel at the end of the game, where I’m going to align with a group of medieval cosplayers who believe in reinstating the will of the people over the gentry in Westminster. They’re ideologically opposed to The Fifth Column, the other joinable endgame faction based off of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. A lot of players complain about Camelot and The Fifth Column not really receiving a lot of foreshadowing storywise, which I happen to agree with, but there is an aspect to The Fifth Column where if you know basically anything about the history of fascism, they should be setting off alarm bells. Many players have found themselves quickly recruited by The Fifth Column only to realize a few missions in that their plan to take down the Gentry involves far more bookburning than anyone should be comfortable with.
Even still, with only so much of the game left for me, I still find moments of beauty and respite. Up all the way north in Camden, tucked away at the northernmost point of the city is a club called Cyberfox, which serves as the headquarters for The Pistols. The loudest, bassiest EDM blares over the speakers as I make my way past the anarchists dressed head to toe in the most punk clothing you can imagine, overhearing bits of their conversations about how happy they are in their polycule and how they don’t want to go to the reading group tonight. I met a lady named Audra there about a week ago, and she asked me if I could find some sheet music for her so her band could practice a new song. I walk in just when the house music hushes and the band takes the stage. They then perform a full on Pop-Punk version of I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, a song so deeply synonymous with the Fallout series at this point that it’s practically inescapable. The Mend plays a few choice covers of other famous Fallout songs that were hits in the UK back in the day, but nothing like this. The song was recorded for and donated to Project FOLON by famous cover band First To Eleven. I sit on a nearby couch, watching the performance. All I can think about is how this only came together by such a huge community effort. Nobody was paid to do this, everyone volunteered, even a band that could have simply ignored this game. They made this because they wanted it to exist. Sure, the drums are off tempo because Fallout 4 is a buggy game and there’s still a couple levels of missing polish in Fallout London from time to time, but the fact that it exists at all is truly beautiful.
