Fallout is a rare ‘90s CRPG that actually still manages to more or less be pleasant to play in the 21st century. The weird style of pseudo-3D pixel art looks kind of dated now, and playing at a modern resolution makes basic things like navigating menus into a pixel hunt extraordinaire, but the depth of its RPG mechanics, the freedom to do whatever you like, and the surprising variety of its environments are enough to basically make Fallout good enough to recommend.
It still has the same issues a lot of older RPGs have, especially the kind where your first playthrough is almost doomed from the very beginning because you have to choose your stats based entirely on brief, vague descriptions before you could possibly know which are useless and which are essential. I also found a lot of the time your actual objectives can be weird and frustrating to complete, like the one where an early area is blocked off entirely until you have a rope, which you’re supposed to buy from an NPC who isn’t in any way presented as a merchant before you even travel there. I get that this is fairly common for older games where a lot of the detailed mechanics (like being able to barter with everyone in the game) are in a manual that you’re probably not going to go searching for when you have a digital copy, but it still doesn’t feel like much of what’s going on in-game is explained well, even for a ‘90s game.
That said, the Steam version does come with a PDF of the manual if you want to have the full retro experience, and the little bit of extra time you’re going to have to spend figuring things out isn’t enough to overshadow the complex and interesting characters, delightful dry wit, and detailed turn-based combat mechanics that make this game such a treat. Chances are if you’re reading this you don’t mind that the game came out in 1997, and unless that’s a major problem that you don’t think you’ll be able to look past, I think you’ll get a lot of enjoyment out of Fallout.
Dylan's Morsels 