Written by Laird Allen
“Fallout Shelter”
Tiny Towers in the Tiny Nuclear Wasteland
There is a forthcoming fourth title in the “Fallout” series, an iconic video game franchise that stretches back to the heady days of 1997. As is common in the modern videogame market, a number of tie-in products have been produced to capitalize on the marketing in advance. The most interesting of these is “Fallout Shelter,” by Bethesda Softworks, a mobile game currently available on iOS.
“Fallout Shelter” takes its cues from a number of recent big successes in the mobile games market, including the well-known “Tiny Towers,” and is set in the ubiquitous Vault-Tec Vaults of “Fallout” lore. These Vaults, established in the near-future during a time of escalating tension over a global thermonuclear war, are set up and set to running, intended to remain sealed until the world has returned to a livable condition. The game takes place shortly after this war has devastated the Earth. You play the Overseer of a vault, in charge of building up your post-apocalyptic fortress and keeping the inhabitants happy, putting some to work in the vault facilities while others train and a select few wander the wastes, seeking guns and equipment.
The gameplay itself consists of building rooms in a cutaway vault and then assigning dwellers—based on their stats—to various tasks. Whichever one they’re best at, they’ll find most satisfactory, and you can put them to work there with equipment or training to boost productivity essentially forever. The game itself goes idle a certain amount of time after being closed, but if you check in repeatedly in a short time period, you can make quick progress. The game isn’t difficult, and there are a series of population-based unlocks to incentivize progress.
The game’s art and music design is heavily influenced by the old “Fallout” Vault-Tec illustrations and is singularly charming, with a retro-1950s style mingled with the occasional sinister detail. The vault is a churning, industrial place, with only musical stings to enliven the place and the occasional alarm or raider attack to brighten the audio palette. It’s all quite competently done and adheres to the fiction of the universe with panache.
Of course, the real problem here is that the “Fallout” games are relentlessly violent and full of pitch-black, tundra-dry humor in support of a sweeping narrative. “Fallout Shelter” doesn’t have any space for narrative, which can make its nastiness seem somewhat arbitrary. There’s no story here to justify it. The wasteland wanderers record their adventures in a journal format, but it’s all randomly generated text. There’s simply nowhere in the game for a story to be told, so there is none.
If there can be said to be a villain in the game, it’s almost certainly the player. To the credit of “Fallout Shelter,” if this is intentional, it’s witty as hell. The player makes decisions that change the lives of the helpless denizens of the vault. The player sets up the vault dwellers to breed and produce offspring suitable to slave away keeping the vault running. The player keeps pregnant women at work and sends men and women into the wasteland to die. Even the dwellers will talk in hushed whispers about the Overseer, the Panopticon who only wants what’s best for them. This theme is relentlessly hammered on in the main series, so “Fallout Shelter” striking this chord—intentionally or not—is charming.
That curious ludonarrative synchronicity aside, “Fallout Shelter” is a fun and ruthlessly casual mobile game for iOS. Ports for Android are said to be forthcoming, and the game itself is free for now, with relatively tame in-app purchases. It’s suitable for teens and up.
