Category: Video Games

Not 21st century Mormons, definitely, but is Far Cry 5 about Mormon Classic Flavor, from the 1830s and 40s? There’s two primary reasons I think this might be true: Firstly, their leader is Joseph Seed, who has the same first name and initials as the first Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and second, Joseph Seed’s Eden’s Gate cult have their own special bonus book of scripture written by Joseph Seed, which is explicitly not the Bible even though it kind of looks like it. In the John Seed storyline there’s a mission where a regular preacher in the Resistance is being coerced into participating in a confessional ritual run by the cult, and pulls a switcheroo with the cult’s off-brand Bible with his own fake Bible, which is a real Bible that’s had a big ol’ hole cut through the pages to conceal a revolver in it. This is a reasonably practical thing to do when you’re in an armed resistance against an authoritarian theocratic doomsday cult, but narratively it is kind of garbled that the symbol of regular folksy Christianity cuts the Bible up to hide a gun inside while the fake cult just uses a different book in addition to the Bible (they quote Revelations a lot, so it doesn’t seem like Eden’s Gate has abandoned the Bible altogether). That’s not the only time the cult’s bonus scriptures come up, either, it’s low-key but Far Cry 5 does make a point out of how Joseph Seed’s own writings are considered scripture on par with the Bible by his followers.

There’s other things that line up, although in a way that would be much more easily chalked up to coincidence without the Joseph Seed->Joseph Smith parallel. They’re a vaguely Christian sect with secret practices who come to a place and take over, which is basically what the Mormons did in like three different towns. Of course, Eden’s Gate does this with automatic weapons and the Mormons do it because they were a sub-culture with high in-group trust who arrived en masse all at once, instantly creating a counterculture that was more economically successful and sometimes even more numerous than the original inhabitants. The people who came before them were understandably upset about the sudden overwriting of their own culture under the force of more economically successful outsiders, but it’s not like the Mormons committed any crimes (I mean, there was the pedophillic polygamy towards the end, but people were pissed at the Mormons way before then) and, y’know, the “original” inhabitants were like one generation removed from people who had seized the territory by force from the originaler inhabitants, so the fact that Missouri flipped the fuck out and legalized the murder of Mormons (technically still a law on the books!) isn’t painting them in the best light.

Eden’s Gate first puts down roots in the game’s setting of Hope County in the Henbane River region, so a lot of their original buildings and early history is concentrated there, and it does seem like this is how they were initially. Whereas the Fall’s End region, home to the largest still-inhabited town in the game, has lots of side quests about how Eden’s Gate cultists terrorized the locals, the Henbane River region has ltos of side quests about how they converted the locals. Like, obviously now you’re fighting a shooting war with Eden’s Gate and there’s not a whole lot of persuasion involved in the first person shooter mechanics, but your quest givers talk about how their friends and family defected, rather than being assaulted, driven out, or killed by unnamed Eden’s Gate cultists, who by implication are strangers (not necessarily outsiders entirely, though – Hope County is big, someone from two towns over could be native to the county but totally unfamiliar to you).

There’s also a quote from Henbane River’s primary antagonist, Faith “Seed” (she’s not actually related to Joseph Seed and she isn’t even the first Faith Seed – it’s not clear if either of the other two lieutenants are real family or not, but they all use the “Seed” name), that “we are all born in purity” and you can be pure again if you follow her. This is in direct contradiction to the doctrine of original sin, which is something the Mormon Church very explicitly rejects – the falsehood of original sin is one of their Thirteen Articles of Faith. On the other hand, Faith also has a sort of childlike purity vibe going for her, despite her backstory making it clear that she’s got to be at least sixteen or seventeen years old, and while I’m bad at reading age even on real people, let alone good-not-great video game models, Faith looks like she’s twenty-five. She has this giggling girlish barefoot-and-sundress vibe to her, though. It is, honestly, a really good portrayal of the creepy fetishization of childishness in women that often stems from (or gets justified by, chicken-and-egg problem there) an obsession with purity and virginity. And while I don’t think any religion is as direct in their rejection of original sin as the Mormons are, they’re definitely not the only Christian sect to reject it overall. It’s just usually something hashed out semi-formally in preachers’ letters from 1870, relegated to obscure trivia that only the most obsessive know about, rather than part of a list of articles of faith that congregants are expected to memorize like the Ten Commandments.

Also, the Mormons in Illinois had their own militia, the Nauvoo Legion, which ruled the city and its surroundings under martial law for a while when tensions got high, and in addition to Eden’s Gate generally being full of stormtroopers to shoot, one of the three lieutenants you take out on the way to Joseph Seed is the leader of that militia. But, I mean, it’s a Far Cry game. Obviously enemy militia were necessary.

It might just be because I live in Utah and there’s a bunch of Mormons here, but it does feel kinda like Far Cry 5 is a modern retelling of the Mormons being driven out of Nauvoo, Illinois told from the perspective of the non-Mormon Illinoisians, and propagandized so hard that they kinda forgot that the Illinois government was pretty firmly supportive of Joseph Smith. Like, yeah, the Nauvoo Legion was Joseph Smith’s own private army and turned out in the hundreds to prevent Smith from being arrested by Missouri authorities, but, like, the governor of Illinois was cool with it and the governor of Missouri was a fucking psychopath. When the Illinois authorities arrested Joseph Smith for siccing the Nauvoo Legion on a newspaper he didn’t like, he went quietly, and then got assassinated by a mob. The Mormons aren’t unambiguously the good guys here, but they look a Hell of a lot better than Joseph Seed does.

Less charitably, you could even call Far Cry 5 a retelling of the Mormons being driven out of Missouri, propagandized so hard that they’ve skipped over and conveniently ignore the massacre of more than a dozen Mormon men and boys that led to the raising of pre-Legion paramilitary groups to guard Mormon settlements.

But the main takeaway here is that canonically, Joseph Smith did in fact get killed by a mob, so there’s no fucking reason why I don’t get to kill Joseph Seed at the end of Far Cry 5, dammit.

I’m pretty harsh on Far Cry 5 in other places, the series never handled its Just Leave theme perfectly even at its peak but they completely bungled it in Far Cry 5, and the game is also just buggier and less polished than previous titles in the series, even playing it long after launch. Weird that they put so little effort into the game whose spicy theme made it the biggest swing of the series so far.

I say that up front only because I want to clarify that this post isn’t a criticism. It’s kinda funny, but, like, it’s fine. It’s not a problem to be solved.

See, Far Cry 5 tracks how many kills you’ve gotten in the game. A lot of games do this, and I like to doublecheck this figure at the end of my playthrough and guesstimate what total fraction of the enemy forces I am single-handedly responsible for killing. Usually it comes out to somewhere between 0.1% and 5%. The upper end of the scale gets kinda funny, while the lower end, though still absurd in the absolute body count involved, suggests I was only critical to the war effort because everyone else was too lazy to push the go-button on an outpost takeover mission.

In Far Cry 5, though, the battle is for a single Montana county. If we take the least densely populated Montana county, assume that Eden’s Gate replaces, rather than adding onto, the people there, make up about 50% of the population, and only 10% of their membership are combatants, they could plausibly have fewer than thirty armed members. I killed 1,986. So, probably no need to lowball things here.

If we instead assume that Hope County is at about the median size county for Montana at 7,000, that 75% of those original inhabitants are old enough to vote/fight against the cult, and Eden’s Gate combatants outnumbers these potential opponents 2:1, that gives Eden’s Gate 10,500 combatants. This is a really high mobilization rate, even for a death cult, but the cult doesn’t have to sustain it long term. It’s a burst of total mobilization within driving distance of their homes, made possible because they’re all living off of stockpiled food for the handful of weeks the conflict takes place over. Even so, I single-handedly eradicated nearly 20% of their forces. That’s the level of losses past which units start breaking and routing altogether. The militia might actually have just shown up to garrison outposts I sacked, without ever taking any offensive action or facing any significant counterattack outside of that which I was personally present for.

Given the cult seems to be near-totally eradicated by the end, though, probably even at this scale, and this level of absurd lethality on part of the protagonist, the militia was probably still responsible for destroying another 60% of the cult, with the remaining 20% fleeing into the wilderness.

Since Far Cry 2, which was such a departure from the original as to be the de facto starting point for the series, the Far Cry series has had an underlying theme of Just Leave. You are coming to a terrible place and your video game protagonist skills of incredible violence simply are not going to help here. How much this has worked has varied from game to game.

As dumb as the Jackal’s plan at the end of Far Cry 2 was, the overall Just Leave theme was 100% valid. While you can help a few civilians evacuate, for the most part the only thing you do in the Ambiguously African Republic is make things worse. The country is divided between two factions which, whatever their initial motivations, are now completely interchangeable with each other, you completely clean out the leadership of both factions and it changes nothing, the missions each one assigns you are individually distinct but you could swap half of the missions from one faction for half of the missions from the other and you wouldn’t notice. For all the people you kill, you never fix anything. The lack of any visible civilians past the opening and a handful of cut scenes, in neither case putting them in any danger from stray bullets, makes it seem like you aren’t actually making things worse, just failing to make it better, but if you suspend your disbelief a little, starting all these gunfights in what look like they should be populated areas are surely increasing the civilian body count while not altering the political situation in any meaningful way.

Far Cry 3 is the least heavy on the Just Leave theme. On the one hand, protagonist Jason Brody definitely should Just Leave, but also, like, that’s the plan for the entire first half of the game, and when he decides to stay it is to help the Rakyat fight off a colonialist mercenary army and also turns out to help him save his younger brother Riley, so even if his motives were impure it was actually 100% the correct decision to not Just Leave. Far Cry 3 instead leans more on the second theme, somewhat present in Far Cry 2 with its beautiful (though slightly poorly aged) rendition of the African bush, of the Murder Vacation, where you come to an exotic and beautiful place and get to do exciting things there, like paragliding or scuba diving or gunfights with pirates. There’s a nod to the Just Leave theme when your Rakyat allies turn out to be just as brutal and savage as the mercenaries they were fighting against – just because they’re an oppressed people doesn’t mean they’re good people – but the Murder Vacation is much more firmly in focus, to the point where Just Leave gets undermined by any analysis of the actual plot.

Far Cry 4 caught itself in the jaws of these two competing themes. It had all the ingredients there for a nearly perfect Just Leave plot with three exceptions: One, the option to Just Leave requires waiting around for ten minutes doing nothing at the start of the game, which is way too obscure, if you really want to nail the Just Leave theme then there should be an in-gameplay option to get the Just Leave ending unlocked in an obvious way at some point in the first half of the game and it should stay available for a long period of time.

Two, the way your resistance allies are just as bad isn’t signaled nearly strong enough or nearly long enough in advance. It’s fine to keep that close to the chest early on, but there should be some foreshadowing close to the end of the first half of the game on the southern map and should get very obvious in the second half of the game on the northern map. Instead, the only clear signal comes from a drug hallucination which, yeah, I know that hallucination serves a narrative purpose, but there’s no reason why protagonist Ajay Ghale should give it any credence.

But mostly three, if you’re doing Just Leave, you have to pull way back on Murder Vacation, and Far Cry 4’s side quests were soaked in Murder Vacation vibes. This is especially the case because of how Pagan Min, the main villain, is a charming psychopath type who kills people in fits of pique or as a punchline. In order to make the villain more fun to fight for the Murder Vacation, they had to make him noticeably worse than either of your two allies. Not by a lot, so it’s not like the Just Leave theme is mortally wounded here, but the war between the resistance and Pagan Min was ongoing when you got there and the triumph of the resistance is a marginal improvement, even if it wasn’t worth all the war deaths. But since you didn’t start the war, just resolved it in favor of one of two slightly better options, you actually did help. A disappointingly small amount for all the effort you put in, but still.

But it came really close to making it work. And all of Far Cry 2, 3, and 4 had one thing about the Just Leave theme nailed: Your allies were little better than your enemies, and winning for one side or another made little difference to the lot of the average inhabitant of whatever place you were fighting over.

And Far Cry 5 bungled this completely.

The idea that, in the Trump era, you could set a Far Cry game in the United States was a killer marketing hook, but they tried to ram a Just Leave plot into it and it was an utter, abysmal failure. It’s not just that it lines up poorly with the real world inspirations for the game’s events – there had and has yet to be an actual shooting war with a right-wing militia, so there was always going to have to be a lot of creative liberties taken there. No, it’s that the team you’re on is very unambiguously the good guys. Joseph Seed’s cult kidnaps, tortures, and brainwashes people, and the resistance does not do that, nor anything like that. Nor is it that you can’t help the resistance win. You absolutely crush the cult as a going concern. Outposts are liberated, lieutenants are killed, if you 100% a region the map tells you explicitly that the cult is no longer present in the region and their presence in gameplay is reduced so far that I think it might actually be totally eradicated (there’s an option to give all the outposts back to the cult in the post-game, which I think supports that it is possible to wipe them out to the point where no patrols spawn anymore).

The game has three endings, the first is the Just Leave ending where you, despite being a (deputy) US marshal (or maybe a sheriff’s deputy? Both the sheriff and the marshal act with a certain level of familiarity that suggests you are their deputy in particular, but either way, you are doing your actual job here), decide not to arrest Joseph Seed despite having come here with a warrant. If you do arrest him and play the rest of the game, you find unambiguous evidence of a huge host of crimes – kidnapping, false imprisonment, rampant theft and mugging, a gazillion murders. This guy is breaking tons of laws and you are the proper authorities. Normally in Far Cry you’re a rando outsider coming into the country to try and fix things with guns and blood. Not without significant provocation, but still, you don’t represent anyone or anything except your own personal interests. In Far Cry 5, though, this is your actual job.

In the game’s second Just Leave ending, you can walk out on the final boss fight, leaving Hope County to Joseph Seed with the tattered remnants of his cult while evacuating all the named characters and, presumably, the bulk of those who opposed Joseph’s illegal theocracy. I guess you can ring up the National Guard once you’re out. Except you get mind controlled by the special Bliss drug that Joseph’s been using to enforce cult loyalty through the rest of the game, and implicitly attack your friends and, since you’re Player One, you probably win.

In the game’s true ending, where you actually fight the last boss, you cut down what are possibly the very last remnants of Joseph Seed’s cult (assuming you’ve been 100%-ing the game, which is uncommon but totally possible and does not change this ending), and then it turns out the nuclear apocalypse is coming, and also you end up a prisoner of Joseph Seed and being mind controlled by Bliss again.

None of these are inevitabilities of your intervention. Unlike Far Cry 2-4, it’s not that you can’t help because one very effective combatant simply is not the solution to the problem here. It totally is! There are clear good guys and bad guys, and even if the nuclear apocalypse is inevitable (it only happens in one ending, but that’s the ending where you fight Joseph Seed, so in the other ending it might happen like fifteen minutes after the fade-to-black, accounting for the time the boss fight takes), you can just take the cult’s bunkers for the resistance. There’s definitely a lot of fire and explosions involved in the battles to take out each of the bunkers in turn, but, like, they’re nuke bunkers. While the squishy people inside are certainly affected by all the burning and gunfire, the key feature of the structure itself is that it can stand up to much worse than a few detpacks and gas explosions. Hell, a bunch of resistance members also have bunkers. When you’re killing Joseph’s lieutenants a bunch of them ask “have you ever considered that Joseph might be right?” and I’m like “yeah, sure, whatever, my team is also full of apocalypse preppers and none of the evil shit I’m killing you for is helping you to prepare for the nukes in any way.”

You aren’t doomed from the start by the hubris of thinking you can murder your way to democracy, you’re only doomed because the hand of the author reaches down from the heavens to destroy your progress. It’s also the only Far Cry game (except maybe 6?) where you can’t kill the charismatic villain at the end. It’s not just that it’s possible to leave him alive – there’s actually no way to defeat him. While I can imagine a story where this would be thematically necessary, every time it happens in a video game it has been strictly inferior to an ending where the villain straightforwardly loses, even if that doesn’t result in a straightforwardly happy ending. It’s very easy to create a story where a lone individual cannot meaningfully fight against the gears of history, but very hard to create a first-person shooter where a lone individual can’t kill a specific guy. We kill a shitton of specific guys in this story, Joseph Seed is just another mortal man and he’s right in front of us. The only reason we can’t add his body to the pile is because he’s the author’s specialest little boy.

This must’ve been a common enough complaint, because (according to the wiki) in New Dawn, the post-apocalyptic Far Cry 5 spin-off, Joseph Seed returns and you either kill him or leave him begging for death on his knees. That’s great, but I’m not buying a second video game to play for 15 hours just to reach the part you should’ve put in this game. I’m just going to alt+f4 as soon as I finish the boss fight.

In the Amazing American Circus, there are fifteen different types of circus performer you can have, and you can bring three of them to any given circus performance, which is a card-battling RPG where the enemies are audience members you have to impress and who boo you on their turn. The mechanics are kind of thinly attached to the theme, but it’s a unique theme and the mechanics are still good, so I like it.

When I say the mechanics are good, though, there is a major hole in them, just one that’s luckily easy to ignore: There’s fifteen classes and basically no reason to care about more than three of them. You start with a juggler, an aerialist, and a clown, and you can recruit new performers at each town you visit. There’s three of the same class, so when you find a class you don’t have, you can pick out one whose starting hand of five cards is closer to the build you’re going for. Performers gain XP from shows, but leveling up gives you extra cards or upgraded cards without changing your limit of 5 cards per performer, and you don’t get any extra HP or anything, so a level 1 performer is completely usable even in the endgame.

However, you don’t get to pick out specific cards when you level up. You get a random selection of three. Since leveling up does take quite a long time, it’s very hard to assemble a build without pulling up the Wiki to see what cards are available and shoot for those…oh, except the Wiki sucks because it’s not a super popular game, so actually when you level up you have to look at the cards in front of you and decide if you want to use a reroll to draw three new ones completely blind. You have limited rerolls per level up (you can unlock more by buying an upgrade, which is theoretically useful, if you know what card you want), so you don’t know if you’re throwing away your best option or fishing for it until you’ve played with that class through multiple level ups.

And since there’s no point where retiring characters is required or even useful, there’s not really any reason to change things up except boredom. There’s more than enough depth to this game to carry it through three or four playthroughs, but once I found my team of Face Changer, Juggler, and Fire Swallower was an effective heavy-attack party, I was reluctant to switch out even after I started maxing the level on some of them. I did eventually switch out Juggler for Snake Charmer because that gave my party a more unified aesthetic (the Juggler looks like just some girl with a dream, which I love, but the Face Changer and Fire Swallower are both really extravagently costumed and the Snake Charmer was more consistent with that, whereas the Juggler looked less like we were an underdog circus with a limited budget and more like we really didn’t like our Juggler and refused to get her a costume). I’m glad to be figuring out a new class instead of just steamrolling through everything with a maxed out party, especially since I can always swap the Juggler back in if I’m ever confronted with a particularly difficult performance, but I would appreciate some more guidance on what these classes actually do and, for that matter, where to find the ones I’m missing. The Wiki doesn’t have complete card lists, but it does have a complete class list, and there’s a One-Man Band? Where?!

What this game is really crying out for is side quests that revolve around and require a specific performer. The game has tons of side quests and they’re great, highlighting cryptids, urban legends, and prominent historical figures of the vaguely 1880 to 1910 time period the game is set in, and they’re the best part of the game. Instead of having performers recruited randomly from towns you visit along the way, the game could’ve used the side quests as an opportunity to recruit specific, named performers with specific classes. A handful of the side quests work this way, or nearly work this way, which makes me think this might’ve been the plan at one point? Having a side quest that required you to use a specific performer for a couple of shows would’ve incentivized the player to get a feel for that class and then make a decision about whether or not to add them to the permanent line-up.

And then, instead of randomly selecting cards on level-up, the performer should be able to get any card they want each level up, including copies of or upgrades to existing cards. Put all the cards in front of the player and let them work out what build they want to go for, and get there within just a few levels. It’s fine if there’s some cards that you can only have a maximum of one of, like the Face Changer’s Dragon Circle, a heavy nuke whose primary downside is that after you play it you have to flip it over to Face of Failure, a terrible card that you play only to get it flipped back around to Dragon Circle (but ideally you’ll play a card like Defensive Change that lets you flip another card in your hand without playing it). This does mean that a performer will probably only spend two or three levels getting new cards (or new copies of existing cards) and then the rest upgrading them, but a lower level cap would be fine and also it would be fine if a performer is expected to have all five cards they add to the deck be upgraded when they hit max level (which is eight in the game as it is).

The Great American Circus is still a pretty great game overall. If you want to explore more classes you can always decide for yourself to swap them out more. In order to see all the classes, you will have to commit to using five in each of the three regions (technically four, but you can’t do the South and the Midwest in the same game, which is annoying), and I didn’t realize I might want to do that until way later in the game, and some better design could’ve fixed that. But it’s not like the game prevents you from fully exploring its mechanical depth. You can just decide to do that.

I replayed Fallout 1 recently – I don’t have a record of when I completed it, which means I had no date to enter into my How Long To Beat backlog of finished games, which I decided was as good an excuse as any to play it again – and as with every time I play this game, I am pained by how close to perfect it is, how relatively easy it would be to get that last inch. Fallout 1 isn’t maimed by the places where it’s slightly rushed, but just another three months of polish and it would be completely flawless. Here’s what’s missing:

First, there’s a broken end slide for the Hub because the quest to turn Iguana Bob over to the police is broken. All that’s missing is the dialogue for turning him over to the police. The only reason this would even take an afternoon to fix is because no one’s familiar with the source code anymore (even the original devs will have lost their intuitive grasp of the structure nearly thirty years later), so you’d need a while to familiarize/refamiliarize yourself with how to set flags and add dialogue at all. If Fallout had even one extra week of polish before shipping, this part could’ve been finished. Instead, it’s impossible to get the good ending for the Hub. It will disperse to the wastelands no matter what you do.

Second, finish the Boneyard. There’s a lot of wholly unimplemented quests in the game, but I don’t think the game particularly needs most of them, especially since all the major ideas the game missed out on got picked up and reintroduced into the setting in Fallout: New Vegas. We don’t need a second raider camp for the Vipers, because to whatever extent that content is missing from our lives, we have it now in New Vegas.

But the Boneyard is genuinely unfinished. Like the Hub, there’s a good ending that’s impossible to get in the current game because the side quest for it was never implemented (you can even get it in your quest log, but the spy you need to find is not in the game world). It’s also impossible to end up with a version of the Boneyard where either the Blades take over or the Regulators remain in power. An ending slide where the Followers of the Apocalypse take over is in the game files, unreachable due to the unimplemented side quest, but if you help the Blades defeat the Regulators or vice-versa while not helping the Followers, there’s just no ending slide at all.

Third and finally, fix all the timers. There’s some dangling bugs where certain activities that only cost you a few days on the pip-boy countdown for the water chip advance the calendar date by several weeks, which matters because the mutant army countdown is based on the calendar date, so the same action can bring you three days closer to Vault 13 dying of dehydration but twenty days closer to Vault 13 dying of super mutant invasion, not because it actually affects the timetables of those two things in different ways, but because of a bug.

Also, there’s claims on the wiki that the super mutants are supposed to take over every settlement in the game on specific dates, but despite blowing past the earlier deadlines even on my fastest playthroughs, the end slides are never affected the way they’re supposed to be. I’ve heard if you actually return to Necropolis after the deadline it will be taken over and the end slide will reflect this, but the Hub and the Brotherhood definitely don’t work this way and if you just don’t go back to the Necropolis it will never be overrun by mutants no matter how long it takes you to finish the game.

The game having a timer for its endgame to pick up when the water chip timer that dominated the early-to-mid game leaves off is a good idea. I understand why people didn’t like the half-finished version that the game shipped with and why the easy fix in the post-release patch was to add a 0 to the number of days on the timer rather than overhaul what happens when the timer counts down, but I think the game would be much better with a properly functioning timer.

What do I mean by “properly functioning?” First, let the player know there is a timer. The staggered nature of the timer is perfect for allowing a player to feel like they’re always at risk of running out of time to save everyone and yet have no chance of running out of time to save anyone. 500 or even 400 days is a ludicrously long time to complete this game in. But because the timer is unannounced and there’s no indication of settlements being overrun (except maybe Necropolis?), players get tricked into thinking they’re off the clock once they’ve got the water chip and may end up wandering over the time limit by accident if they spend a lot of time criss-crossing the map. There should be a radio network linking different settlements together. Shady Sands should have a little radio hut where you can tune in to hear the latest wasteland news, using the radio item (the same one you use to turn forcefields on and off with computer hacking in the military base) should let you tune in as well, and when you finish up in Junktown, whoever you helped should give you a radio so they can keep in touch in case the town ever ends up in trouble again. NPCs in the Hub should also point you to the radio in the general store, saying it’s a good idea to have one.

Now, on day 90, you get a radio message from a survivor from the Gun Runners in Boneyard who’s fled to the Hub, letting you know that the Boneyard has fallen to a mutant army and it’s only a matter of time before they expand outwards (“it’s only a matter of months, maybe even weeks, before the mutants strike at the Hub!” or similar to help emphasize that this is a countdown, not a battle map). This causes a new sticky note to show up on your pip-boy in place of the water chip countdown. It’s got a spot on it for the water chip countdown if that’s still relevant, and it’s got a list of all the settlements in the wasteland in order of when they’re conquered, with the Boneyard on top, crossed out. The player doesn’t know exactly when the others will fall, but they get the idea that they are on the clock to stop this mutant army before it’s too late.

Second, sort out the timers on all the settlements between the Necropolis and Vault 13. According to the wiki, the timers for the end slides are (or are supposed to be) 90 days for the Boneyard on the Master’s doorstep, 110 days for the Necropolis, 140 days for the Hub, 170 days for the Brotherhood of Steel, 210 days for Junktown, 230 days for Shady Sands, 400 days for Vault 13 if you told the Water Guild about its location to extend the water chip timer, or 500 days if you did not. The only ones of these that are well-balanced are the Boneyard and the Vault 13 default. The Vault 13 default is so long that, provided the player actually knows they’re on the clock, running out of time is nearly impossible. The Boneyard is on a tight enough timetable that you have to have a good idea of what you’re doing to meet it, making it a good challenge objective for a second playthrough.

The problem is that all of the others are way too soon after the Boneyard, except the 400 day timer on Vault 13 if you did give its location away, which is still so easy that it’s not much of a tradeoff at all for extending the initial water chip countdown. Making the Vault 13 timer more aggressive would be bad because you get an instant game over if Vault 13 falls, but if that just isn’t true, if you can keep playing so long as there’s one settlement left no matter what it is, then extending your initial timer can cut Vault 13’s endgame timer by a lot.

Necropolis being packed pretty tight after the Boneyard might not be a terrible idea, since it serves as a backup objective for someone who was going for the save-everyone deadline but missed it by a hair. You probably missed both the Boneyard and Necropolis on your first playthrough, so getting one but not the other serves as a decent consolation prize.

But saving the Hub is way too hard. As the primary city of the wasteland, any victory that comes after the fall of the Hub is going to feel like a Pyrrhic victory, and you can get there just by making one extra trip back up to Vault 13 to check on things, going on a few caravan runs, and spending a bit too much time in recovery from the Brotherhood of Steel’s stat-boosting surgeries – a sloppy playthrough to be sure, but not excessively so. The Brotherhood of Steel is supposed to get overrun after 170 days, but it definitely isn’t and shouldn’t be, because they are the source of power armor and the stat boosting surgeries, which means it shouldn’t be possible to lose access to them unless you’ve seriously messed up.

Instead, I’d suggest that at 140 days, the Hub reports that scouts from the Crimson Caravan have spotted a mutant army massing and announce that all caravans are suspended as all guards and Hub police are massed into an army to fight them off, at 170 days they announce that just as Hub forces were at their breaking point, the Brotherhood of Steel pushed the mutant army back, leaving without a word and leaving everyone as baffled as ever as to their motives and whether this is a good thing in the long term, and at 200 days, reports come that the Brotherhood is under siege. At 230 days, the Brotherhood falls, and the Hub falls at 240 days.

You can still get power armor (and some of the other loot normally available from there) by getting past the super mutant garrison and retrieving it (the mutants don’t need any special dialogue or anything, they’re just a bunch of bruisers left behind to camp on mostly the first level), but you permanently lose access to the surgeries and no one will show up to help you fight at the military base (for all the help those three losers are when they don’t even follow you inside). Likewise, while you can pick up some amount of leftover loot from the Hub (and get piles of XP from fighting the mutant army occupying its five maps), it’s eradicated as an interactable location.

Once they’ve captured the Hub, the mutants also capture the location of Vault 13, if the Hub traders had access to it. Without the Hub or the Brotherhood to fight them in the field, the super mutants can go wherever they want – Junktown will hold their walls against the army, but they won’t meet them in the field if they go around. Since nearly everyone in Vault 13 is sufficiently unaffected by radiation as to be a prime candidate for mutation, it’s a priority target, and it falls after just 255 days as the mutants make a beeline for it. Junktown goes at 270 days, and Shady Sands at 320 (it’s remote). If Vault 13’s location wasn’t given to the Water Guild, they hold out until day 500 because the super mutants don’t know about it. They think they’ve won and put no particular effort into doublechecking.

The drama around the fall of the Hub and the Brotherhood should make clear to the player that they’re still very much on the clock, and even 245 days is a very generous time limit to finish the game up within, so the player would have to have been completely ignoring the time limit to lose Junktown, Shady Sands, or Vault 13 (even with the Water Guild knowing where they are – the water chip deadline isn’t super harsh, so the price for extending it doesn’t have to be that severe, just not so lenient that it’s virtually guaranteed not to come up unless you go looking for it).

A player who didn’t take the fall of the Boneyard or Necropolis seriously might struggle to save the Brotherhood and the Hub, but even then, not by much. The battle for the Hub, from the first time the Crimson Caravan reports they’re in danger to the point when the Hub falls, lasts 100 days. The entire game is expected to be completed within 90 days if you know exactly what you’re doing, so while saving the Hub adds enough time pressure to make you think twice about making a second trip to the Glow to clean out extra loot, it shouldn’t be hard to do.

So now the game has Junktown, Shady Sands, and Vault 13 as settlements that are nearly impossible to lose, the Hub and the Brotherhood as settlements that are on a tight enough deadline to stop you from thoughtlessly wasting time but which you will almost certainly save in your first playthrough, and Necropolis and the Boneyard as settlements that require fairly efficient gameplay to save, with no room for a stray caravan trip or any unnecessary visits to remote locations like Vault 13 or the Glow (and pretty limited tolerance even for extra trips within the core region of the Hub, Junktown, Necropolis, Brotherhood of Steel, and Boneyard).

This is, by far, the most drastic overhaul to the game, but it’s part of the game’s original plan. The only thing I’ve tweaked is the exact number of days it takes to get there, everything else is reimplementing a super mutant march that was always supposed to be in the game.

The Amazing American Circus is a card battling RPG where the premise is that your battles are circus performances. In terms of mechanics, it’s identical. Your audience is your enemy, they inflict damage on you by booing and sneering, and once you inflict enough entertainment on any given audience member, they start to cheer instead. This does not heal you, they just stop inflicting damage, just like a slain orc.

The game takes you from one end of the continental United States to the other. You have to choose whether you want to go through the Midwest or the South to get from the west coast to the east, which is annoying, but the writing on the side quests is fun. You often encounter cryptids and ghosts, and sometimes blunder into major historical events of the late 19th and early 20th century, in a way that makes it clear that the exact year the game takes place in is a non-committal mumbling sound.

When you arrive in Michigan, you can go hunting for a vaguely Nessie-esque lake monster (not that specific shape, but same idea), and as is often the case, you’re given a chance to express skepticism or belief at the existence of this monster. We’re about halfway across the States now, so it’s pretty hard to get this far without seeing a bunch of the supernatural. Side quest completionist that I am, I had a girl possessed by a fire demon, a clown cured of alcoholism by a magic ritual, and a literal ghost in my circus troupe. But a lake monster? Come on, no way, I’m totally with Scully on this one.