All screenshots taken by me, Guubadoop
Here we are again on Fallout 2, last time I wrote a lot of boring words about how to make a character, but today we’ll actually get to play the game.
As soon as the character creation is done with we are greeted by a cutscene of an old woman speaking...
Come in, Chosen One. There are things you must know.
The village is dying. The signs are everywhere. Withering crops... dying brahmin... sick children.
There is hope, however. A slim hope that few know of. The old disks speak of an item called the Garden of Eden Creation Kit. It is said it can bring life to the wasteland. This will be your quest if you prove yourself worthy.
For that proof, you must first journey to the Temple of Trials. If you survive, come back to me we will talk more. Our life is in your hands, Chosen One.
Prove yourself. Find the GECK. Be our salvation.
She’s the elder of our little tribal village and what she basically tells us is that we’re doomed.
…
Well, not really.
She also says that we’re the “Chosen One” and that we also need to prove ourselves in order to demonstrate that we are, in fact, the Chosen One.
Makes sense, right?
When she’s done speaking we find ourselves in this little area here:
Our protagonist (Sara) is the one with the red hexagon around her, while this man at the bottom of the screen is just a random NPC.
We can try talking to him but he gives no information at all, always repeating that we must complete our trial first so we’ll go and do that first. As soon as we load into this area we can see the entrance and the two characters I mentioned before, since this guy wants us to complete or trial we’ll enter this weird temple and do whatever it is we’re supposed to do.
Temple Entrance
The first room of the temple, note the blackish creatures in the shadows
You are in a dark, musty temple. The shadows seem to play tricks with your eyes, and you can hear the faint sound of movement.
As soon as we’re entered we’re greeted by the first enemy of the game “Giant Ants” and this is where the whole “Worst Tutorial Level” thing I put in the title comes into play.
See, when people build their characters they have a general idea of what they want to play, when I first played the game I had made a character that focused on gunplay. Which is completely fine, what’s not fine however, is the fact that you start with nothing but your bare fists and a shoddy spear to fight against waves and waves of giant ants.
The problem is that while you do in fact have a weapon, it won’t do anything if you don’t have the required skills to use it properly, so imagine if someone builds a character with no points whatsoever in the combat skills and they’re swarmed by these ants without being able to fight back, see what I mean?
What’s worse is the fact that even if you do make a character with some points in melee or hand to hand combat since you’re just in level 1 you won’t have enough points to guarantee a hit, which means you’ll probably miss most of your attacks and get hit a lot.
Oh and the healing items you have make you weaker, thus making it more difficult to hit enemies.
For a game so focused on exploring and “playing your own way” this is literally the worst thing you could do for a tutorial level.
BUT, you can live through this (even if your character can’t do anything here to save himself) it just requires a lot of save scumming and praying to the RNG Gods luck.
Surprisingly, I managed to kill the ants in this room with little to no problem. Thank you RNGjesus
Going up, I open the door and see two paths (I forgot to take a screenshot here, sorry) going to the right takes me to the door to the next area and going left takes me to a room with a pot, so we’ll go there for the sweet loot.
There was a stealthy ant here but nothing I couldn’t deal with. Opening the pot i can see…
Some drugs, nice.
This is Healing Powder, the first healing item we get in the game and using this gives us debuffs in our perception thus making it more difficult for us to hit stuff.
It also makes the other people in our tribe hallucinate or something.
Going to the right, we find a locked door, and this is where the player is introduced to the ability to using skills in the environment.
Using my mad lock picking skillz I can open the door.
Lockpicking is an ancient skill in our village, passed down from generation to generation.
This takes me to the next area, where I’m immediately greeted by a projectile trying to kill me.
This room is the usual temple room with traps that throw stuff at you. We could tiptoe around and try to deactivate the traps while making a path to the other end of the room, OR…
Run to the other side while avoiding anything thrown at us, which is much cooler in my opinion.
An ant attacks me as soon as I’m done running, but is killed by one of the traps of all things.
I go another room and I’m ambushed by Giant Scorpions, this is where the save scumming begins because they can poison you and there is not enough antidote in this entire temple to cure you if you were to be poisoned by every single one of them. Thankfully however, there is an ancient technique we can use to finish this fight.
It’s called “Tactical Retreat”.
The scorpion is right next to Sara, behind the wall. There is also a second one, but he was too slow.
Before running retreating I confuse my opponent by running circles around him and open the chest.
The scorpion chases me all the way to the next rooms, but since he’s lost direct line of sight with me I can forcefully end the combat and his AI will just give up the chase.
I continue moving forward and fighting off the vicious Ants that seek to eat my poisoned body for some reason and reach a pot which contains, of all things, plastic explosives.
This is an ancient relic of my people.
How does a group of tribal people even manage to find these?
If we continue going upwards we’ll find a metal door that can’t be opened by lock picking it or by normal means. The first time I played this it took me 3 hours to figure out what to do:
I open my inventory and fiddle with the explosives, silently praying to RNGjesus that I don’t kill myself while tampering with them. I manage to set the timer, and proceed to drop the explosives to the floor; I perform a quickly executed tactical retreat while waiting for them to detonate.
I also found out that you HAVE to manually drop the explosives, otherwise they blow up in your pocket.
They are strong enough to destroy the metal door and allow me passage to the next and final area, after thanking RNGjesus I make my way and fight some more ants and scorpions, because for some reason they’re the only sentient things in this place, aside from me.
I’m quickly proven wrong as I open the final door and find a room different to any other.
Were you waiting in here all along?
This man’s name is Cameron, and he’s the “final boss” of this hell tutorial section.
The first thing he tells us is that we must defeat him in unarmed combat in order to pass our trial. Unlike the guy at the entrance, we can actually ask him some stuff before we proceed to beat the stuffing out of each other.
How did he even get here? The way in was blocked by a big metal door!
I ask: "Can I ask you some questions first?"
"What would you like to know?"
-"Why do we have to fight?"
"The path of the Chosen One is not an easy trail to walk, you will be faced with many challenges throughout your lifetime, and the most difficult of these will be dealing with your fellow man."
"There will come a time when diplomacy and tact will prove to be useless and your hand must be raised instead. This challenge prepares you to face another human, look him in the eyes, and know that you may have to kill him."
Since I know that: 1-Sara has only survived thanks to praying to RNGjesus luck, and 2-My melee skill sucks, I respond:
-"I disagree with you. I think that a peaceful solution to any problem is possible."
"You may be correct, but not in our current situation. You must defeat me to succeed in your trial."
-"Look, I don't know all of your strengths and weaknesses, and you don't know mine. Accidents do happen, so what if one of us inadvertently kills the other? Let's just end this now rather than take that chance, okay?
He does actually kill you if you decide to fight him.
This satisfies Cameron, allowing me to pass and complete the trial. Finally I open the door to our reward, and find some weird looking pajamas.
Ah yes, the ancient pajamas of power, one of our most sacred relics.
That’s it for now, this one is a little longer because I wanted to tackle the entire tutorial at once, since I want to complete the initial part of the game as soon as possible
Next time we’ll get to see the Elder and the people of "Arroyo", any advice is welcomed and I hope you guys enjoyed my ramblings about this really old game. See you next time.
