The enormous amount of space and interactivity allows Fallout 4 to play with narrative in the manner of an ensemble novel. The world of Fallout 4 is big and it is scary. But the monkey’s paw that is this spacial sense of openness (both in sheer size and active capability) doubles as a blessing and a curse. That pattern continues in the newest iteration of the post-apocalyptic-wastlandtopia: Fallout 4 allows for a monstrous amount of exploration along with an unparallelled amount of player agency (re: the freedom to fiddle around in perpetuity). But Bethesda’s last decade of games have embodied the term more than anything else on the video game shelf with their mouth-gaping quantities of depth and interactive surroundings. After the wanton destruction of the term by fail videos and meme generators, the word has become an easily dismissed hyperbole. In 2015, it’s tough to use the word “epic” in any serious sense.

This week, Scott digs into his stockpile of canned goods and purified water in order to survive ‘Fallout 4’, developed and published by Bethesda for PC, Xbox One, and Playstation 4. This is LOAD FILE, where all of our survivalist fantasies finally pay off.

Fallout 4 load order file