But What if I Don't Like Fallout 4?

If you've been paying attention to almost any mainstream culture over the past few weeks, you probably would have noticed a certain buzz in some quarters about an enormous new post apocalyptic role playing game. Fallout 4 arrived this month with an appropriately nuclear sized bang and seems to have taken over the world. No doubt you have seen the adverts, both on the internet and in the real world. The internet is awash with talk of it, your friends and their kids are talking about it, and collectively its players have already spent hundreds of years of playtime exploring its post-nuclear wasteland.

And all that is wonderful for those that are into it. But what if you're like me, bitten by the post apocalyptic bug whilst having absolutely no interest in playing the game. Well, I'm here to help. Here are a few post-nuclear literary worlds you can immerse yourself in whilst your friends have disappeared because they're spending days at a time on their PlayStation.

Mortal Engines:

Philip Reeve's Mortal Engines quartet is set several thousand years and two or three world orders after the end of a cataclysmic event known as the Thirty Minute War. As a solution to the problem of the world's dwindling natural resources, many of the remaining inhabitants of the world have returned to a nomadic lifestyle and put their cities on wheels. Vast tracked cities roam the remains of Europe and a now empty North Sea gobbling up natural resources and hunting other cities in a system known as Municipal Darwinism.

If this all sounds a bit grim, rest assured, it isn't. Mortal Engines is a rip-snorting action-adventure on a massive scale, following two outcasts from London that has almost everything. There are the aforementioned cities on wheels. There are airships, gunfights, and humorous misunderstandings of the technology we left behind. There is a terrifying and unstoppable, yet sympathetic antagonist, and best of all, there is Hester Shaw. One of the strongest, angriest female leads I have ever laid my eyes upon. I really can't say enough good things about Mortal Engines, and if you enjoy a great adventure story, you need to put this on your list.

There is also a quartet of prequels, starting with Fever Crumb, set at the dawn of the traction age. Sadly, we may never see the fourth book, but the three that we have wrap up quite nicely on their own and are well worth your time. Just be sure to read Mortal Engines first.

The Metrozone:

Put simply, Simon Morden's Metrozone trilogy is Die Hard transplanted into London, with a post-nuclear twist.

Metrozone's world is one that has survived a wave of nuclear terrorism perpetrated by a group of Christian fundamentalists known as the Armageddonists. It is here that we meet the lovably unlovable scientist, Russian refugee, and possible sociopath, Samuil Petrovich. A chance decision to intervene in a kidnapping sets off a chain of events involving the Neo-Yakuza, an all powerful computer virus called the New Machine Jihad, some car chases, some crashes, many explosions, a few giant robots, several heart attacks, and a warrior nun. And that's just the first book.

Just like Die Hard, the story tears along at breakneck pace and Morden takes great delight in beating the stuffing out of his leading man. You'll read these books in a single sitting. They're that good.

Metro 2033:

And now for something a little different. Metro 2033, by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky is an altogether more plausible study of what we might become in the aftermath of the unthinkable. Set twenty years after a nuclear strike on Moscow, what might be humanity's last remains make the best of what they have living in the world's largest bomb shelter, the Moscow Metro. Unremittingly bleak from beginning to end, the inhabitants are beset by terrors from all sides. The surface is devastated by war and given to the mutants. Radiation seeps through the cracks and makes everyone sick. People lose their minds in the darkness of the tunnels or to the Dark Ones who periodically venture down from the surface. And of course there are the other people, who can be much worse than all of that. 

So yes, Metro 2033 is dark, but it's also an excellent study of how we band together to cope with the most extreme situations and a compelling journey to take alongside Artyom, the story's leading man. Read it and feel the terror at how close we once were to this book becoming reality.

Wool:

Continuing the bleak, we move onto Hugh Howey's Wool. In Wool, we find ourselves with Juliet, living in a silo with no contact with the outside world except for what's shown on the screens in the main communal area. Those screens show a completely dead vista of lifeless foothills and hints of towers in the distance. As a power struggle and rumblings of an uprising begin to brew, Juliet finds herself caught in the middle, and that's when the real trouble starts for her.

Whilst Wool is less unremittingly grim than Metro 2033, it still has a very downbeat and dystopian tone. The society in the silo is very much two tiered, and very controlled. The elites of the upper floors tend to look down upon the people of the lower floors, who as usual are the people who actually keep the civilisation running. Particularly cruel is the twist inflicted upon anybody unlucky enough to be sent to the surface. Like Metro 2033, Wool is scary because it's so plausible, and it's very much worth your time for that reason.

Shades of Grey:

Let's finish on something light, shall we? When you open the covers of Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey, you find yourself in Chromatacia; Britain several hundred years after The Something That Happened. A Britain where your place in society is determined by the colours you can and can't see. In fact, almost everything in this society, likened by Fforde as an English grammar school as run by Pol Pot, is determined by colour. From the names of towns and places to a person's job, to whom you can and can't associate with, even your name. Amusingly, certain shades of green have narcotic effects and stronger shades, such as lincoln, are strictly controlled.

Also, there is a critical shortage of spoons.

So yes, Shades of Grey is a very strange book, and it drops you in at the deep end, with leading man Eddie Russet about to be digested by a carnivorous tree. There's a lot to take in, but thankfully, Shades of Grey has an ace up it's sleeve. It is very funny, which helps lubricate the gears of your mind as you try to catch up with the strange place you've found yourself in. Once you're up to speed however, things quickly get sinister, stranger and amazingly, funnier. The plot barrels along through a conspiracy that will shake the characters' worldview to its core and on to an ending that will definitely play on your mind. 

I love this book, and have recommended it to pretty much everyone who's ever asked me what they should be reading. If I have one gripe with it, it's that the next book isn't coming soon enough.

Imagination-Land

This post first appeared on readyplayertwo.co.uk.



The right Bioshock Cover

Playing so much Bioshock Infinite of late has led me to a rather surprising conclusion. The level to which I connect with a game is in almost direct correlation to how fantastical or unusual the setting is. Put it like this. What sounds more appealing? Grey first person shooter set in a gritty rendition of modern day northern Waziristan or primary coloured first person shooter set in a sunlight flooded flying city circa 1912. Of course, I'm talking about Battlefield 4 and Bioshock Infinite, and for me, since games are all about escapism, my natural choice would be the game set in the early twentieth century flying city. Let's try another one. A racer featuring real world cars racing on real world tracks or a supersonic hovership racer running on tight rollercoaster tracks set in a bright post scarcity future? Forza or WipeOut. I own and enjoy both, but I only utter the L word about one of those, and it's not the one with the real world cars.
 
Games have an ability, unique in pretty much all media, to immerse you in the impossible. Titles like Fez, WipeOut and Antichamber can even take you to places beyond what a layman like myself would accept to be the normal laws of physics, let alone beyond the average imagination. And while a mega budget 3D movie can show you the impossible, only games can let you experience it.
 

This shot sums up the mess that the Spec Ops
soldiers have gotten themselves in to.

It makes me sad when some games seem to squander the worlds they're built in. Take Gears of War as an example. It's set on what's assumed to be another planet, it's antagonists erupt from the ground and sink entire cities in their wake. Yet despite all this, it's still for the most part a gritty urban shooter in which you're surrounded by burned out cars, lumbering tanks, helicopters, crumbling neo gothic architecture and lots of brown. Take away the locust and it could be a war zone in any European city. All of the Gears games are great and I've enjoyed every one of them, particularly the third, but it says a lot about a series' sci fi setting when it's most memorable moment (at least for me personally) is also practically the only nakedly sci fi set piece of the entire series; the section in which you kill a giant city devouring worm from the inside out. It's easy to forget, during the moments you're not chainsawing Locust, that Gears is set on a different planet at all. Conversely I find, Spec Ops: The Line's gorgeous sun drenched rendering of Dubai really compelling. Spec Ops' developers took the usually mundane idea of a modern day city, drowned it with a sandstorm and then seemingly made every reflective surface out of gold. It's a look and a location that is pretty much unique in gaming at the moment. The result takes what should have been just another brown shooter and polishes the brown to a blinding sheen, which is what gives Spec Ops' realistic setting such a kick.
 
What I'm trying to get at here is that a game can be much more interesting if it's framed in a way that's not often seen. Admittedly, Gears' success did set the formula for the brown shooter, but I've seen so many brown shooters since, that when Spec Ops came along wrapped in sand, bathed in blinding sunlight and drizzled with gold it felt like a breath of fresh air.
 

One of the most iconic shots in Dishonored.

Thankfully, once you've pulled your eyes away from Call of Battlefield, you don't have to look too hard to find game worlds lavished with a wealth of creativity. It goes without saying that if you want to see the most creative and original games available at the moment, then you need to look at the Indies. Titles like Fez, Antichamber, Bastion, Dear Esther, Machinarium, To the Moon, Dust or even Minecraft are unlike almost anything you'll find in a box on the shelf of your local games shop. But even if for some strange reason you only limit yourself to boxed games, there is still a wealth of creativity out there. There's the aforementioned sun drenched turn of the century vintage futurism of Bioshock Infinite, or the deep-as-the-ocean green tinted decopunk of Rapture of that game's progenitors. Don’t want a dystopia in the sky? Then why not tour the bright yet totalitarian city in Mirror’s Edge. If you want to pass on dystopias altogether, then try a post apocalypse. If you think every end-of –the-world is the same, then might I point you in the direction of the criminally under rated, and exceptionally leafy, Enslaved or Naughty Dog's forthcoming The Last of Us. Alternatively if like your post apocalypse a little bit grimmer, yet still crave something that feels fresh, then may I present to you 4A Games' Metro; bleak and dark as the Moscow underground that shelters the last remnants of humanity in all its tunnels. Too dark? Perhaps we can lighten the mood in the collapsing laboratories of Portal 2. Too light, or not escapist enough? How about a visit to the charmingly English land of Albion in Fable, or the icy blue tundra of Skyrim. Too much fantasy? Then why not visit the crumbling, and entirely fictional, yet surprisingly plausible whalerpunk city of Dunwall, the place that accounts for at least seven tenths of what makes Dishonoured so great. If you're feeling more adventurous? If you haven't already, look no further than the Uncharted games, whose fabled lost cities, once they are revealed, dish out the most lavish and awe inspiring vistas of this generation. What if you want the fabled cities but less of the shooting and more of the journey? Obviously you want to visit the golden deserts and the desolately beautiful crumbling lost civilisation of the genuinely moving Journey. I could go on and on.
 
And I haven't even mentioned Final Fantasy yet, whose designers, Square, are the undisputed masters of creating richly imagined worlds. Worlds dense with culture, history and story, that feel lived in and are a pleasure to inhabit. Final Fantasy VII wouldn't have been the worshipped game it has become without that kind of imagination. It takes a special kind of mind to come up with a concept as out there as the Lifestream, but without it there would be no Mako, no Shin-Ra, no Soldier, no Materia, no Cloud, Sephiroth, Avalanche. The Ancients, with whom the Lifestream is intrinsically linked, would not have sprung from the mind of Yoshinori Kitase and with no Ancients, there would be no Aeris. Without the Lifestream, Aeris wouldn't have died, because she would never have existed, and a whole generation of gamers would not have experienced 'that' moment. You all know the one. Square still have that wealth of creativity. Say what you like about Final Fantasy XIII as a game, you can't deny that the twin worlds of Pulse and Cocoon make for one of the most compelling gameworlds of this generation.
 
Games are always better when game designers can let their imaginations run wild. That's why so many indie games are so great. With fewer concerns about shareholders or appealing to the mass market, indie devs can really cut loose. But there could be more of this sort of thing if the publishers were daring enough to indulge the experimentation of developers. Would it not be great if publishers weren't as commercially cautious? I like to think that if they weren't, we would begin to see fewer gritty modern world war games, less dystopian cyberpunk and less stone-faced post apocalypse. Of course, every now and then a game will appear that will turn your expectations on their head. Spec Ops' Dubai proves there is room for maneuver in the modern day shooter and the forthcoming Remember Me's Neo-Paris does some really interesting things with cyberpunk.
 


This is London on wheels, note St Pauls perched at the summit.

Personally, I'd like to see more of the punk suffix flying around. Bioshock-the-first may have been first out of the blocks with decopunk, but there's a lot more that can be done within the realms of 1920's art deco futurism. In fact there's more that can be done with retro futurism all round. For instance, who wouldn't love to see something based around Retropolis? Or how about an adaption of Philip Reeve's far future world of Mortal Engines? Whilst the novels are not strictly steampunk, their vaguely Victorian cast iron and brass aesthetics, rich back story, airships, unstoppable ancient warrior cyborgs and predatory mobile cities (yes, you read that right) could make for a pretty compelling experience. Steampunk has become almost a subculture in itself, and is pretty ubiquitous at a certain kind of real world convention, but I'm yet to see a full blown steampunk game. Dishonoured came close, but it wasn't quite there, which is why I knocked together whalerpunk to describe it instead.
 
If all that seems a bit overused already, then there is also dieselpunk and atompunk to check out too. The best way to describe these would be to tell you to watch Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and check out the Ratchet and Clank series' various robots. Or I could just say that it's futurism that respectively focuses on the aesthetics of the thirties and the fifties. Or you could check out the Wikipedia page here. I'm barely scratching the surface really.
 
Games tend to focus a lot on sci fi and fantasy, and all this punk stuff is just my own narrow vision. There are hundreds of talented game designers out there with incredible imaginations whose ideas are broader than mine will ever be, who can produce out-there concepts that I couldn't dream of. The games that come from that kind of imagination are the kind that I always love most. I’m hoping that the success of Bioshock Infinite can convince the cautious corporate sorts who have the say in the game industry that a triple A game doesn't have to be grey, brown or a combination of the two to be successful. Hopefully they'll begin to allow those designers to set their imaginations free. The results could really be spectacular if they do.