Let’s not pretend. Fallout is meant to be a little inappropriate. Part of its charm is how it portrays a real wasteland, somewhere between the 1950s and a world with nasty, nasty people who do whatever it takes to survive and quite a few steps beyond that. Things get weird. There are experiments, corrupted heroes, impossible decisions, and every kind of immorality you can imagine.
So, in that spirit, let’s take a closer look at Fallout 4 and the surprising number of hidden stories in Fallout 4, and just how wrong they are. Oh, sure, this world is a wasteland and everyone is doing some pretty nasty stuff, but these are the things that make you sit back and wonder, “Wait, is that a little too much?”
Yes, yes, it is. Whether it’s one-night errors or wicked surgeons who do a few too many experiments on their patients, here’s the list of things we aren’t quite sure should even be in Fallout. Some disturbing stuff is okay. But when you start telling players that it’s okay to do the nasty stuff, it’s easy to go overboard, and this game has more than enough opportunities to get crazy. Sit back and take a look: We can’t promise it will be pretty, but we can say you probably haven’t heard of all these unpleasant stories, especially the ones that the world lets you figure out. Strap in, because things are about to get weird, and not in a good way.
25 Terrifying Everything
Hallicugen is a chemical factory filled with Gunners, a fairly common occurrence in Fallout 4. But the complex story is way beyond the pale, if you stop to pay attention. You see, back in the pre-blown-up-Boston days, it was desperate for money, and as an all-powerful company it decided to do the obvious thing:
Invite poor people in for fake jobs and use them for experiments.
You can still see the experiment chambers where Gunners, driven mad by dispersal gas, are gibbering. You can drive them madder, shock them, or do any of the other hideous experiments that they were practicing. Hey, break into the lab and steal their terrifying gas grenades! Just don’t think too hard about where they came from.
24 Anything To Do With The Children Of The Atom
Look, we all know that the Children of Atom are crazy. That’s okay. We expect nothing less. But in Fallout 4, they get a little too…intense. When you find them around the world, they were all worshipping radiation until dropped them, leaving dangerous radiation grenades around because they also tried to do that to other people.
We understand the need to join an evil guild, but maybe tone it down a little, guys.
When you find them alive, they attack you on sight, or worship glowing ghouls in lighthouses, or try to recruit you to detonate an ancient atomic bomb and summon monsters from the fog – or all three. Think of the message you’re sending to the children. You know, those that survive. Which is no one.
23 Your Night Stand With Magnolia
Magnolia is a singer you meet in the Third Rail bar: You can totally ignore her, or talk to her and…initiate an encounter. Magnolia is voiced by Linda Carter, of Wonder Woman fame, so there are several fantasies right there. She also has practice in being a lady of negotiable affection, and will openly flirt with you, to pretty much whatever you say. As is Fallout tradition, if you are high enough in the right stats, you can flirt back and – yep, go home with a singer you never really see again. If you try to romance companion characters, things get awkward if you try to talk with Magnolia again. It’s a classic wasteland oopsie, from a man….uh, from a man mourning his fallen wife and kidnapped child, actually. Huh.
22 The Entire Chem System Is…A Horrible Lesson
Don’t worry, long-time Fallouters. We know that crazy chems humor are a classic part of Fallout lore, and that’s it’s one that makes this game series so unique. But Fallout 4’s relationship with chems is…messed up. Classically, taking chems always comes with downsides, namely addiction that lowers your stats and makes you think, “Oh, should have seen that coming.” But in Fallout 4, addiction is basically a gnat you wave away at any time with a quick visit to a doctor for a cheap fix or a magical potion you can make at a crafting table. Feel free to guzzle all the gross chems you need, players!
21 Pickman, The Horrible Criminal You Happily Help
Pickman’s Gallery is a famous spot in Fallout 4, an old apartment complex where a nasty serial attacker named Pickman lives. There’s no easy way to say this: He paints beautiful paintings with his victims’ remains, and hangs them all over his house. Not that great – but the worst part is that you can follow Pickman’s enemies down the house, eliminating them all, until you reach the even creepier basement altars and ultimately save Pickman himself. Pickman is grateful, creepy, and generally everything you should have expected. He gives you a key to open a safe and get his secret weapon, which – you guys know what that thing has been used for right? Oh, it has a sneak bonus? Well okay, just this once.
20 Vault 75’s Awful Kids
Vaults are always a great spot to go if you want to find out why Fallout games really aren’t meant for kids. In this case, literally, because …
Vault 75 was all about raising children from carefully monitored DNA and then training them as attack machines.
The problem is that the children caught on, and they orchestrated a revolution that left all the adults gone. The place is filled with Gunners now, and many fans have guessed that the Gunners were actually the original children from the Vault, now fighting across the world map. It’s okay kids! A random dad is going to come and snipe you all from behind a chair. We hope your lives have been fun, because we got a lot of loot out of it.
19 The Fens Street Sewer Criminal
The Fens Street Sewer is a random little dungeon in the midst of ruined Boston that’s really easy to miss – and if you find it, you probably wished that you did. That’s because of the home of a famous pre-war criminal who loved to arrange his victims’ bodies in macabre scenes and settings: Not exactly a new idea, but very grisly when explored a forsaken sewer palace.
There’s a ghoul boss at the end who is probably meant to be the infamous criminal.
Getting rid of that particular enemy doesn’t feel quite as good as it should have. You can find signs of the story behind the guy and the detective (maybe even Valentine in his old body) who was hunting him down.
18 The Forged, A Crazed Fire Cult With Hideous Rituals
The Forged live at Saugus Ironworks in the north of the map, where they chill and…do some pretty messed-up things. There is a quest to get an interesting fire sword by hunting down into the depths of the foundry, which is filled with fires and bubbling metal: You see, the Forged basically worship fire and heat, and tend to throw in members who act too pansy or make mistakes – to act as fuel, of course. In fact, you find just such a ritual going on and have a rare moment of choice in how you handle it (and speech checks, of course). Read the notes around the foundry, and you will find a lot of nasty tales about how they burn themselves and other people for fun and giggles. It’s a good thing they have great weapons to loot.
17 Character Voice Lines Over The Edge
Much has been made of the dialogue options in Fallout 4 and how they are…well, four basic choices. By far the most popular option is the sarcastic voice line, which to its credit creates a lot of hilarious situations…and some very inappropriate lines. Ask people their favorites, and one common example is, “Eddie! It’s me! Your old pal, Shamus Mc—-yourself,” which may be both wrong and racist at the same time. Other lines emphasis interesting activities with private parts, wanton marauding, eating other people, and many other fascinating lines you may not want your children hearing. In this case, the dialogue system actually seemed to deliver an authentic Fallout experience, so we congratulate them for making the world a little more realistic…if also something we hope other people don’t overhear.
16 Giving An Old Woman Chems – Lots Of Chems
Mama Murphy is a character you encounter early on in the game, and she teaches you a ton of really bad ideas. First bad idea: An random old woman can see the future and give you magical guidance in your wanderings. Second bad idea: To help you out, you need to give this old woman a lot of really hard pharmaceuticals, like the scary stuff you just whipped up in your backyard chemistry lab that you hope no one else in Sanctuary notices. The problem is that once you start giving Murphy chems, she keeps wanting more and more, and you can keep giving them to her until she succumbs to an overdose. Realistic? Possibly. But definitely not the greatest storyline to discover with a nice old lady who only wants to help.
15 Mannequins for Company
Fallout 4 is really big on mannequins: They are everywhere, hauled to various positions by raiders for fun and giggles or sheer terror or maybe just a good decoy for snipers. But sometimes the mannequins get a little…worse. Sometimes it looks like they moved by themselves. For example, in Concord you find a skeleton in a bathtub, surrounded by mannequins, some holding weapons. Hey, free, weapons, but you have to wonder how they all got there, especially when it’s not at all clear how the bathtub man perished. In the same spot, you find another skeleton who apparently had too much on some powerful chemicals, lying in bed with another mannequin….for fun? Either this was a meme of the ancient Fallout world, or these mannequins are a whole lot more creepy than we thought.
14 The Cult Of Dunwich Borers
Dunwich Borers is a big mining site where you can snipe a lot of raiders and then discover what the place is really about: A huge, haunted mine where you see visions, encounter ghouls, and work your way down through an awful story. Back when this was a mining site pre-war, the company in charge had a very lax attitude toward fatal accidents, even when children were involved…almost as if they wanted the accidents to happen. Conditions grew worse and worse, until …
The company devolved into a cult worshipping at the altar of an ancient evil at the bottom of the mine.
Literally. Those company men are hideous ghouls when you discover them, but the bloodthirsty altar is still, along with a dangerous prize to claim.
13 The Creepy Story of Cambridge Polymer Labs
Cambridge Polymer labs is, like so many places in Fallout, a ruined building that looks fairly innocent until you go inside and things get very wrong, very fast. In this case, it’s an old lab that’s run by an ancient robot that assumes you are just there to apply for a job. Since everyone else is deceased, you are easily hired – and then trapped inside the building, as the robot’s protocols require all employees to be sealed in the building until a little nuclear episode is cleared up. As you explore, you find that the rest of the employees betrayed each other and were either dispatched or ate poison to end it all. Ultimately, you discover that the director of the company was turned into a ghoul and has been trapped in his office for hundreds of hungry years.
12 The Diamond City Bar Scandal
There are just, so many quests in Diamond City, the only real hub that exists in Fallout 4. But one of those quests gets awkward very fast (oh okay, more than one), and it’s about a good old-fashioned case of adultery. In Diamond City Blues, you find that a man’s wife has run away with a crooked bartender, and they are shacking up like there’s no tomorrow. You have several options on how to handle the issue, but most end up with you making a sleazy deal with the bartender and ultimately laying waste to just, a lot of random people. While it may not be the creepiest quest, it’s definitely one of the most mature stories in a video game that doesn’t exactly pull any punches.
11 Chems And Vault 95
Vault 95 is a weird place, even compared to other vaults. It was originally designed to hold addicts to various chems and drink – and try to rehabilitate them with a combination of therapy and a really nasty brain device that sort of sucks into your skull. Hooray! It worked for several years (as you discover, picking up the pieces hundreds of years later), but the Vault was an evil experiment, of course, so eventually, they opened up a great big storage room of chems. Many inhabitants had too much, while some fought each other into the grave over the last chems or drinks. When you find the place, all the original people are skeletons, huddled around chem syringes and bottles…which you immediately loot to feed your own habit. Is it just us, or is that particularly wrong?
10 The Eerie Town Of Covenant
Covenant is a heavily fortified little town in the middle of nowhere where everything is neat and tidy, and all the people are pleasant, and there’s free lemonade. As you might expect, everything goes horribly wrong. The town is so afraid of synths that it constructs a weird test on all newcomers, and make sure that all humans obey a super strict set of laws and never, ever behave oddly in any case. Oh, and they are also secretly interrogating people they believe may be synths, like the girl you discover in a hidden prison away from the town. You don’t really learn if she’s a real synth, but you can certainly reclaim the town for yourself if you want and end the Twilight Zone show at last.
9 The Touching (And Horrible) Old People Gravesite
Speaking of Covenant, the town is by Covenant Lake, a large lake that hides a number of secrets, including a free and rusted suit of power armor that you can nab if you’re quick enough. But there’s a dark little story at the other end the lake, up on the shore by an old drainage pipe. Here, you find wheelchairs and skeletons, along with flowers and other signs that this is a resting place for senior citizens. Where do they come from, and who brings them here? You never find out, although it could be what happens to Covenant’s old people. There are dozens of creepy little stories you find just wandering out in the wilderness of the game, but some of them are just a little intense, you know?
8 Diamond City’s Insane Surgeon
Okay, back to Diamond City for a little bit. There is a case you can take for Nick Valentine, regarding a simple missing person. Unfortunately, the case doesn’t end with such ease: Long story made short, it turns out the local doctor was dabbling in plastic surgery, and not the kind that movie stars get. He was practicing on the missing person, and it ended as a fatal accident. The doctor went mad, and locked himself in the cellar with the body, babbling about how he could make it right again. By the time you find the doctor, the body is in several pieces, and it takes an incredible speech check to even get the doctor out with you without harm. Not exactly your usual noire detective case.
7 Synth Are Either Servants Or Brainwashed People
Synths just don’t have it easy. From the Institute’s perspective, they are mere tools, things to be created and deployed in the world when they need a spy or an…undercover agent without a mission? Whatever. But the Railroad believes that synths have real agency and personalities, and tries to free them from their slavery. The big problem with this is that the Railroad’s big plan for these slaves is helping to steal them away…and then completely erasing their identities and giving them brand new brains. So, basically, “We believe that you have a real life, and now we are going to utterly destroy to save you. No talking back, please.” And yes, these are supposed to be the good guys, in case you were wondering: We sure did.
6 The Boylston Club Pact
The Boylston Club was a Boston haven for the rich and famous (men) to gather and smoke cigars while drinking fine drinks and musing on how very rick they were. That’s good news because it means free drinks and old cigars for you to sell! But if you listen to the tapes around the lounge and notice all the conspicuous skeletons, you soon discover a darker tale.
What’s haunting is seeing that the Club still stands all these years later, in a ruined city that’s all too alive with monsters.
The club realized that the world was ending, and decided to end it all by drinking some poisoned wine. Oh, that’s a warning too – don’t pick up the poisoned drinks and try them out, because they will not treat you well. To find out more about how rich people survived in Fallout, keep on reading!
