Wasteland Survival Guide Vol. I: "I'm THIRSTY."

The starch... is an absolute good. The starch is life.

Survival mode is not what I expected. After 6 hours with it I'm both delighted and frustrated. There are great ideas mixed in with punitive nonsense. It's like a 10 course meal and you can't stand 4 of them. Clearly a lot of effort went into it, like it was a pet project of someone high up in Bethesda. If you're the kind of person who wants all games to be a little bit like the long dark, this is certainly that.

I adored New Vegas's hardcore mode. Ammo weight becoming a thing, eating, drinking, and sleeping being necessary. It made the game just involved enough to be more interesting rather than irritating. Fallout 4 has all that and oh, so much more. In New Vegas sleep, thirst, and hunger, would only effect you if they ran out. You would die. Now those things have four depths each taking about 5% off your action points like radiation on your health bar. Oh, and the second levels start deducting SPECIAL points. One time my strength got cut by 4 and I was literally too tired to move.

You can't walk for more than 5 minutes with being sleepy or peckish, or parched. So you find yourself devouring all the cram,  mac'n'cheese, and dirty water in your pack to stave off the crippling consequences. In the process I took out a third of my health bar in RADs and... well let's just say radaway now behaves a lot more like actual chemotherapy now.

It's all really, REALLY, annoying. At least at first, because then I decided I needed to play differently. The lead belly perk, something I'd never conceive of choosing normally, made my crop of mutfruit magically RAD free! The industrial water purifiers used to be something I'd make just because I could. Now that stimpaks dehydrate you, the 30+ bottles of the stuff I make a day are vitally necessary. I also noticed that melons hit both hunger and thirst at once making it worth it's weight in friggin' platinum. I found smart ways to game the new systems and now... well I still think I get too thirsty too fast but I'm still truckin' along.

I could go into how emotionally devastating it can be to loose 45 minutes of progress to one legendary radioactive mole rat who came out of absolutely f**kin nowhere... but I'll save that for Vol. 2.

Raise your hand if you've actually had one of these. Not bad, right?