I pre-ordered Fallout 4 and I finished it for the first time several days after its initial release. It’s a great game, in general, and it’s what you expect form a Fallout game made by Bethesda, with all the good and bad parts.

There is something extremely appealing in this post-apocalyptic world. I spent a lot of time as a child exploring the remains of Soviet Empire and I still like to explore abandoned collective farms and industrial buildings when I’m visiting Russia. It looks so distant, like the artifacts from another world. Fallout games feel similar, it lets you explore the ruing of something more complex and mysterious. It’s like exploring a new world you know very little about.

This time, I’ve decided to try the so-called survival mode. That adds a few interesting twists in the gameplay. It simulates hunger and thirst, and you can even get sick for various reasons. You can save the game only if you’re nearby a bed and yeah, you need to sleep too. If it’s not challenging enough, the damage from your enemies is much higher and a couple of bullets or a single Molotov cocktail is enough to kill you.

If the survival mode isn’t challenging enough: Bethesda is always ready to add some real challenges. The thing is, Bethesda games are full of bugs, and they tend to crash a lot. This is more or less tolerable when you have an auto save in a normal mode, but it’s extremely frustrating in survival mode. Hard to blame Bethesda, they only had five years to fix this fucking game.