While not, strictly speaking, what is traditionally considered to be a horror game the Fallout series has always had a deeply unsettling atmosphere due to the horrors of the nuclear apocalypse. The developers do their best to alleviat꧑e the crushing depression that could set in wandering about the blasted remains of Washington DC for 40+ hours: cheerfu♒l music, slapstick, a high-energy DJ, the unmistakable optimism of the fifties.
However, one can only spend so much time picking through destroyed elementary schools and looting dog bones before the horror sets in. After delving into one more abandoned home, the family scattered, the furniture burned and tossed, the eꩲver-present empty echo of the world stops being a background sound and begins to drill into the back of the player's head. The intensity goes from being charmingly over-the-top and becomes macabre. The plastic, lifeless human NPCs take on less of a personality than the hundreds of blackened skeletons. The dead still have stories to tell: in their last moments, the terminals nearby, the weapons lying discarded nearby having finally failed them. The living, vapid humans have a desperation that the dead don't: the player is always being sent on errands to find people lost in the Wasteland, or items in the ruins of Washington. The dead, with their stories, are far more ali𝕴ve than the living.
Worse: in the wide wor⭕ld there are pockets that are more frightening, off the beaten pat🍰h, unmarked, home to monsters and men alike. Those who live there have done awful, unspeakable things to survive. What will you do to survive them?
25 💞 The Insanity Experiment
Unravelling the mysteries of the underground Vaults is one of the great joys of the Fallout series. In addition to being undeꦚrground bunkers, the Vaults are also a vast network of social experiments designed t🙈o test a variety of theories on human behaviour using a bonanza of compelled, but unwitting, test subjects.
Ten days after the doors sealed, Vault 106 pumped psychoactive material into the air filtration system.
According to the terminals, the Overseer knew about the 🧸experiments and told security personnel to observe the effects of the substance. When the player enters, 200 years later, the vault is full of people driven insane by the drugs and the player will hallucinate too upon entering. Deep down in the bowels, you can find a tunnel with some skeletons and miniꦛ-nukes, a clue that maybe they were trying to dig themselves out.
24 A Family's Last Stand 🐈
The Keller Fami🤪ly Bunker is one of the many locations without a quest in the Capital Wasteland. The player will stumble on holotapes out𒐪 in the world that will give them clues as to the bunker's location, and each is a part of the code required to enter.
The Keller family has repurposed an old National Guard armory into their personal storehouse, and the Lone Wanderer has to travel through an office building to reach it. There's some great loot in there, including an MIRV launcher and some mini nukes. Once inside the bunker, the Keller family has all died with the exception of Keller Senior, who has been transformed into a hideous Glowing One. Once you put him down you discov𝓰er the bones of the other family members, and are finally able to put the Keller Family to rest.
23 ✨ What Happened To Tom McMullin? 🐻
This quest is part of the DLC for Fallout 3 called The Pitt, which is about the Lone Wanderer journeying to the post-apocalyptic hellscape that is Pittsburg, truly one of the Fallout series most harrowing locations.
Before the war, was the supervisor for a supply plant near to Pittsburg whose management was slowly replacing the workforce with Protectron robots, because sometimes a video game predicts real world issues ten years early. Tom did his best to slow the process down, but was found out and tried to escape the factory. His workers, mistakenly believing he was behind the replacements, locked him in a room. Tom heard the Protectrons arr༺ive and slaughter the workers, then left the room only once before immediately running back inside to wait until the robots left. According to the skeleton found in the room, they never did.
22 The Saddest Dog 🍰
In a treat for classic science fiction fans, the house at 2096 Bradley Lane in Georgetown, The McClellan Family Townhome, is a deep reference to the Ray Bradbury story "There Will Com🍸e Soft Rains." In the story, a fully robotic house continues to service its residents, not knowing that they died long ago in a nuclear war.
In Fallout 3, the house contains the ends of a young boy and dog, as well as a deactivated Mr Handy robot.
By using the terminal nearby, the player can instruct the Mr Handy to reactivate and pursue a varietyꦕ of chores, including reading the long-dead children a bedtime story, which is exactly what the house does in the Bradbury story. The is a short, chilling read and was first published in 1950!
21 🐲 The Morse Code My෴stery
This is one of my favourite Fallout secrets because I stumbled o൲n it on my own and spent a whole weekendꦅ trying to track it all down. The Radio Towers scattered about the landscape of the Wasteland each transmit a unique morse code signal that can be used to discover a supply cache. Two of the towers, however, hide some frightening stories.
One of the messages is the voice of a father trying to find medicine for his son, who is quite ill.
Discovering the source of the message also reveals a grisly truth: no one ever responded to that message. Another is j🏅ust a series of eerie gurgling and moaning, which seems to be caused by a group of feral ghouls milling near the HAM radio broadcasting the signal.
20 ဣ Seeing Things In The Bayou ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ
The bayou introduced in the final DLC for Fallout 3, Point Lookout, is 🃏a creepy enough location as it is, (See further down the list for proof) but one event stands out as a particularly chilling moment in a game full of upsetting experiences.
To be accepted into the tribe of Point Lookout, the Lone Wanderer must consume the fruit of the Mother Punga, a giant hallucinogenic plant that grows in the swamp. Upon doing so, the player is knocked unconscious and experiences visions, which would be a bad enough, but then the ferryman who transported the player to the island brings them back to the ship and cuts out a part of their brain. You can confront Tobar and kill him for the violation, and afterwards take the chunk of your brain, kept in a jar, and car🐬ry it around with you. For the memories, I guess?
19 Someone Actually Made𒉰 This Thing
Those pesky feral ghouls are one of the best innovations Bethesda made in transitioning Fallout to 3d. Nasty, fast, angry humans who have been mutated for so long they've gone completely ma🐼d, they inject a welcome element of zombie horror to the game.
Unless you're wearing a terrifying mask stitched together from the faces of ghouls. Your reward for getting Roy Phillips into Tenpenny Tower is this… gift that would make Buffalo Bill proud. Wearing it 🌠makes feral ghouls friendly to the player, and even your companions, and causes certain people in the world to react with revulsion at your fashion sense. Considering what a nuisance the feral ghouls can be, especiall꧋y later on when you can one-shot them, this is a useful, if grisly, item.
18 𝓰 Science Experiment Gone Wro🅰ng
Isabella Proud has a theory about feral ghouls being attracted to sources of radiatio🅰n, and she's gonna prove that theory by any means necessary. If this means slathering her and her partner with radioactive goo, Marie Curie-style, and seeing what happens, well, so be it. If her partner, who loves her despite her dangerous and dubiously useful obsession, doesn't know about his bait-covered rad su💖it, well, that's one way to ensure an authentic result.
You find Isabella and her lover long after the experiment has 'concluded'- both have been ho🏅rribly ended by the feral ghouls who now infest the testing area. There is also a Glowing One named "Samuel" who is referenced in Isabella's research nearby, and the player can avenge the scientists by killing him and the other ghouls.
17 ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𝓀ᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ Fear The Puppet Man
I was a big fan of the long-running webcomic Penny Arcade when Fallout 3 was released in 2008 and thrilled wh꧂en they announced they would be working with Bethesda to make a promotional comic. The comic they released is considered canon and added a few new Vault experiments to the lore of the games, including the famous "10 men, 10 women, and 1 panther" Vault which, sadly, has yet to appear in game.
The main story of the comic, though, was about a Vault that contained only one man and a box of puppets.
This character is referenced very subtly in Fallout 3, in the Paradise Falls slaver camp. Next to a 𒊎unique Vault 77 jumpsuit is a holotape advising the slavers to burn it, as it is a memento of a mythical slavery-killer called The📖 Puppet Man.
16 Sacrifici𓃲♑al Lambs
Okay, I cheated a bit: this Vault is actually in New Vegas but it's so good I had to include it. It's one of my favourite Vaults in the entire series. Seems that, every year, the residents of Vault 🐽11 were required to elect one of their members to be killed, sacrificed, in order for the rest of the residents to live. If they refused, they would all be killed. In actuality, the Vault was programmed to broadcast a message should the residents refuse to sacrifice one of their own. The message would say that the vault dwellers were to be commended for standing up to tyranny, and that they were free to go. The doors would open, and that was that.
Except ꧂they never refused, not until there were only fiv🧜e residents left. The story is a chilling tale of power, subservience, and, finally, revenge.