Note: there’ll be no major spoilers in this article but I will talk about some of the inciting incidents seen in the first two episodes, so minor spoilers ahead.

We’re living in the dawn of a golden age of video game adaptations it seems! Over the past few years, we’ve seen Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros. dominate at the box office while on the small screen, The Last of Us and Arcane have shown that character-driven game adaptations can be prestige TV. I’m happy to say that Prime Video’s Fallout is now a proud member of the “successful video adaptation club”. It’s a great treat for fans of the series but totally accessible for those who aren’t at the same time. Let’s get into it.

Developed by Jonathan Nolan (who directs the first three episodes) and Lisa Joy, both of Westworld fame, with showrunning by Geneva Robertson-Dworet (Captain Marvel) and Graham Wagner (Portlandia) and Bethesda Game Studio’s own Todd Howard serving as executive producer, Fallout takes place a few hundred years after a cataclysmic nuclear event in the United States. The retro-futuristic society at the time though had built a series of shelters across the country called Vaults, to house survivors and preserve society until the titular fallout goes away and society can be repopulated on the surface.

It’s here where we anchor into one of our main plot lines and the series lead, Lucy Macclean (Ella Parnell), a dweller of Vault 33 and daughter of its Overseer. Being sheltered from, well, everything her whole life, Lucy has a very happy-go-lucky attitude and takes extreme pride in the Vault’s eventual mission to repopulate the surface world. The vault dwellers are one white picket fence away from Pleasantville or Truman Show in their demeanour and Lucy with “okie-dokies”. But one day, raiders break into the vault, kill many of its dwellers and kidnap her father Hank (Kyle Maclachlan), forcing her to break out of Vault 33 against the orders of the senior members and venture into the bleak, weird and violent wasteland above. Unfortunately for Lucy, life being sheltered in the vault has made her extremely naive, but the writers handled it so well that we get some great comedic moments but also some moments of growth and self-reflection. Lucy isn’t completely helpless either, thanks to practicing the likes of gymnastics and basic combat training in the vault, and overall is a great lead for the show and a great way to learn about the wasteland as she explores it for the first time.

It’s on the surface above where she meets the second lead, a squire in the Brotherhood of Steel named Maximus (Aaron Moten). Our intro to him sees his fellow “Brothers” hazing him by means of a beatdown, putting him far down the social hierarchy of this faction who seek to find and preserve pre-war technology. Maximus, despite being a lowly squire, has dreams of being a knight and donning one of the iconic suits of Power Armor, for wearing one of those would grant him a level of power, respect and fear he’s been craving for years. He’s tasked with accompanying Knight Titus to the wasteland in search of Siggi Wilzig (Michael Emerson), a member of the Enclave, who has been doing some mysterious experiments in the facility and has injected something of great value into his neck before fleeing, causing the Enclave to issue a bounty on his head (heh). Maximus is an interesting character, in that he’s the one who makes the most mistakes and seemingly doesn’t learn much from his mistakes, causing him to constantly be digging a deeper hole for himself to the point where I think it’s okay to question if we’re supposed to be even rooting for him.

Then, there’s the third lead, Walton Goggins as The Ghoul. Ravaged by the radioactive fallout, The Ghoul is a former Hollywood actor from the past named Cooper Howard who now walks the wasteland as a fearsome bounty hunter. While The Ghoul acts as something of a chaotic wild card and has very little in the way of character growth, it’s the flashbacks Walton gets to do as Howard before the bombs dropped that allow both the overall mystery of the show to really develop and to illustrate just how far this character has indeed fallen due to centuries living in the wasteland. I was really into this part of the show and it was fascinating seeing Coop as the slick Hollywood A-lister and as the scum of the earth throughout the show. The practical effects for The Ghoul are also really well done. The Ghoul is, of course, given the bounty to find Siggi, which is how these three plot points intersect.

While those are the three leads, there is one more major plot line and that’s what happens in Vault 33 after Lucy has left it. In a neat move, the Vault becomes pretty integral to the plot and one of the biggest mysteries of the show is tied to this plot line, which is anchored by Lucy’s brother Norm (Moisés Arias) and his cousin Chet (Dave Register). Norm is the defacto fourth lead and should not be dismissed, as his story is just as interesting as Coop’s. Norm is a very inquisitive and curious character, which works perfectly for his arc as it features plenty of sleuthing and investigating and I was actively jonesing to return to Vault 33 to learn more about the overall mystery there.

Fallout feels like it was made with love for the source material. There’s so many little background details, sound effects pulled from the game and lore-accurate mechanics that make the show feel like an extension of the established lore. A few examples include the sound a stimpack or the pip boy’s flashlight makes or how computer hacking is visualized in-universe. Heck, they even found a way to bring “being over-encumbered”, a gameplay mechanic, into the show with the squire’s hilariously oversized travel packs. Even the leads all feel like some sort of interpretation of the many playstyles you can try out in the games. But unlike, say The Last of Us, which fully adapts a game, Prime’s Fallout show created a whole new story set within the established world. None of these characters exist in the video games, which allowed the writers to not be tied down to expectations or redundancies. I think creating a whole new story based on an RPG video game was the right way to go because those are the kind of games where half the fun is creating your own story on the fly. And of course, all of the characters are well-written and interesting and each of the actors does a great job of bringing those characters to life.

The humour is also surprisingly spot-on and even laugh-out-loud funny at times. It’s dark, weird and often unexpected, yet despite the type, it takes some of the grimness out of the viewing experience because the show can be dark, weird and hyperviolent, sometimes all at once. Fallout does not shy away from how downright weird this world can be and just like the game, it embraces the whole aesthetic because there’s really nothing else like this out there. We’ve seen so many post-apocalyptic stories over the years, but both the Fallout games and now the show just feels like a breath of fresh air due to its visual style and tone.

I mentioned that the make-up for The Ghoul was spot on, but this applies to the overall look and feel of the show. There’s a lot here that feels practical, whether it be the hulking Power Armor suits, the sets made up of wreckage and reappropriated items from yesteryear, it all looks so good. There’s, of course, CGI, and for the most part, it’s pretty good, with some inconsistencies with the monsters roaming the wilds, but it’s the sets and costumes that are the highlights here, especially the Vaults and the town of Filly I’d say. And don’t even get me started on the music, both Ramin Djawadi’s original score and the jukebox worth of retro jams from the 1930s-1960s. A horrifying display of violence will be happening on screen, but Nat King Cole is crooning in the background. It shouldn’t work, but it 100% does.

I unfortunately think it was a major mistake for Prime to release all eight episodes of Fallout at once. This is the kind of show that would’ve benefitted from having weekly discourse, to allow for some theorizing and anticipation to build. Shogun has benefitted from this and has been in the public eye for months now, but Fallout’s footprint may not be as long-lasting because of this. Hopefully, for season two, which has been greenlit, Prime will adopt a week-by-week structure to give the show some room to breathe. The show overall keeps getting better as it goes, but I did find episode four to feel inconsistent with the rest of the series overall.

But that aside, I had a blast watching Fallout. It balanced humour, adventure, action and intrigue in a well-balanced bundle and its commitment to practical sets should be commended. This feels like a loving addition to the Fallout canon, one perfect for newcomers and old fans. A strong recommendation from me and one of the best watches I’ve seen in a good while!