Before Wasteland 3 begins, the developers at inXile Entertainment present the player with a message. “Wasteland 3 is a work of fiction,” we’re told. “Ideas, dialogue, and stories we created early in development have in some cases been mirrored by our current reality. Our goal is to present a game of fictional entertainment, and any correlation to real-world events is purely coincidental.”
It reads like a warning. What you’re about to see, inXile is saying, may seem like the dreaded “politics in our video games” thing, but it’s not, because we came up with this nightmarish vision of America before America became the nightmarish vision it is today.
As I ploughed my way through post-apocalyptic Colorado – and ploughed really is the word, given you spend a lot of time driving a hulk of a car through the snow to get from settlement to settlement – inXile’s statement became more and more irrelevant. It is impossible to disassociate Wasteland 3 from the context of the now. At times, the allegory is almost too on the nose. And rather than find inXile’s message annoying in that context, I spent my 55 hours and counting with Wasteland 3 revelling in its politics. I chose to read this hilarious and depressing, disgusting and dastardly old-school role-playing game exactly how it should be: as a devilish satire of modern America. And I have come to fuck it up.
