Fallout: New Vegas has been on my mind again recently, with the upcoming Season 2 of the Amazon Prime show taking Lucy and the Ghoul into the heart of the Mojave Wasteland. In reminiscing about my experiences with Fallout: New Vegas, I’m reminded of how often the game is praised for its fantastic DLC. While I’m partial to Lonesome Road as my overall favorite in the bunch, Dead Money continues to stick with me to this day due to the terror it instilled in me on my first playthrough.
The premise of Dead Money alone is a clash between opulence and its corruption caused by the nuclear apocalypse that the Fallout series is iconic for. Visiting the Sierra Madre, what should have been the peak of luxury in the Mojave, and finding the enigmatic ghost people that inhabit its remains, set the stage for a chilling tale capped off by a truly twisted villain in Father Elijah. I continue to be haunted by this DLC and consider it to be one of, if not the scariest, pieces of Fallout content ever made.
Dead Money DLC Makes a Strong Case for Fallout: New Vegas Being a Horror Game
In my quest to find the perfect games to replay on Halloween this year, I considered how the Fallout series has all the pieces to qualify as a horror game—horrifying enemies like ghouls, deathclaws, and super mutants, as well as the dark themes associated with nuclear war. As an avid horror game fan, it’s hard to rattle me when it comes to gruesome enemies or chilling stories. However, Fallout: New Vegas has a unique combination of disturbing elements within its writing and world design that scares me in a way no other games have, and the Sierra Madre is the epicenter of that fear.
Fallout: New Vegas Was the First Game in the Series to Legitimately Scare Me
Not every Fallout game is as darkly written and presented as Fallout: New Vegas, and I think that’s part of the reason Dead Money is the scariest DLC in the Fallout series. Just a few of the elements that contribute to my terror when playing Dead Money include:
- The ghost people, who are essentially feral ghouls trapped in hazmat suits
- Father Elijah’s nightmarish, explosive collars that he uses to keep kidnapped victims in the Sierra Madre
- The toxic Cloud that persists throughout Sierra Madre, giving it a cloak of eerie red fog
Humanoid beings in hazmat suits already creep me out, and the background behind the creation of the ghost people as former Big MT researchers trapped in ill-fitting ones only heightens their creep factor. The maze-like layout of Sierra Madre makes me feel claustrophobic, which is only made worse by the wandering groups of ghost people and toxic red mist from the Cloud. The dungeons where Father Elijah keeps the corpses of kidnapped wastelanders who attempted to escape are also like something straight out of Saw.
While Dead Money is often considered the worst New Vegas DLC due to the massive difficulty jump and slow story pace, it helps the DLC feel almost like a survival horror game with RPG elements, more so than a full-fledged RPG like the rest of the game. Couple the intensity of combat with an oppressive atmosphere, a heartbreaking story of letting go of the past, and one of the most unhinged villains in the Fallout series, and Dead Money makes for a sinister experience that haunts me years after I first played it.
