It’s up to you to keep the lights on, the water drinkable and the entrances well-guarded, all the while enticing new, oblivious inhabitants into your little nest of slave labour and sexual predators. Shelter isn’t a traditional Fallout experience, but instead a Tiny Tower-style management game which casts you as an Overseer of your very own Vault. But in Fallout Shelter, a game which solely revolves around the accruing and balancing of resources, it’s easy to boil away all the extraneous, bothersome morality and just regard everything in the game – up to and including people – as differently-shaped commodities. Vice versa, too: spend enough time looking for it, and you’re sure to stumble across something which doesn’t necessarily gel with your personal philosophies. If you root around in the guts of any fictional world you’ll probably find all kinds of insightful social commentary – intentional or otherwise. It has that fifties-era cutesy aesthetic, and the series has always been about parodying archaic ideologies. Is Fallout Shelter’s cavalier attitude to women and children a razor-sharp satirization of 1950s family values? Hell, maybe. If it were up to me I’d get the kids involved too, seeing as how when they’re born they stroll smugly out of the elevator like biology ain’t a thing, but apparently child labour is where the game draws the line. There’s no decline in their productivity, they can toil around the clock without food or water, and if a fire breaks out or Raiders invade, they do the sensible thing and run away. Mums-to-be in Fallout Shelter get a spiffy yellow t-shirt, unbridled happiness and, oddly, the gift of immortality. Maybe I should feel bad about the bulk of my workforce being in its third trimester, but frankly, I can’t see any downside to it.
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