Fallout New Vegas Dead Money Review

 You heard the stories of the Sierra Madre. We all have.

The Fallout New Vegas experience remains on of my most cherished in all my long years of gaming. Seriously, I rate New Vegas as my second favourite RPG of all time, and a lot of that comes down to the DLC which launched after the game did. I played through each one as they came out in the order that they did, and fell head-over-heels when I realised that just as there was a great and sprawling narrative to be told in the New Vegas main game, there was a mysterious and personal through-line stringing together the DLCs. Like an episodic adventure full with brand new journeys within my most favourite Fallout game ever, how could I not just adore that? And the first DLC in that line was one which gets a lot of slack from people for the way it handled- well, just about everything. That DLC was called: Dead Money.

In my recent playthrough of everything New Vegas, I took the time to sit down and enjoy the full breadth of the DLC to figure out if I still found them all as endearing as I did and perhaps uncover what it was I liked and/or disliked about them. In doing so I feel it's important to mention that I was more than familiar with most of these DLCs beforehand, having played Dead Money countless times, Honest Hearts a handful of times, Old World Blues exactly three times now and The Lonesome Road now twice. I know what I'm talking about with these blocks of content, so try and bare with me as I compare each DLC not just with the base Fallout game but the other DLCs because unlike with some other Fallout game's offerings, each DLC is substantial and distinct enough to stand for it's very own merits. (Of course, I'm not including the pre-order bonus content in that metric.)

That being established, I think I'd have to say that Dead Money is the most distinct from the four Vegas expansions. Whereas the other expansions explored different themes and even styles of exploration design, Dead Money was the only one that tried to create a different style of gameplay; and that might just be one of the reasons why Dead Money usually ranks as people's least favourite of the DLCs. Right from the get-go Dead Money takes every bit of power that the player has gathered up until that point in terms of equipment and weapons and stuffs them in a world of total-death traps, horror-style patrolling monstrosities and a hanging cloud of suffocation and erosion. The Spanish styled tourist villa of the Sierra Madre is full of grim shadowy streets and sturdy 'Ghostmen' who can take down even the most experienced Couriers fairly quickly. The very premise is tipped to encourage and reward a stealthy style of play.

Now stealth is a bit of an iffy topic when it comes to Fallout, on account of the fact that it's never been the most fleshed-out or well rounded mechanic relying on fiddly line-of-sight equations influenced by a stealth score stat with an unclear specific effect on you, a totally esoteric sound-generation system which can betray your position from several feet away when completely cloaked and a total lack of decent silenced weapons which means that most of the time the moment you take out one solitary guy the rest of the area descends upon you like it's 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. So you can imagine how a DLC which prioritises and lionises those extremely rudimentary stealth mechanics is going to have some trouble winning fans right from the get-go. (Seriously, even Skyrim has better Stealth, and Skyrim stealth is not a solid measurement for great Stealth.)

The narrative of Dead Money is straightforward and effective, as it tells a story of greed through the lens of the past and present, having the player being kidnapped and forced to work alongside other captives in a heist plot to plunder old-world technological secrets for a megalomaniacal former Brotherhood Elder, Elijah; all the while picking through the remains of an old world resort built in vapid reverence to some long-dead starlet and corrupted by vindictive passions and betrayal. Both narratives make use of a very truncated cast of characters to what you might typically expect in a weighty expansion DLC, which allows for adequate exploration into who everyone is and why they fell into Elijah's trap, or for their own dark desires, in the first place. There really is a great cast of characters and personalities here who are forced to work together against their better natures, and the way in which the player interacts with them does, in fact, have a bearing on their endings which makes talking and learning from them significant.

I particularly like Christine, a woman who has had her vocal cords irreparably damaged and thus has to communicate entirely through hand signals that are described in the text boxes and need to be interpreted using the intelligence based stats of the player.  And Dog/God the DID suffering Nightkin whom the player can choose to exploit for his brute strength by evoking the Dog personality, or attempt to repair his broken mind through synthesis and shotgun psychology. Dean Domino always rubbed me the wrong way as a pretentious ass who thinks himself the smartest person in every room, but so he is meant to. He was written to come across like that and he does so perfectly. And learning the story of Sinclair, Dean and Vera presents a glimpse into the exorbitant extremes of the wealth divide in pre-war America that we don't typically get to see in the Fallout universe; and their little three-way gambit of, admittedly rather transparent, lies and deceit makes for a great story in it's own right. (Even if one of the most pivotal parts of that narrative is a tape that has been bugged since the DLC launched and was ever fixed.)

Elder Elijah is, of course, the big focused entity throughout this story, being the chief driving force and antagonist of Dead Money, and his performance as this neurotic tyrant lost in his own world of brute solutions to nuanced situations works wonders to flesh out an interesting figure from the original game's wider lore. Elijah is mentioned in the Brotherhood section of New Vegas, and in fact Veronica herself had a great connection with him when she was growing up, as such Dead Money feels like a great exploration of the New Vegas world by allowing us to follow the journey of this important lore-wrapped character and see the life behind the accounts of others; it slaps flesh on those bones. I only wish there was more of an interaction between the main game and the DLC in that we might just get the chance to at least mention to Veronica that we found her girlfriend. I mean we get to talk all about Elijah but Christine is off the table? What is the Courier supposed to be too stupid to put two and two together or something? 

The actual worldspace of the Sierra Madre is vastly different to anything from Fallout prior thanks to the Latin influenced architecture, as well as the general world makeup of narrow streets and tall buildings creating this sense of being a rat trapped in a plaster-wall maze. Focusing on stealth and a horror-adjacent atmosphere allows Dead Money to have very different pace to the rest of the game which is usually very run-and-gun. You need to be stealthy, pay attention to radio transmitters in the environment that might prematurely set off your explosive collar and scavenge around clouds of deadly erosion clouds for small caches of limited supplies. There's not such a lack of supplies that you'll be going wanting for ammo and dodging hoards like this is Resident Evil 1, but there's just enough scarcity to make you conscious of what supplies you do spend in each fight, feeding into the background idea of survival that the team wanted to highlight.

All that is a bit undercut, however, by that whole 'cloud of death' thing which hangs over the villa. So this cloud is all over the shop, as in whenever you're outside your subject to its effects, and that effect is the player losing health periodically. The drain is slow, but it's present enough to make the player constantly feel like they're on a clock and need to be speeding about even when every other element of this DLC's design is telling you to slow down and sneak around. Now I'm lucky enough to never have been effected by this simply because every time I've entered Dead Money it was after getting the expensive Monocyte Cell Breeder Sub Dermal implant which provides a passive health regen effect that actually perfectly counteracts the cloud drain. (In essence, the cloud just nullifies my passive regen.) But that shouldn't be a requirement for playing the mod. I'm not entirely sure what sort of environment the poison air was supposed to create for Dead Money, but It did not gel with the rest of the mod whatever they intended for. 

The climax of Dead Money is, for me, iconic as one of those moments you always go back to when remembering your own playthrough, both for the achievement of the designers in making a great set-piece stand-off against a character built up both in the main game and throughout this DLC; (their ties to the lore makes the encounter that much better) and the novelty of the community coming together to totally undermine the thematic message. The copious amounts of wealth stuffed at the end of the Sierra Madre vault is supposed to be left behind, as the resolution of the narrative preaches the virtues of letting go, letting go of revenge, of destructive ambitions and of consuming greed; showing you well the consequences of those that ride those dark attribute to the bitter grave. But in comes the community with the 'but I mean, if you're clever about it, you an totally tiptoe around the automatic detection markers get all those gold bars.' I always love those moments when the artists are leapfrogged by their fans.

And the final note of Dead Money not only features on of my favourite monologues of the franchise, one which I have parodied multiple times on this blog, but also the pilot spark for my obsession with the DLC series of New Vegas in all of those 'hints of the future' slides. It really was risky for the team to advertise their next adventure within the endings to this DLC, and it's something they do a lot more subtly in proceeding DLCs, but I think the payoff was like a wildfire amidst the community. Everyone loves to feel like their story is building to somewhere important and being given free reign to speculate is like feeding fans a clove of catnip; they go wild for those opportunities! The choice to present the future of the DLC series as 'The battle of the Divide' was a genius use of folktale presentation that imbued mythical reverence on the character of the Courier, elevating their story to legend. I credit this alone to the reason why The Courier is such a fan favourite character among all the Fallout protagonists, we got to hear and then play out the path of his living legend.

Dead Money has it's obvious drawbacks when it comes to honestly ill-conceived gameplay design choices, but aside from that I honestly think this DLC is still a shining example to the whole expansion content practise. It changed up the flow of gameplay significantly enough to make the player shift up playstyles they'd have tackled everything else in the game with, it presented an environment that was designed and shaped unlike anything else in the game, it gave us a great and varied cast of characters with intertwined and effective narratives that feature multiple endings and it departed on an exciting wistful note for the future. My only real regret is the fact that upon finishing the DLC there's no way to revisit the Sierra Madre, which makes getting all the collectibles and finishing everything available on the first run a sort of necessary ritual I have to go through each time I play. For all that in consideration, I would give the Dead Money expansion a B- Grade in my arbitrary marking system, with a recommendation seal of course, but everything associated with New Vegas gets my recommendation so that much is as given. I think it's reputation is a little unearned in it's ferocity and it still stands as a great example of Fallout content to this day. Everyone should play Dead Money at least once.