The Silver Shroud Quest In Fallout 4

Becoming a comic book vigilante on the streets of Goodneighbor.

- Samuel Roberts

I enjoyed my 70 hours with Fallout 4, but despite finishing Bethesda’s latest open-world RPG around a year ago, I find myself unable to recall much about it. Perhaps this is because it felt so structurally similar to the other 3D Fallouts and elder Scrolls games, despite looking a lot nicer and having significantly better combat. Or maybe it’s because following up such a rich vision of a postapocalyptic American city was always going to feel like slightly diminishing returns.

When asked recently to recall the best bits of the game, two moments came to mind. One was stepping into the irradiated wastes of the Glowing Sea and finding the eerie chassis of a passenger plane destroyed in the epicenter of a nuclear blast. The other was The Silver Shroud quest, where you assume the role of a Dick Tracy/The Shadow pulp hero. It reframes Fallout 4’s systems to fit the life of an in-universe radio serial vigilante—it’s essentially another layer of roleplay within a role playing game. This gets you to invest in the game in a different way, even though you’re doing the same things you do in every Fallout quest: Going to a place, fetching a thing, and killing a bunch of guys. This time, though, you’re doing it in a trilby.