
The person you spend the most time thinking about in a Fallout game is the build-a-bear murderer you assemble in character creation—an amalgam of traits, facial blemishes and inventory items glued together by a haphazard personality you’ll develop on the fly.
Eventually, though, the other voices start to seep in. Preston stops speaking for a bit and you begin to hear from a wider cast of freaks and weirdos—companions, villains, chancers and kings of one-horse towns. Each has been transformed by the wasteland, and may be changed in turn by contact with you. A handful have made such an impression that they’ve stuck with us afterwards, like radiation on a Fancy Lads Snack Cake. These, we contend, are the best characters in Fallout.