#plus the robot family bustup is my favourite character arc in the game

[rad-roche]

i think part of the reason far harbor Hits Different is that its presentation and writing come across as a lot more confident compared to most of what you see in boston. quest resolution in the commonwealth feels, for lack of a better term, sort of 'video gamey'. airship full of extremists! christ, blow it up! underground facility full of evil scientists! christ, blow it up!

it's little things. like the conversation that recontextualizes the mariner being behind a speech check a little ways into getting to know her, compared to her outright saying 'i feel the need to reinforce the hull because i am terminally ill' out the gate. and it isn't something you can 'fix'. she confides that she's dying and all you can really do is go well, that sucks. because it does! but you're just somebody who arrived on a boat, you can't do anything about it. the fact that the island is full of struggling, miserable people and there's no way to 'beat' the Fog. you can't, it's a force of nature and it's been around a lot longer than you. all you can do is take the time to get to know, and show kindness to, the people living under it. you can get a 'good' ending where everybody plays nice, but doing so empowers a serial murderer who has no qualms with meddling in other people's lives. and even if you go okay, i think the payoff is worth it, how long is that peace going to last really? is it worth the gamble? is 'gambling' at all with this idea sick?

your protagonist, no matter who they are in the commonwealth (leader of an extremely advanced scientific facility, general, some kind of swaggering giga-chad) effectively gets 'demoted' to a gumshoe, but doing that lets them interact with a world as a citizen of it, not as a kind of writing black hole where everything has to go their way. the island sets up a bunch of circumstances that let you feel uneasy and, instead of rushing in to alleviate that fear with an affirmation or a big cool gun, sets it down on the table and makes you look at it. far harbor gives you a bunch of hard, messy questions and, crucially, doesn't answer any. why should it? life certainly doesn't