Fallout-inspired game runs in Excel — a spreadsheet-powered wasteland escape from your daily corporate wasteland
Ever wanted to explore a Fallout (1997)-flavored post-apocalyptic wasteland from with the safe confines of Microsoft Excel? Dynamic Pear on YouTube, or "The Storyteller" on Storyteller-Blog.com, has been making playable Excel experiences for some time now — and the latest on the list is "a Fallout-inspired RPG game," in which players explore the post-apocalyptic "Mercer".
If this sounds unusually ambitious for a Microsoft Excel project, it actually... isn't. We've seen a functioning 16-bit CPU worked into Excel, complete with accompanying programming language. There have also been projects such as a functioning 3D game engine made in Microsoft Excel. As it turns out, people do lots of weird stuff with this application in addition to creating impossible-to-navigate spreadsheets.
In terms of gameplay, this Fallout-inspired Excel RPG actually looks a bit more like Wasteland (1988) than it does Fallout. The Fallout series originally started as a result of disputes over who had the rights to the name, with some of the original team eventually working to create a different post-apocalyptic series. Then inXile eventually got the rights to Wasteland from EA and Kickstarted a sequel, leading to the twenty-six year gap between Wasteland games.
In this case, the top-down scrolling graphics and map navigation of the original Wasteland are present here in Fallout-Excel, as is the mostly text-based gameplay. On that note, Wasteland is currently just a few dollars on Steam — though of course, this Fallout in Excel project is completely free to play. It's also much shorter than the original Wasteland, never mind the sequels.
Fallout-Excel can be broken down into two main gameplay components: Questing and Battling. Eight quests can be found in the explorable top-down map that comprises Mercer, our legally-distinct Wasteland alternative. The "meat" of the game is in the Battling system (like most RPGs), which uses some Dungeons and Dragons tabletop rules for its turn-based system. Again — way more Wasteland than Fallout.
That said, the overall gameplay of this Excel RPG from Dynamic Pear looks pretty similar to the gameplay of the rest of his Excel RPGs. Not to be overly critical, though— it's cool that someone would go to the effort of making free RPGs that should run on any machine that runs Excel. It should be especially cool if you're into Pokemon battles or... Wordle. Now that's some real post-apocalyptic gaming.
