I am a huge Fallout fan. It’s what introduced me to Role Playing Games, which have taken up more of my life than I care to admit. The feeling I get building a character and getting lost i an immersive world sometimes completely foreign to our own is hard to describe. However, it’s what has fueled my love for gaming.

The thing I love most about Fallout, though, has to be the setting. I am addicted to stories, films, and games set in post-apocalypses. There’s something about the crumbled remnants of our modern era that captivates my imagination and keeps me hooked, sometimes for the story and others just to find any bits of evidence describing what happened to cause the end of the world as we’d known it. So for my last blog, I thought I’d share my favorite genre with you in a short 3 episode trilogy (that I hope they’re working on continuing) called ADAM, made by Unity and Oats Studios.

ADAM is partly the story of a man whose body has been discarded and his brain placed into robotic one. His part opens on him waking up, coughing and disoriented, in a dark room with cables connected to his back and head. He quickly pulls them off and stumbles out of the room and into the outdoors past some vast wall, assumably protecting a city. He sees tons of others like him all stumbling, just as disoriented, away from the wall as guards coax them on. And so his story begins.

The episodes focus on creating an otherworldly feel to the setting and characters, going beyond simply robotic “protagonists” and showing characters like the two that appear out of the wasteland beyond the wall to meet the others outside it. Their designs are honestly my favorites, specifically the one wearing a sort of cloak. They wander the wastes on what appear to be short stilts to protect from debris or possibly to move more quickly and easily. They walk wordlessly, yet listen to Chopin as they go. I’ve talked before about the dreams I’ve had and this plays on another of mine, easily gluing me to the events following it.

The second episode continues on with that story, however I’d rather not discuss it to leave some intrigue. The third episode, however, focuses on something largely unrelated. Episode 3 shows a group of normal humans living out in the wasteland. They seem to worship or simply admire a bald man wearing robes who has this odd ability to heal others of afflictions with his bare hands. He appears generally peaceful, but shows a violent side when it comes to machinery. His village denounces the sort of tech one finds in a place called the Consortium and those who wish to join them must destroy anything that connects them to machines.

One of the coolest parts of this trilogy is that it was all made in a game engine; specifically the Unity Engine. It’s exceptionally well animated and runs with 4k graphics. It’s quite visually stunning. The only downside is really just that there are only three episodes which feel incomplete and in need of expansion. I really do hope Oats Studios releases more of that content, but in the meantime they do have a few other really well made short films (even one with Sigourney Weaver).