Pop quiz, hotshot: How many people, animals, and/or mutants did you kill on your way through Fallout: New Vegas? The answer is probably “a lot.” Well, one YouTuber has completed a permadeath, max difficulty run of Obisidian’s Fallout 3 follow up without technically killing anything.
YouTuber Rhetam set out to create the ultimate challenge for himself when he began his New Vegas run March 2017. It was to be a no-kill run, on hardcore mode with permadeath. He couldn’t use companions, it had to be on the highest possible difficulty setting, and he only allowed himself to use boxing gloves as weapons.
Fallout: New Vegas is still one of the best RPGs ever made for PC.
The Golden Gloves, which Rhetam uses for much of his playthrough, can be found in the Lucky 38 casion’s VIP lounge. These cause damage to an enemy’s fatigue level instead of their health, so you can knock them out instead of killing them.
However, Rhetam generally relied on stealth and speech skills to avoid combat wherever possible. While he didn’t recruit any companion characters, he did find ways to lure tougher enemies into combat with allies who didn’t share his pacifist outlook.
In the 15th episode of the 17-part series, Rhetam takes on the quest ‘Hard Luck Blues,’ which sends him into an irradiated vault full of ghouls. It’s a potentially run-breaking quest, because to complete it, the player has to obtain a password held by the Overseer, who has become a ghoul due to the radiation.
Ghouls can’t be pickpocketed, so normally the only way to get the password is by killing the Overseer. Rhetam found that he could lure the Overseer into a chamber filled with gas, which was then ignited by the ghouls’ explosive attack, finishing off the Overseer and granting him the password. The letter of the law was obeyed, if not its spirit.
PC Gamer spotted Rhetam’s series, and you can watch it in full over on his YouTube channel. We hope to find him wandering the hills of West Virginia when Fallout 76launches in November.