What game I choose to play after getting the kids to bed but before cooking dinner heavily depends on what kind of day I’ve had - if my brain is toast, fast shooters like DOOM and Overwatch don’t sound particularly attractive and neither do more strategic games like Massive Chalice or Civ V. No, some days what I need is a Zen experience of walking around a bombed out wasteland in my giant robot suit accompanied by my faithful canine companion and shooting feral ghouls in their rotting faces.

Those days have been more frequent lately; we added a new family member a few weeks ago and our relaxing routine we had established got as nuked as Tom Brady’s in-universe house, so it was with a little bit of dismay last weekend that I realized that the end of the Fallout 4 story content was fast approaching. Fortunately, there’s DLC.

I’ve only gotten a couple of hours into Far Harbor, but I’ll tell you what: so far, it’s a good chunk of new content that seems to step up the story game of the bare-bones Fallout 4 experience, with new enemies, new story missions, a continuation of “Well, is she a synth or not, dammit?” and lots more aluminum cans to collect.

(I also picked up the Vault-Tec Workshop and am very much looking forward to torturing my Vault Dwellers under the tutelage of the insane ghoul overseer, because that’s how I like to unwind).

I’m currently in a vault populated by the disembodied brains of New England’s super-rich, existing in tank-like robot platforms in order to be functionally immortal...except one of them has been murdered and it’s up to me to figure out whodunnit. I think the Fallout universe is at its best when it plays up the ridiculousness of the 2077 world as if the atomic-age visions of the future came true, and so far this new mission is hitting that note with perfect pitch.

In addition to the occasionally wacky story missions, the other place that Fallout 4 has shone is in the crafting department. So far, the Far Harbor DLC has given me the opportunity to play around with a cowboy-style lever-action repeating rifle chambered in the storied .45-70 Long Colt (which does just massive amounts of damage) that I renamed "John Wayne", leading me to believe there will be more opportunities to curse the dearth of adhesive in the world.