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Spreadsheets are boring? Not anymore they're not, someone made a Fallout RPG in Excel

'Fallout - but in Excel' game is a post-apocalyptic RPG played out on a spreadsheet, and it's a relatively robust mix of questing and combat.

Spreadsheets are boring? Not anymore they're not, someone made a Fallout RPG in Excel
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Fallout is very much flavor of the month, thanks to the success of the hit Prime Video show (we just finished it last night - what a finale), and so what next? Fallout games, of course, and here's something out of left-field.

For those who don't want to rekindle Fallout 4 - which has a current-gen update landing later today - you might want to play a new Fallout-inspired post-apocalyptic outing in Excel.

Yes, Excel is the medium in which you run 'Mercer' which describes itself as a Fallout-inspired adventure game.

How does that work? The gist of it is a blocky map rendered in the spreadsheet app which you can move your party around, visiting towns or vaults, and picking up quests.

That map exploration and quest completion is interspersed with battles, which are turn-based (much like the original Fallout RPG was, way back in 1997) and are realized D&D-style (initiative rolls, then rolling to hit versus armor class).

Yes, it's a pretty basic game, and you can see how the different elements play out in the YouTube clip above. However, given that this adventure is running in Excel, it's a pretty impressive achievement from developer 'The Storyteller' (aka Dynamic Pear on YouTube).

Excel boundaries are being pushed considerably these days, and as Tom's Hardware - which spotted Mercer - reminds us, a full 3D game engine has been rendered in the spreadsheet app. (That too is predictably basic, but still quite something).

Read more: RTX 3060 cements its place as the most popular GPU on Steam as NVIDIA remains dominant over AMD

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Darren has written for numerous magazines and websites in the technology world for almost 30 years, including TechRadar, PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Computeractive, and many more. He worked on his first magazine (PC Home) long before Google and most of the rest of the web existed. In his spare time, he can be found gaming, going to the gym, and writing books (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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