Web Video / Drb0sch

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Drb0sch is a Fallout: New Vegas meta-horror series that started in 2023. Presented initially as a "glitch" video ostensibly for the purposes of sharing on a discussion forum, an unnamed player (presumed to be Drb0sch himself) documents how he found a way outside the Mojave Outpost and got stuck out of bounds, discovering a large, mostly empty area beyond which is not indicated on the map.

Things slowly go from innocuous to creepy, and eventually outright disturbing as the player goes further outside the game area, chasing a mystery that seems to contradict what we know about Fallout: New Vegas itself. With every step deeper into the rabbit hole, however, something becomes terrifyingly clear: Whatever he's uncovered, wasn't meant to be, and something is very, very wrong in the Mojave Wasteland.

To put it bluntly, this wasteland is not an okay place to live.

The Series Finale "catali̱xi̱" was released on April 22nd, 2025.

E) Open Trope to (null):

• Adaptational Context Change: Pretty much all of Mr. House's dialogue at the end is a collection of vanilla quotes, reversed and reordered to help emphasize the surreal nightmare of the world he's stuck in.
• all lowercase letters: Apart from the first episode capitalizing Fallout New Vegas, the episode names are entirely lowercase.
• Alternate History:
  • Implied in "intro": the titular intro to Fallout: New Vegas plays out normally except that the logos for Interplay and Black Isle appear in place of Bethesda and Obsidian Entertainment, implying that the player has ended up in a timeline where the studios never went under, and thus were able to finish developing Fallout: Van Buren, releasing it under the title Fallout: New Vegas.
  • In-Universe as well, as the same "intro" notably lacks the Lucky 38 Casino in the title splash, and while exploring, the player comes across several newspaper articles indicating Mr. House being investigated or arrested for some sort of unknown activity, implying that the scandal prevented the Lucky 38 from protecting Las Vegas and was subsequently destroyed during the Great War.
• Ambiguous Situation: How did the glitchy out-of-bounds area come to be? What was the monster the player ran from in "exploring"? Neither of these things are ever revealed.
• And I Must Scream: Mr. House's gibberish at the end of "catali̱xi̱", once deciphered, reveals that he has been waiting for the player for possibly hundreds of thousands of years. Piecing together several out-of-place words which don't align with the vanilla script gives a hidden message that only serves to drive the point home.
  House: So cold. So filthy. Usurped. Please. Please forgive me.
• Bizarrchitecture: The out-of-bounds areas are quite bizarre, featuring upside down rooms, a doorway entirely blocked by radios, a giant room, and much more.
• Chase Scene: Near the end of "exploring", a mysterious pair of footsteps begins chasing the player. In this case, we don't even get to see the monster.
• Closed Circle: In "stuck", When the player attempts to get back inside the playable area, they are blocked by an Invisible Wall and are unable to fast travel, forcing them to go further out of bounds.
• Creepy Cave: "under" has the player traverse one of these. Extremely dark and claustrophobic; piles of radiation; creepy statues; giant skeletal and bloody remains; you name it.
• Death World: The environs created(?) by the Minus World range from confusing Bizarrchitecture to decaying ruins of various flavor. There are no NPCs or characters to speak of except for the obscured monster the player runs from and the glitchy screen of Mr. House in the finale. Compared to the base game, this area is well and truly dead.
• Discovering Your Own Dead Body: In "under", the player encounters his Dead Alternate Counterpart from this alternate timeline: a corpse labeled "Heironymous B." wearing an exact copy of his own outfit. Creepily, a glimpse of his Pip-Boy in an earlier video shows that his character is actually named "H. Bosch", meaning the game did not simply copy his character's name to give to the corpse...
• Dramatic TV Shut-Off: Sleeping in the bed during the space sequence in the finale outright forces the player's PC to shut down.
• Et Tu, Brute?: Clues from the various newspaper snippets in later videos implies that this version of Mr. House had his funding cut by a spiteful rival, preventing him from defending the Lucky 38 (and by extension Vegas) from the nukes.
• Fate Worse than Death: The Minus World's Mr. House was betrayed before he could defend Vegas from the nukes. He's been trapped in the destroyed Lucky 38 for millennia waiting for the player for reasons unclear.
• Framing Device: The description of the very first video states that these videos were being posted to a forum to document oddities.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: When b0sch's computer crashes at the end of "catali̱xi̱", the very last frame reveals that the video and possibly the whole series after the first episode was recovered from a livestream he did for his forum.
• Glitch Episode: The premise. A player manages to go out of bounds, discovering a horrifying Minus World full of glitchy oddities.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • Near the end of "stuck", the player gets disturbed by a growling ambient sound and tries to turn on the radio, to no avail.
  • Near the end of "⠀⠀⠀⠀", a Drone of Dread erupts from the abyss in Raul's Shack. The player decides it's a good time to leave.
• Jumpscare: A minor one occurs at the end of "under", where as the player opens a door, the screen glitches out, complete with an ear-piercing noise.
• Locked Door: In "exploring", the player finds a locked door that needs a key to open it. When the player attempts to use the console to open the door by force, the door blows up and knocks a good chunk of their health off.
• Minus World: The player encounters a rather terrifying one outside the playable area, filled with weird locations, a bizarre and frightening narrative, an unusual quest titled "MJOHNSONVER???YEDGSHCH", a near complete lack of NPCs, and leftover assets from Fallout 3 and Fallout: Van Buren.
• Mundane Solution: At the very end, it's revealed that b0sch's previous attempts to document the phenomenon were lost. The board as a whole is Genre Savvy enough to realize it might happen again and decide to just livestream it, which seems to work.
• No Fair Cheating: In "exploring", when the player attempts to use console commands to open a Locked Door by force, the game responds by blowing up the door, causing the player to take damage and forcing them to go the intended route.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Despite signs of previous habitation, the areas that b0sch transverses are completely devoid of NPCs and enemies, adding to the desolation and horror the series harbors. Even when enemies start to show up, we never get to see what they actually look like or how they act. The closest we get is the approaching footsteps at the end of "exploring" and a small clip in "nadir" showing b0sch sneaking around a building with an unseen in-human sounding monster lurking about.
• Not So Stoic: Despite their fearful circumstances, the player simply can't resist grabbing and tossing various items using the physics engine.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: There's numerous instances implying the player fights battles we don't get to see, given how much their health fluctuates.
• Ominous Visual Glitch:
  • At the end of "under", the player opens a door, causing the screen to glitch out.
  • In the finale, an out-of-place render causes all audio to deafen and silence, though it disappears instead of causing harm.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: In-Universe. A frame right at the end of the finale shows b0sch (the player) posting about the bizarre circumstances in-game on a message board, revealing that the videos we've been watching were snippets from a livestream he was doing with his buddies.
• Recap by Audit: At the last minute of "catali̱xi̱", the player's game crashes. As it does so, a screencap of a discussion on b0sch's message-board pops up, revealing why b0sch was exploring the hellscape in the first place: The videos were portions of a livestream his forum had collaborated on to prevent the phenomenon from being lost to time; they'd already lost past footage and this was their workaround.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: The later, much darker locations encountered have a red sky to indicate that the player has gone far too deep to turn back.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!:
  • When the player encounters the obscured monster, they don't try to fight it, they get the hell out of there.
  • The player's investigation in Raul's Shack ends abruptly when some sort of unnatural noise emits from the floor. b0sch doesn't stick around to find out what it is.
• Shout-Out:
  • In "down", the player encounters a terminal, a chess set, a chair and a radio, referencing the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL 9000 and Frank Poole play chess. The radio also plays Morse code which translates to "THIS THINGS HOLLOW - IT GOES ON FOREVER AND-", a snippet of a famous quote from the book of the same name.
  • One of the terminals in "somewhere" contains a reference to the Pasteboard Mask speech from Moby-Dick.
  • Paintings by Francisco de Goya (several of his "Black Paintings"), René Magritte and Hieronymus Bosch are seen throughout the series.
  • The concept of a mysterious man clad in a gas mask treading deeper into the earth while carrying a briefcase is eerily similar to the plot of Phil Tippett's Mad God. Much like in that film, the player isn't the only one to have made such a descent, as many bodies identical to theirs are found in "pod".
• Spectrogram Spectacle: Used a few times throughout the latter half of the series. In "nowhere", one spectrogram shows this◊ lovely image of some weird smiley creature, while another shows this◊, which is actually a picture of Howard Hughes exiting a prototype of the "Hughes XF-11" shortly after a successful test flight (image can be seen in full in this article).
• Stylistic Suck: "outside the mojave outpost" is styled as a tutorial video in the veins of similar videos from back in 2010, complete with spelling and grammatical errors.
• Sudden Soundtrack Stop:
  • At the nine minute mark in "mojaveraw-14e0f8e5a0d3", the radio suddenly cuts out, and never plays music for the rest of the video.
  • In the finale, the player discovers a hovering, out-of-place texture. Getting closer to it slowly muffles all in-game audio until it abruptly disappears.
• Surreal Horror: Many of the horrors that the player encounters are quite disturbing and bizarre.
• Tempting Fate: Retroactively. The off-screen poster in the screenshot of b0sch's messaging board raises concerns that the expedition into the Minus World might result in "a 'killswitch' situation" that'll wipe all the evidence away (with implications that previous footage was already gone). The very last thing that happens is b0sch trying to sleep on a bed during the space sequence, crashing the game and forcibly shutting the player's PC down.
• Tightrope Walking: In "outside the mojave outpost", the player briefly walks over a chain-link fence before falling off.
• Tragic Backstory: News-articles throughout the series paint a version of Mr. House that was betrayed by a rival and left unable to defend the Lucky 38 from the nukes during the Great War.
• Twisted Eucharist: In "somewhere", the player eats a steak, takes Acrylonitrile, and reads a Gnostic text in a send-up of communion, healing them to full health. During "⠀⠀⠀⠀", b0sch comes across a more traditional bread and wine communion, which also heals him alongside curing his addictions. Here, the Acrylonitrile reappears and is shown to actually set the player's intelligence deep into the negatives, implying the first communion may have done more harm than good.
• Underground Level: The fittingly titled "under" has the player traverse a cave system located in a giant hole in the ground.
• The Un-Reveal: Downplayed. While it is eventually shown that the Mr. House in the version of New Vegas b0sch stepped into has a more tragic background, what caused the Minus World, if anything did, is left ambiguous.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Midst all of the insane visuals and Surreal Horror throughout the entire series especially in the latter half of the story, in the episode "back" b0sch ends up waltzing into one room where a couple of radroaches are sitting at a table with the implication they are playing cards that b0sch decides not to engage with at all compared to other moments, which is a strange moment of levity during one of the heaviest episodes in the series.