Basically, the theme of Dead Money is that holding onto the past is enough to destroy you.

It's weird, given the theme of "Treasure of Sierra Madre" is a flat out "Greed will kill you."

I wonder how people saw this reflected.

Obviously, Elijah's obsession with the past destroyed him.

Christine 'let go' of her obsession of getting revenge on Father Elijah by letting you kill him / lock him in the vault. Dean let go by leaving the casino and dog/god let go of his rage and need for control by merging his personalities.

The only character who doesn't let go is Elijah. . . .or you if you use a glitch to steal everything from the vault.

From Vault Wiki:



I liked the leg go theme although they were a bit heavy handed in hammering it into you over and over again.

I absolutely loved it. Dead Money terrified me at first. Seriously. The Ghost People nearly gave me nightmares (Then again, I'm a wuss, and didn't play FO 3 because the subways & ghouls terrified me.), but I finally got around to playing the game, if only because I'd heard a bit about the story line from my BF. I'm only playing it now so I can hear the story, see the character development through the story line, and all that jazz.

So... I loved it.

I'm not thinking about that theme anymore. I let go of it a long time ago.

It's wonderful, Dead Money is beautifully written. And it's a damn shame that more games don't try to introduce some sort of theme or "red line" throughout the story, at least if they are story-heavy. Then again, can't really blame them when so many people A don't really care beyond shooting stuff or B miss the point anyways.

But yeah, I loved that and I think it made the entire experience of Dead Money rather eerie in many ways. Avellone said in a blog that he think it failed as a horror experience (which I'd agree with), but they really nailed it with the feeling of isolation as well as sentimentality.