Your usual Fallout setting, nukes dropping out of the blue for no reason except that apparently human race is stupid enough to bomb the entire planet. It's in our nature or something like that. Maybe it wasn't asteroids that caused the extinction of Dinosaurs but mankind doing nuclear routine, who knows?
Point is that you've an underground vault and four people to provide with water and food, two adults and two children, for as long as possible. While having "children" in your group might seem as a handicap, in Sheltered age doesn't really matter. Or strength, size, experience, or well... Anything but RNG.
A 1 strength child might knock out cold a full-size bear with an uppercut and a 20 strength adult equipped with a sledgehammer and dozens of battle experiences in his pocket might get his every attack blocked by some barehanded hobo. Who knows? Maybe you get that one piece of common material you need to finally get a necessary upgrade or more probably you'll get twenty more of whatever is it that you have the most.
I was hunting for hours in the lookout for hinges and didn't get nothing, and after getting one they started to come by the bulk. I end up having to build extra storage thrice just to put all those hinges somewhere!
Overall I'd say that the nice art and the whole bleak scenery might give you a couple of runs worth of fun but after that the faults of the game start to become too evident and ruin the experience. For an instance: there are five stats, but none of them matter because the game mechanics are unbalanced to the point I doubt they've been tested.
Battle is discouraged since the rewards are never worth the risks, not of losing the survivors that are easy to recruit and interchange but of losing the items they carry, worth several times more than them, and even if you engage in combat the game practically forces you to end them in your first turn either by killing them with a rifle (the only ranged weapon that hits the target) or by "subduing" them, which means rolling a dice to instantly kill them.
All of this makes forming warriors a waste of time and resources. The trading system is also too random with the values of the items not being related to their practical worth but to some kind of perceived value that'll have you trading 5 cans of food, 6 bags of concrete, 10 bars of iron, 10 plates of steel and a truck full of electronics for some soap, and Charisma barely has any impact on trade.
Intelligence increases the chance of recruiting new survivors but these literally come day in between to knock at your door begging for a place to stay, and lastly Perception also has little impact.
Then there's the problem of common sense. The developers were so focused on having this harsh world that they made the characters in it to be mentally impaired.
Situation: you have a starving colony, people are dying of hunger and there's fresh meat, caught in a trap just next to the vault... But you can't get it because there's no refrigerator.
You got everything to make the damn fridge, but you got no hinge. Can't just build it without a hinge.
Situation: survivors come back from a perilous expedition and the stuff they bring back doesn't fit in the small cardboard box at the center of the room. Do they put it in the giant empty room? No, they toss it outside the base for anyone to grab.
People walk around with gas masks and they don't get radiation sickness, your survivors do. If you don't have any, you can't use one of the hazmat suits your vault is equipped with.
Survivors keep nagging you via radio about if they should explore the places you specifically send them to, and then they ask if they should check the items. No, just leave them, I just wanted to check if the hospital was still there, dumbass!
To cut it short, the game needs a lot of work, but devs moved onto Sheltered 2, which is basically the same game but 2.5D and more bugs. Gee. 4/10
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