THE OUTER WORLDS
All aboard the good ship lollipop
Let’s say you’re not feeling quite right. Maybe you’re ill. You come home and how do you seek comfort? Maybe it’s somewhere at the bottom of a big bowl of cheesy pasta or it’s in a tall glass of wine or perhaps you’ll find it somewhere in the end credits of an awful Netflix Original. For the RPG fan, The Outer Worlds takes great pains to scratch that itch.
That is to say, you’re a recently thawed hero skill-checking and sharpshooting your way across the universe alongside your crew of acquired miscreants. Along with everyone else on space colony ship The Hope (this being just the first in a long list of endearingly unsubtle names), you were put into suspended animation. However, The Board (the group of space capitalists calling the shots across the system) has deemed it too costly to revive everyone on The Hope, leaving the ship to idle at the edge of the stars. Naturally you – alongside the loose cannon scientist who revived you – cannot allow this to stand.
The acidic alien vistas you run and gun through come second only to the writing. Don’t get us wrong, there’s plenty to write home about the combat; unloading a round into the oversized wildlife, followed by a quippy riposte from your companions, does feel good. However, we’re not convinced that first-person melee can ever be not-awkward. Gunplay, as smooth as it is, is a pitstop rather than your final destination, overshadowed by a conversation system whose familiar nuts and bolts have been beautifully polished.
FULL STEAM AHEAD
Full voice acting, dialogue choices that only appear when you have the right skill set, and a script to make you smirk – it’s all here. Playing The Outer Worlds feels like a conversation between old friends, the chat lampooning the absurdity of its dystopian setting and wellworn quest design. That is to say it’s comfortable, for better and worse.
The care poured into this production is evident. This is one of Obsidian’s biggest, shiniest, and most stable games to date. However, it’d be premature to call it ‘the action RPG’s final form’. For one thing, set in such a timely dystopia dominated by corporate greed, we would’ve welcomed more biting commentary throughout the writing. For another, the Flaw system adds a neat roleplaying wrinkle by offering bonus skill points in exchange for a situational knock to your stats, however it ultimately never quite finds its place in our universe. Last, while solving problems using words results in an impressive array of outcomes, combat-focussed quests too often boil down to going in guns blazing or making a sneaky back entrance. But all that said, you won’t want to leave this adventure in stasis.
VERDICT
“PLAYING THE OUTER WORLDS FEELS LIKE A CONVERSATION BETWEEN OLD FRIENDS.”
An out-of-this-world adventure that, for better and worse, feels far from alien, even if you’ve been frozen for a few years.
The familiar done well and then some. Jess Kinghorn