Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, would probably be proud of the writers who laboured on The Outer Worlds. There's wit, charisma, nonesense, and irony carefully woven into each piece of flavour text, safety sign on a wall, or in the very journal's of this universe's inhabitants.
I like things that make me laugh. Laughter is a delicate thing. Sometimes I laugh at things because they're genuinely funny, or use laughter as a coping mechanism.
Othertimes, like in The Outer Worlds, I laugh because I see haunting parallels between our present reality, and an imagined future of "what if?", the very notion of Science Fiction.
The Outer Worlds was released last year. I've just recently finished the game. I enjoyed it a great deal, not just because it made me laugh, but because it has deep, fulfilling characters, environments, gameplay, and plot that is absurd, circumstantial, yet an urgent commentary on where our planet may just be heading one day.
The game begins with you being jettisoned away from the Spaceship Hope, a floating bucket of bodies in suspended animation. It is your goal to meet with Captain Hawthorne, having been freed by Dr Wells.
You come down to the planet where he is destined to meet you, only to crush his supple, fragile human body with your escape pod. An unfortunate end.
From here, you gain custody of the Spaceship, (and Captain Hawthorne's identity) as you explore the local cluster of planets. I must take a moment to also mention that the spaceship you captain is called "The Unreliable", but she's pretty reliable throughout your gameplay playthrough.
You meet a cast of interesting characters along the way, and you can complete almost every quest in many different ways. You can make some people happy, others very sad, and genuinely decide on who you want to please or dissapoint.
It's an open ended game, and my character went from stealthy-lying-lockpicking scoundrel to heavilly armored machine gun toting maniac (who still picked locks) in my play-through.
The atmosphere and level design of the game is very Deus Ex (the original masterpiece, not the abominations that followed) - and the writing, immersion, and gameplay feels more laid back, like Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines.
The Outer Worlds is a game that I believe is a genuine masterpiece that I will want to continue to play in the years to come. Unlike other games in this fashion, it was rather stable throughout its original release, and the only issue I encountered was due to the fact that I was using two different monitors on my system with different refresh rates and resolutions.
Nothing a restart of the game didn't fix!
Visuals could be better in this game, but that's not what counts. The gameplay, story, and immersion are!
The Outer Worlds is available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. There's a version in development for The Nintendo Switch as well - and given the scalabity of the Unreal Engine, on which this is all built on, I feel as though this game has a promising future, enabling gamers to enjoy it for many years to come.
