4/5 ★ – eatpotatochip's review of The Outer Worlds.

The Outer Worlds is a game made by the studio Obsidian, one of my favourite game developers of all time, and co-created by Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain, two of the creators of the original Fallout, released in 1997. The promotional trailer mentions this very prominently, and this isn’t by accident - the modern Fallout games, created by Bethesda, have had a mixed critical and public reception, and Obsidian has a lot of goodwill with those critics and fans, not just for having many of the original Fallout staff at hand, but also for making the (especially in retrospective) best received modern Fallout game, the spinoff Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian has a reputation for making classical RPGs that give a large amount of player choice, to the extent that, in many of their games, you rarely get any explicitly good-vs-evil choices, and can kill nearly any named NPC in the story without breaking the plot. I picked up an Xbox Game Pass subscription pretty recently, and decided to try The Outer Worlds out. Overall, it’s nice! This is probably the most high-profile game mentioned in this article that has explicitly anticapitalist themes. The setting is set in a space colony run by a corporation where nearly everyone living in the cities is an employee of some sort, and everyone has to tailor their lives around their corporation’s products. You’ve got corrupt business executives hoarding resources for their rich cities, plague-ridden cities that prioritize medical treatment for productive employees, and a public class that has internalized corporate propaganda to the extent that they’re hostile and dismissive towards any thought of an alternative form of life being good for them - the first person you mean in the game is a soldier that refuses to acknowledge that his gun misfired and resulted in him injuring himself, because that would mean violating his employer’s rules by attributing blame to their military products. I really, really like the setting. There are a few choices in the game that feel important, too - you’re often given a choice between people barely surviving in a capitalist city and people barely surviving in an anarchist commune (oh, yes, there are anarchist communes and revolutionaries in this setting, of course), and if you don’t play things right (and you sometimes can’t) you have to choose between dooming one or the other. Some of these choices are difficult enough that you have to resort to depending on your ideals, too - saying any more would spoil the game, and I think I’d like to write something more on this one sometime. The companions are very well written and extremely memorable, featuring a lively and diverse cast of characters. Obsidian hasn’t always done great with companion characters, having a cast that can alternate between brilliant and forgettable, and I think this cast of companions is their most consistent and memorable yet. The obvious breakout character among the bunch, though, is Parvati, an awkwardly charismatic and sweet engineer, with a great personal questline that delves into her insecurities as an antisocial asexual in search of love. The problem with that questline, though, can also be attributed to the problems with most of the quests - you do a lot of repetitive quests involving going to a location, shooting a bunch of creatures/marauders, and collecting things to return to your quest giver. There are many quests that have options to skip a chunk of the content if some of your attributes and skills are high enough - for example, you can intimidate an enemy into submission, causing them to tell all their soldiers to stand down, avoiding a gunfight. However, this just highlights another flaw - if your quests either have you doing the same things over and over again, or give you options to skip through quests entirely, it just reinforces the apparent lack of ideas in the quest design. There are some interesting ideas in the gameplay, though. As you finish quests, gather experience and level up, you receive perks every few levels, which can enhance your abilities and make your character more fun to play. As you keep playing, the game also occasionally offers you the chance to accept flaws in return for additional perks - if you’ve been hit by corrosive damage too many times, you can be offered a flaw where all corrosive damage hits you even harder, and if you’ve consumed too much food, you can accept a flaw that gives you a crippling food addiction. Ultimately, I like the game a lot, even if the core gameplay didn’t do much to make me play it much more, and the story, while good, didn’t really motivate me enough to give it a replay. Let’s see, though - the lead writer on Outer Wilds has joined Obsidian, and she's writing for their new downloadable content pack for The Outer Worlds (and yes, this sentence is very confusing, I know), and I want to see what that new DLC has in store.