The Outer Worlds

I've replayed Fallout: New Vegas enough times to know exactly where The Outer Worlds sits in the Obsidian family tree - and no, it doesn't quite topple its older sibling. What it does do is remind you why this style of first-person RPG felt so vital before the genre got swallowed by live-service nonsense. You wake from cryosleep decades late, abandoned by a corporate cabal called the Board, and a semi-unhinged scientist named Phineas Welles hands you the keys to a rattling ship and a galaxy of problems. The setup is familiar, but the execution leans hard into satirical worldbuilding, and the anti-capitalist undercurrent running through every colony, faction, and shopkeeper slogan gives the whole thing a coherent, biting edge that most RPGs would kill for. Character building is where the game earns genuine praise. You distribute points across skills ranging from long guns to intimidation to lying, with each threshold unlocking tangible bonuses - max out intimidate and enemies will sometimes flee the moment you drop one of their friends. Every other level awards a perk point, and the optional Flaws system lets you voluntarily shoulder a debuff (robophobia, anyone?) in exchange for an extra perk. It is the kind of light systemic creativity that rewards people who actually read tooltips. The companions are the other big mechanical lever: each has a unique activated ability and, more importantly, actual dialogue that reacts to the world around them. NPCs will sometimes pull your companion into separate conversations entirely, which I kept triggering deliberately just to hear the backstory. Now for the honest part. Combat on the default difficulty is soft. Tactical Time Dilation, the game's time-slowing mechanic that lets you target enemy weak spots, is genuinely fun conceptually but becomes a formality once your weapon skills are high enough. Elemental damage types, equipment mods, and consumables can all be safely ignored for a full playthrough - a real waste of the system depth on the character sheet. The Supernova difficulty mode addresses this by adding survival mechanics, permadeath for companions, and restricted saving, but it is firmly a second-playthrough proposition. The UI compounds the frustration: you can only track one quest at a time, and the inventory system makes comparing weapons more irritating than it has any right to be. Scope is the other conversation worth having. The Outer Worlds replaces a single sprawling open world with a set of smaller exploration zones - digestible, curated spaces that keep pacing tight and prevent the padding that bogs down bigger RPGs. The tradeoff is that it can feel constrained, especially to players expecting the lateral sprawl of a Bethesda title. Playthroughs clock in somewhere between 20 and 40 hours depending on how thoroughly you poke at sidequests, and the branching endings mean your faction choices - particularly the tension between siding with the Board, backing rebel factions, or steering your own anarchic course - do carry real narrative weight. The writing is consistently sharp, and the game's dark comedy tone, one where a worker's suicide is classed as a corporate crime because his body was company property, lands with the kind of uncomfortable precision good satire requires. If you are the player who squeezes every dialogue option, reads terminal logs, and wants a talking-your-way-past-everything pacifist run, this game will reward you fully. If you want deep combat loops or a world that keeps expanding past the horizon, you will hit the ceiling sooner than you'd like. With a sequel in development, now is also a reasonable time to get familiar with the Halcyon colony before the world expands. Obsidian made something compact, well-written, and sometimes brilliant here - even if it occasionally feels like it left half its ambition on the cutting room floor.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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