The Outer Worlds Brings Inner Depth to ’50s Sci-Fi Pulp

It’s been a while since I played an Obsidian Entertainment game. Admittedly, the last time was Fallout: New Vegas. What would turn out to be my favorite of all the Fallout games would also one day break my heart—not because of anything the game did, but because there would never be another one. Following its release, the relationship between Obsidian and their publisher Bethesda soured, and despite bearing many members of the original team that brought Fallout into existence, they would never write another Fallout game again. The subsequent Fallout 4 was famously missing the skill system that added so much depth to the multi-branching narrative structure of previous games. It took much of the series’ depth with it. I thought, with that chapter closed in Fallout history, that there was no going back.

But the past few weeks I found that sometimes you can go home again, even if that home is now worlds away. In The Outer Worlds, Obsidian attempts to recreate the magic of the series that started it all, placing classic visual themes and a robust character-building system against a conflicted political backdrop on a divergent timeline. In The Outer Worlds, a passenger on an abandoned ship from Earth is awoken from cryostasis by Phineas Wells, a mysterious scientist who needs their help rescuing those who remain on board. As they begin the quest to save the colonists of the Hope, a system of interplanetary corporate rule begins to crack at the seams, revealing a drastic conspiracy. How the player chooses to settle the conflict is entirely up to them; a system of specialty skills supports a range of playstyles and approaches, whether you like to go in guns a-blazin’ or talk your way out of everything. Combined with visual and narrative inspiration from pulp novels of the 1950s, it’s a vintage sci-fi comic book, fully realized in an interactive space.

If you’ve played older Fallout games, The Outer Worlds is an opportunity to enjoy improvements on the systems that made them great. Like New Vegas, the companions of the game, NPCs you meet during your travels who become a part of your crew, have personal storylines and offer substantial in-game boosts depending on who is in your party. Whereas managing their gear and selecting who to accompany you used to be a complicated process, it’s now streamlined through the user menu, where their perks can also be applied and managed with every additional level. Factions are also back, and they too have a spot in the menu, where the player can quickly gauge their standing with every group in the solar system as they progress in the game. A new time dilation ability meanwhile serves as a stand-in for V.A.T.S., slowing down combat and revealing different status effects on enemies based on where they are struck or shot. “Flaws,” reminiscent of Traits in Fallout: New Vegas, create a character attribute in response to certain in-game events, offering a negative feature in exchange for a single perk point. For example, encountering a particular enemy several times may prompt an offer of 25% decreased damage against their type, but with the trade-off of an additional point to invest in perks. The choice of whether to accept is up to the player, and so far, I haven’t picked any, but they’re still a fun bit of in-game responsiveness that makes me feel as though my choices matter.

The writing of The Outer Worlds covers a lot of familiar topics, from interfactional disputes, corruption, free will, determinism, and the sanitized veneer of corporate branding, to name just a few. But beneath the repetition sits Obsidian’s impressive ability to balance several conflicting and often contradictory viewpoints and sympathetically represent them across a world of interacting characters. The many unique interactions of the companions make for delicious drama, and I love walking into a new conversation and seeing how my crew members will respond and interact with the dialogue. I especially appreciate how they talk to one another, talking shop about shared interests, offering competing points of view or commentary on the history of a new location. The reactiveness makes it easier to take an empathetic interest in the local politics and the differing perspectives of each character, despite their lack of explicit real-world parallels. It’s also fun to choose a companion based on how they might respond in an individual situation, rather than their combat skills. Orchestrating specific scenarios (like the alcoholic Nyoka accompanying Parvati and me to the bar for a girl talk session) always pays off, often in ways that I did not expect.