It’s far more horrific than it sounds… but you can’t do anything to change it, and in the context of Halcyon’s bureaucracy, that makes perfect sense. The game’s creepiest quest has you investigate an “early retirement” program for underprivileged citizens.

Help somebody find their fallen comrades, and they’ll turn out to be indirectly involved in the killing. If somebody asks you to save their assistant from monsters, your reward is hearing about how a dead protege would have damaged their career. It’s hard to feel like a good person in Halcyon. No wonder Phineas is so interested in them.īut over dozens of hours of planet-hopping, Outer Worlds undercuts these neat technocratic solutions. It’s as if Halcyon’s creaky, decaying corporations poison everyone they touch - and the Hope’s passengers aren’t simply smart or strong, they’re uncorrupted by the rot. I could walk away from fights by giving security guards a rare word of kindness, or infiltrate an office by transparently playing on corporate lackeys’ insecurities. But I felt almost guilty using speech checks in Outer Worlds, because its characters seemed so pathetically eager to be manipulated. I’m used to the ridiculously powerful conversation options in Fallout games. Halcyon’s decaying corporations poison everyone they touch Defectors are either indiscriminately violent “marauders,” rebels who are revealed to be callous and bitter, or genuine idealists who struggle to make a difference. Company town citizens suffer under horrific and draconian rules, too, indoctrinated by corporate propaganda to imagine a better life. Many of Halcyon’s inhabitants, by contrast, seem irreparably broken by capitalism. Societies have appropriated pre-apocalyptic symbols (from Elvis to the Atom Bomb) in creative ways, and characters have at least the illusion of agency.

In-world, though, it’s also remarkably dark social commentary.įallout games, for all their grim set dressing, are about people building a new life in the ruins of a fallen world. You can read this as a self-aware bit of meta text - most role-playing games are about noblesse oblige, and Outer Worlds just cops to it. It’s giving Hope passengers the equivalent of an RPG protagonist’s “good” option: drop into an unfamiliar society, spend a few minutes talking to the residents, and single-handedly fix all their problems. But Phineas’ alternative isn’t giving more power to the exploited. As many reviews have pointed out, the game harshly critiques corporations that exploit people. Outer Worlds is a political polemic built on video game logic. You have to unfreeze more extremely smart people from your ship, then ask them to save the world. Is it rallying the downtrodden but resourceful people of Halcyon to overthrow their overlords, drawing on their shared knowledge to build a better future? No, that would be silly. Phineas explains that there’s only one solution. The solar system has been mismanaged beyond repair by a corrupt corporate board. From its first few minutes, you’re effectively one of the most exceptional people in the known universe, and an eccentric scientist named Phineas Welles has dispatched you to save Halcyon from a terrible fate. And instead of coming from a vault, your protagonist is an unfrozen passenger on the Hop e, a long-lost ship that apparently holds some of Earth’s brightest minds in suspended animation.īut Outer Worlds doesn’t bother with false modesty. Huge companies with old-timey names like “Auntie Cleo’s” have colonized a solar system called Halcyon, turning its planets into nightmarish company towns, hardscrabble survivalist compounds, or a labyrinthine prison. Instead of a Mad Max-inflected Earth with a ‘50s Raygun Gothic aesthetic, it portrays a far future where the Gilded Age of robber barons never ended.

Will the outer worlds 2 be on pc