The Outer Worlds
Review
2026-08-22
I finished this in 2019 and the entire "review" I left behind was that "the kid raised by a robot was hilarious" which is meaningless to everyone including yours truly. So I spent twelve hours replaying the game to refresh my memory, understand why everyone hates this perfectly fine game, and write something better. Still don't know who the fuck the robot kid is though.
The Outer Worlds is gorgeous--Scylla, the pulpy propaganda posters, the cutaway diagrams of what's inside the local wildlife--and the writing is a cut above typical gamer swill. If you didn't enjoy the moonman-helmet bit--"Where can I get a hat like yours?" "You would never ask if you knew what it's like in here."--or didn't laugh out loud at Vicar Max's reaction when you hand him the book, I think you might just have dysthymia or something.
My favorite complaint I've seen for the game is that it's centrist propaganda or something. About a game where you can grind down an Auntie Cleo doctor responsible for his employee's death until you give him the True Detective "If you get the chance, I think you should kill yourself" line at the end. To say the game says anything is a weird claim when it's so clearly a hodge-podge of different writers with different feelings telling different stories. Sure we got the "kill yourself corpo-swine" quest, but we also got the heartwarming "find the gay lover for our I-guess-not-really-asexual companion" quest, and the comically un-nuanced quest where we must choose between the morally gray corporate director guy who means well but is a little shitty and the pitch-black, clearly evil, Grandma Cannibal Holocaust sneaking soylent green to her subjects. There's a lot of flavors and your dialogue options vacillate between dick jokes ("Oh, did I say I had a data cartridge? That's just what I call my left nut.") and piddling neutral "I dunno I guess I can help out" bullshit.
What holds it together is the Obsidian interconnected-quest thing--you look into a missing man and his death turns into leverage in somebody else's labor negotiation, or you take too long reaching a guy in trouble and arrive to find a ripped-up corpse--and what pulls it apart is Monarch. Edgewater takes three hours to strip to the studs, and being able to say that about an RPG starting area is a genuinely nice thing--I'll be thinking about it fondly at hour twenty of Crimson Desert's when I play it later this year. Then Monarch takes those tight five-location valleys and lets them sprawl, and every stop is one more shootout over a chest containing a gun and armor you already have. Mechanically it never gets better than that first level, which is reined in in scope and where the surface-level combat, with shooting that feels little better than the by-then decrepit Fallout 3 (and much worse, factoring in VATS), hasn't bored you to tears.
In a way it's just like Avowed. A puddle-deep amusement park ride masquerading as an RPG. No, none of the skills or builds are interesting, all +10% carry weight and +25% spacegun damage. Yes, different quest routes are gated behind different skills. But I went all-in on Mind--Hack 109, Engineering 112, Science 98, Persuade 108--and never once hit a door I couldn't open, because they hand you an option for every skill every single time.
A damning indictment if you couldn't finish the entire game, seeing absolutely everything, in twelve hours. And that's where Avowed only ekes out a 6/10 from me[1]: it drags its heels at every turn and stretches that paper-thin core till it tears. The Outer Worlds wears the same paper proudly like me in one of those hospital gowns, ass out to the world. And here I am bending over, ass-exposed, to pick up a top hat off a skeleton which I will wear for the rest of the game. And will I forget about it like I forgot about that robot kid? (Do they even exist?) Who cares. I don't remember riding Space Mountain but I know I had a good time.
- Especially because that fucking decrepit, horny, pink furby Yatzli--FUCK.