***This Post Contains minor spoilers for a companion Questline***

4.5/5

Played on: Xbox One

Price: $59.99 (or $9.99 a month if you play it on Xbox’s Game Pass)

Is It Worth The Money? : Yes

Developer: Obsidian

Some Initial Thoughts-

When I first saw the trailer for The Outer Worlds some months ago, I thought that they were being somewhat kind of presumptive about how good their game was going to be by marketing it as being made by the people who originally brought you Fallout.(Obsidian Entertainment is the developer of the Fallout franchise favourite Fallout: New Vegas) Having just been bitten in the rear by how Fallout: 76 turned out, I wasn’t all that optimistic about a game that looks like it’s just Fallout, but with spaceships. But since it was going to be coming out on Game pass, I decided to preinstall it on the morning of the 24th, and started playing it at 9:00pm that night. (The game went live midnight of the 25th, which was 9:00pm on the west coast.) After the first few minutes of playing, I knew right away that all of my preconceived notions about the game were dead wrong.

What The Game Is-

The Outer Worlds is a futuristic first person RPG, set against the backdrop of large corporations colonizing far away star systems, and the humans that pay their way to these stars with indentured servitude. In the game, you’re first given a questline by a certain character, who hopes that you will help him free your shipmates abandoned in space by the corporations, who are collectively known as ‘The Board’.

Or, the first chance you get, you can abandon the whole quest line, and start helping the board in the fight against the rebelled workers if it so tickles your fancy.

Though for the most part, the choices that you make throughout the game are not game changing, you do feel an emotional weight to them. Obsidian has taken everything that they have learned from their work on New Vegas, and built onto it, and applied it to The Outer Worlds. The characters in this game are so well written, that having to choose to cut the power from either the town or the camp of displaced workers becomes a serious moral dilemma that you worry about. Compare this with Fallout 4‘s ‘Brotherhood of Steel’, or even ‘The Railroad’ who I could wipe out with a few rounds from my Fat Man, and not lose any sleep over it.

This game carries some serious emotional weight with it, something that other RPG’s are never able to fully capture.

We Need To Talk About Parvati-

**SPOILERS**

As a Queer person who’s also Asexual, representation in mainstream AAA titles is something that I have a bit of a hard time finding. So it came as a much welcome surprise to me when I found that your companion Parvati is explicitly queer. This isn’t a queer like in the Fallout games, or BioWare titles where you can romance your companions, regardless of your gender, and no one in the games have any definable sexualities. No, Parvati gets nervous around girls that she thinks are cute, and even has a whole quest series about her getting you to help her work up the nerve to ask out a girl that she’s interested in. And throughout the game, her sexual orientation is just so normalized. She never has to come out as being interested in the same sex to you, or anyone else. She just tells it to people, and they accept her.

There is one part of Parvati’s quest where you go with her to a bar to try and get her loosened up, and when you get to talking, she tells you that she doesn’t experience sexual attraction, and how that has gotten in the way in past relationships. I was so unbelievably excited to find a game where one of the characters was explicitly queer and Ace. Then my excitement was turned up to 11 when my dialogue tree gave the option for my character to respond that he was also asexual, and it created a nice bonding moment between you two, with Parvati getting excited that you had that in common.

Should You Buy it? –

Yes. This is the most immersive RPG that I have played in a long while, and I love it. And if you’re an Xbox player who’s not so sure about it, it is available on Game Pass, so you can give it a test run and decide if you like it or not.

Was there any downsides to the game? Ultimately, yes. I found a few bugs, but there was nothing that I came across that was gamebreaking. And the aiming is kind of annoying at times. Have a shotgun? It doesn’t matter, because the blast will completely miss the enemy unless they are lined up directly in the middle of your sight. But apart from that, there’s nothing about the game that I don’t like.

Image Credits:

Header Image:

https://outerworlds.obsidian.net/en/media

Image 1:

https://outerworlds.obsidian.net/en/media