"The OSI teaches that the Grand Architect set a perfect system in motion at the beginning of time. Contentment is found by accepting one's role in that Grand Plan."
--Vicar Maximillian DeSoto, The Outer Worlds
The Outer Worlds brings satirical humor reminiscent of Borderlands to a gameplay style that would be right at home in Fallout 4. Sharing other significant similarities with Fallout, including the companionship of partners and the presentation of computer terminals, The Outer Worlds offers around 35 hours of quests set in a cluster of planets under the heavy influence of major corporatist factions mostly under the shadow of "the Board." Its comedic dialogue may stay throughout the entirety of the main story and the many optional quests, but the stakes do have grave consequences, and many serious decisions must be made regarding how to interact with crew members, who to help in zero sum situations, and how to stand up to the Board.
Production Values
The blurry textures and very noticeable sudden appearance of vegetation as you walk closer are evident from the beginning of the game, so The Outer Worlds is not the apex of visual clarity on the Switch, even though its shortcomings are quite possibly due to the fact that the game debuted on the PS4 and Xbox One only last year. Luigi's Mansion 3, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, and Bayonetta 2 are much better examples of the Switch's graphical capabilities, but The Outer Worlds is still a testament to the fact that the Switch can run massive games designed primarily for the more powerful consoles of its generation. After all, it still contains numerous worlds full of different regions and characters. The characters themselves are realized through very realistic voice acting. The player's character himself/herself (the gender is one of the customizable options) never speaks, but many others do, and they bring their own motivations, problems, worldviews, and personalities into a serpentine tale of conspiracy.
Gameplay
Customizing the playable character, a colonist brought out of cryo-sleep, using a very limited number of attribute points sets them on their way to visit numerous planets affiliated with the Halcyon colony. A host of quests that fall into various classification categories await, many of which have the potential to shift the direction of the game. Entire side quests are even sometimes devoted to individual objectives in main quests. Thus, completion of at least some non-primary missions is necessary to beat the main story. The side quests have additional room to showcase the satire of The Outer Worlds, though, and the parodies of prominent ideas, including baseless fears over an "imminent" artificial intelligence uprising, get direct attention in these secondary missions that might have less immediate impact on the goal of freeing Halcyon from the Board.
Emerging from cryo-sleep has its benefits beyond merely introducing a character to play as. Tactical Time Dilation, or TTD, can be used in combat and amplified in its duration and effectiveness by spending perk points, just as armor effectiveness, sprint speed, and solo combat ability can be permanently boosted by perk points. Even companions get their own perk points independent of the player character's total, but almost all of their perks are completely the same across all companions. A separate point system awards players 10 points to be spent on improving attributes like "Medical" each time they level up. Based on how many points a given attribute or its sub-attributes have (which is also affected by companion bonuses), new dialogue and action options become available when interacting with NPCs, computer terminals, or gates. A flaw system can actually lower certain stats in exchange for perk points--thankfully, these flaws can be accepted or rejected on an individual basis!
Not all perks and attributes affect combat, but plenty of weapon types and customization kits can be utilized. One-handed handed melee weapons, two-handed melee weapons, "science weapons" like a shrink ray, and many more provide numerous different ways to approach specific scenarios. Brandishing weapons does not alarm most unsuspecting NPCs thanks to a holographic image projector that changes how your appearance is perceived (for a time), and stealth can minimize even what would otherwise be open firefights in less monitored spaces. Depending on which NPCs are in the area, cooperating with them can avoid fights altogether and raise the player's reputation with that faction, which can make new missions become available and keep companions satisfied.
Story
Some very basic spoilers are below.
A colonist aboard a lost vessel called the Hope, one of many colonists sleeping on board, is awoken from cryo-sleep by a man named Phineas Welles after around 70 years in space. The Board, representing powerful corporations, wants to apprehend Welles, but he enlists the player's character to recover chemicals to revive all of the other forgotten colonists on the Hope. This awakened colonist travels the local solar system in pursuit of various objectives that eventually lead them back to Welles and to a confrontation with the Board itself.
Intellectual Content
As players journey throughout Halcyon for the sake of primary or secondary quests, they will encounter a variety of worldviews of varying degrees of rationality. The company Spacer's Choice, for example, is built on utter corporatism. The Board and its subsidiaries behind Halcyon go so far as to contractually "bind" their own workers' future children to serve corporate masters and mistresses! It is this corporatism that the dialogue mocks or describes in satirical comments all throughout the game. In contrast, the Iconoclasts serve no corporations. They have devoted themselves to pursuits other than submission to enormous business conglomerates.
The most explicitly philosophical but most metaphysically erroneous ideology met is that of the Order of Scientific Inquiry (OSI). The OSI is said to be "Scientism," a deistic approach to science and metaphysics based around the Grand Architect, or the uncaused cause, and the supposedly deterministic system of causality it set in motion. Particle behavior is described as encompassing all of reality, or at least all of reality other than consciousness, which Vicar DeSoto outright assumes is metaphysically dependent on matter. Not only does he assume that a kind of emergent naturalism regarding consciousness is true (this is logically possible but unprovable), he also ignores other far more penetrating facts in addition to accepting determinism in spite of the verifiability of one's own free will and conflating determinism with order and purpose.
DeSoto either neglects or has not ever discovered that only the laws of logic encompass and govern all of reality--from material objects and events to mental states to all other immaterial things other than itself, like time and space. Eventually, should one of his later side quests get completed, he has a hopelessly vague, irrationalistic conversation with a seemingly hallucinated version of himself that actually spurs him to accept a kind of grateful acceptance of nihilism. He is then stupid enough to insist that people are free to "create" their own meaning in an existence where not investigating the concept of objective meaning is ideal. The Vicar is thoroughly incorrect and prone to assumptions, but he could at least provide entertainment for rational players!
Conclusion
The Outer Worlds manages to combine elements that have already been seen in other popular science fiction RPGs and present them in a universe with its own personalities and unique satirical focus. There is more than enough content to both resolve the central issues of the plot and leave enough history or possible futures open to warrant a sequel if the developers are so inclined. The game's trip through Halcyon does not have as many incentives for replays as similar first-person RPG franchise Borderlands has, but the core mechanics are mostly strong and have enough differences to make them stand out at least somewhat. If Peril on Gorgon, the first DLC expansion to The Outer Worlds, has enough content to merit a separate review, I may address it on its own when it comes to the Switch so that I can write more about the Halcyon colony and its struggles!
Content:
1. Violence: Limbs can actually be severed from some enemies, though it is far more common for corpses to remain intact.
2. Profanity: "Damn," "shit," "bastard," and "fuck," or at least variations of some of these words, are used.
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