The Other World; Or, Glimpses of the Supernatural by Frederick George Lee

“It’s a very familiar format to anybody who’s played a Fallout game, in that there are almost always multiple ways to fight, talk, or sneak your way through – and notably there are different speech skills to lie, persuade, or intimidate your way past adversaries. The Outer Worlds feels smaller in scale than that, though, so that works well enough. The first big quest has major parallels to Fallout 3’s signature Megaton choice, though while I did enjoy hearing about the philosophical differences between various factions, there aren’t many big surprises or Megaton-like “wow” moments in how quests play out. Sometimes by throwing a switch to declare your preference for the winners, and sometimes by simply shooting said losers. On one hand, The Outer Worlds feels aimless for a long time, but on the other, that means the quest to help a mad-ish scientist revive your fellow colonists from hibernation sort of fades into the background as you casually wander into the middle of morally gray local conflicts and pick winners and losers.

In some ways it’s nice that the story doesn’t put a face on the evil corporate Board that rules over this isolated colony until around two thirds of the way through the roughly 30-hour campaign – and even when they do they’re not all that menacing. It isn’t hard to picture Captain Malcolm Reynolds reading off some of the more sarcastic dialogue options, either.

From the on-the-nose “Firefly” branding on the energy weapon ammo to the fact that your junky transport’s young naive engineer lady talks pretty much exactly like Kaylee, it’s layered on thick in a way I appreciated. And, as a big fan of the short-lived sci-fi western show Firefly, I spotted its influences everywhere. Everywhere you look there’s a satirical slogan or crazy-eyed mascot, a worker being treated as hilariously disposable, and oppressive propaganda and policies keeping everybody in line. I wouldn’t quite call this space-frontier themed adventure the best of both, but it’s a creative and well-made take that’s both familiar and new all at once.The Outer Worlds takes place in a solar system-wide colony ruled by corporate feudalism and filled with dark humor. Obsidian, a developer that’s made sequels to both BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Bethesda’s Fallout 3, has merged those two distinctive flavors, and they taste great together. The Outer Worlds is the “you got chocolate in my peanut butter” of RPGs.

The Other World; Or, Glimpses of the Supernatural by Frederick George Lee