The Outer Worlds, Revisited

I got The Outer Worlds for my birthday, and gave it a try this week. I’ve been grinding The Borderlands 3 pretty hard for a while now, and wanted a break. Initially, The Outer Worlds provided a nice escape.

The game is beautiful. The world is vivid, and the game zips along buttery smooth. I think it’s a sad statement about the current state of the industry that playing a game that has no obvious graphic or audio issues feels like a novelty. From the artwork to the menus to the characters, the game feels polished.

And it is clearly created by people who love old-school adventure games. If you’ve played any Bethesda game in the last decade, you’ll feel at home pretty quickly in The Outer Worlds. The story seems interesting, the characters seem real, and the combat is simple and engrossing. In short, there’s a lot to like.

But a couple of days later, I’m back to grinding out The Borderlands 3. For all its charm, The Outer Worlds is very much a old-school adventure game, and that means a lot of walking here, talking to this person, walking there, talking to that person. And the people are nicely fleshed out, and the story is interesting, but after a while, I started to feel less like I was playing a video game, and more like I was in an interactive novel. I started to get bored, and I moved on.

I’m glad I got The Outer Worlds as a gift. I am glad I played it, and I’ll probably pick it up again, some time down the road when I want more of a story. I went back to grinding The Borderlands 3 because I wanted to work on something. It’s hard to describe. I get in these moods with my gaming. It’s sort of like craving pizza, and someone offers you a cheeseburger. A cheeseburger on its own is great, but it’s no pizza.