Company town citizens suffer under horrific and draconian rules, too, indoctrinated by corporate propaganda to imagine a better life. Many of Halcyon’s inhabitants, by contrast, seem irreparably broken by capitalism. Societies have appropriated pre-apocalyptic symbols (from Elvis to the Atom Bomb) in creative ways, and characters have at least the illusion of agency. In-world, though, it’s also remarkably dark social commentary.įallout games, for all their grim set dressing, are about people building a new life in the ruins of a fallen world. You can read this as a self-aware bit of meta text - most role-playing games are about noblesse oblige, and Outer Worlds just cops to it. It’s giving Hope passengers the equivalent of an RPG protagonist’s “good” option: drop into an unfamiliar society, spend a few minutes talking to the residents, and single-handedly fix all their problems. But Phineas’ alternative isn’t giving more power to the exploited. As many reviews have pointed out, the game harshly critiques corporations that exploit people. Outer Worlds is a political polemic built on video game logic. You have to unfreeze more extremely smart people from your ship, then ask them to save the world. Is it rallying the downtrodden but resourceful people of Halcyon to overthrow their overlords, drawing on their shared knowledge to build a better future? No, that would be silly. Phineas explains that there’s only one solution. The solar system has been mismanaged beyond repair by a corrupt corporate board. From its first few minutes, you’re effectively one of the most exceptional people in the known universe, and an eccentric scientist named Phineas Welles has dispatched you to save Halcyon from a terrible fate. And instead of coming from a vault, your protagonist is an unfrozen passenger on the Hop e, a long-lost ship that apparently holds some of Earth’s brightest minds in suspended animation.īut Outer Worlds doesn’t bother with false modesty. Huge companies with old-timey names like “Auntie Cleo’s” have colonized a solar system called Halcyon, turning its planets into nightmarish company towns, hardscrabble survivalist compounds, or a labyrinthine prison. Instead of a Mad Max-inflected Earth with a ‘50s Raygun Gothic aesthetic, it portrays a far future where the Gilded Age of robber barons never ended.
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