【Street Stall (2015)】

After tooling around in Obsidian Entertainment's corporate space RPG for more than a week I landed on Street Stall (2015)a perfectly succinct description: The Outer Worldsis a Fallout game wearing a fake mustache.

That shouldn't really come as a surprise. After all, Obsidian is the studio behind Fallout: New Vegas, a game that lots of fans would argue delivered the best first-person Fallout adventure of its generation. It was a little rough at launch, but matured into something memorable over time.

The Outer Worlds has no such issues at launch, at least in the PC version I played for review. Your journey across the stars is propelled by short load times, eye-catching visuals, and generally polished performance. Also, importantly: great writing from Leonard Boyarsky, one of the co-creators of the Fallout series, and his team. It's fair to think of The Outer Worldsas a spiritual successor.

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The story starts you out as a deep space colonist who's been freshly unfrozen after a lengthy period in hibernation. The mad scientist who breaks you out informs you something's happened with the colony ship that was ferrying thousands of Earth's finest minds to their new home, and you've been brought back to investigate what's going on.

There's some important backstory to lay out before we go further. The Outer Worldsis set in an alternate timeline where President William McKinley was never assassinated, and Theodore Roosevelt never succeeded him. That timeline tweak laid the groundwork for a future ruled over by megacorporations, including the ones that led the charge on colonizing deep space.

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The various interplanetary colonies you visit over the course of The Outer Worldsare all overseen by the region's competing business interests. It's an oppressive environment that favors a small group of haves over a vast sea of have-nots – people who don't even know enough about the world outside to appreciate the happier life they're missing out on.

You stroll in and immediately set about righting – or, if you prefer, creating! – various wrongs. The story takes you from planet to planet as sleuth your way through the mystery of what happened to your colony ship and what's really going on behind the scenes with all of these corporations.

As you'd expect from a Fallout-style RPG, there are tons of people to talk to and open spaces to explore, and those lead to all manner of optional side stories. Choice is a major factor at every step, as you're often left to decide, through both your actions and dialogue selections, how each scenario plays out.

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The Outer Worldsbenefits greatly from a deft script that makes the good vs. evil distinction a murky one in many of the choices you face. One pivotal early moment sees you caught between an oppressed company town and a nearby colony of deserters, the leader of which lusts for revenge against her former oppressor.

The Outer Worlds is a Fallout game wearing a fake mustache.

Before it's all over, you get to decide which of those communities to support and which to sentence to a slow death. Yes, the corporate town sucks because of who runs it, but do the good people who live there deserve such a fate? The deserters have carved out a happier and more comfortable life for themselves, but will their leader's lingering anger simply shift the balance of the planet's haves vs. have-nots divide in the opposite direction?

This exemplifies the moral dilemmas that you're constantly grappling with as The Outer Worlds' story unfolds. There's not always a right or wrong answer, or a positive outcome in every situation. But the game is generally very good about making every situation feel open-ended and up to you, rather than scripted around a small set of possible outcomes.

Alongside all of that is a sticky action-RPG shooter that has you gunning down or sneaking past armies of alien beasties and mean humans. As you play and level up, you assign points to a variety of skill categories that make you more effective at certain tasks and, in some cases, unlock new abilities.

It should be familiar stuff for fans of these kinds of games, but The Outer Worldsintroduces a few twists of its own. Randomly occurring "flaws" give you the option of accepting some kind of passive stat penalty in exchange for a free, performance-boosting perk point (you usually only get a new one for every two levels gained).

The flaws are one-time offers. If you decide against accepting one, the opportunity is gone forever. You'll get more chances to take a flaw later, but there's no way of knowing when one will pop up or how harsh its randomly generated penalty will hit you.

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That, along with skill categories that tie directly to unlockable abilities, creates a stronger sense of attachment to the character you're building. I found myself looking ahead to future unlocks and thinking strategically about the tasks laid out ahead of me and the skills or abilities I might need to tackle them in a certain kind of way.

SEE ALSO: Original 'Fallout' creators drop trailer for sci-fi adventure game 'The Outer Worlds'

That sense of variety in how you build your character fades toward the end of the game as you amass enough levels to excel in multiple categories. By the time the credits rolled on my story, I was a stealthy sharpshooter and natural leader with a knack for hacking and persuasion. But it was a gradual transformation, driven by the various ways I wanted to approach each challenge laid before me.

One thing I would say to any Fallout fans: if you're the sort of player who likes to do lots of sidequests and level up outside the main story, start your game on the "Hard" difficulty setting. Your mileage may vary, but "Normal" felt way too easy to me.

The Outer Worldsparticular kind of game for a particular kind of crowd. If you're anxiously waiting for the next Fallout or Elder Scrolls or whatever else, this is the experience you're looking for. It's not just a time-filler, though. The Outer Worldshas its own vibe, its own sense of identity, its own virtual power trip. It might be Fallout in a fake mustache, but I'll tell you folks... Fallout has never felt so good.

Topics Gaming