Obsidian's 2019 role-playing game is a compact, sharply written science-fiction RPG about corporate colonialism, made by many of the people responsible for Fallout: New Vegas. Halcyon is a star system where every settlement is owned outright by a brand, and the writing mines that for satire without losing the ability to make individual towns genuinely bleak. It is not open world; it is a set of hand-built maps you fly between, which keeps the density high. Character building allows real specialisation, including a dialogue-only path and an option to make your character so stupid the game writes alternate lines for it. Companions each have a personal quest and a combat perk, and every major questline can be resolved by persuasion, sabotage, siding with the corporation, or killing everyone involved. Combat is functional rather than exciting, with a time-dilation ability standing in for VATS. Two expansions followed, and The Outer Worlds 2 built on it directly. Twenty-five hours, no filler.
Metacritic
