I begin my Outer Worlds adventures this week going through the surprisingly big Rizzo’s underground complex. Will it be abandoned? Scary? Purple? I don’t remember, but as Ellie said, this place smells like despair. And purple.
Basically, this level is Aliens mixed with Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory — and yes, it’s every bit as awesome as that sounds.
It looks like the place got taken over or invaded by Mantisaurs, so there’s my primary enemy for the next hour. I do find it adorable that the robots elevated the threat to “Petrifying Purpleberry.” I would totally take a swig of that.
Anyway, the whole job here is to steal a bunch of gas from Rizzo’s for Sublight. This makes that corporation very happy — and nets me another job, this time to steal an entire space station.
“All right, ladies. It’s time for a moon dance.”
The station is eerily quiet. In fact, I don’t get into a single fight the entire time I’m there, thanks to talking down some wanna-be boarders and using my hacking skills to deactivate the security robots. But as I claim the place for Sublight, there are indications of weird science experiments happening. Back at Sublight HQ, my contact says that this is proof of alien sentient life — and a conspiracy to twist humans to become more like monsters. Or something.
Back on Monarch, I get MSI and the Iconoclasts to stop fighting long enough to bring some measure of peace. This lasts for about 30 seconds until a spaceship crash lands with tech that both sides want. And a race is on! A race that I won, so I favored MSI and ended up killing all of the Iconoclasts. Honestly, I was tired of their bickering anyway.
Last time I played Outer Worlds, I didn’t recruit the sixth and final companion SAM (for some reason). Corrected that oversight this time around, as who wouldn’t want an overly cheerful cleaning robot on the team?
With Monarch done, it’s off to Byzantium on Terra 2. Despite looking like a super-rich city, this place has obvious cracks (some literal) in its foundations. As my intelligence contact puts it, something’s off here. Things are breaking and never getting fixed — which is especially noticeable if you slow down and look at all of the minor details in the streets. It’s opulence decaying. And that bodes well for nobody.
And it’s here that I find out another cover-up that’s going on: Halcyon is dying. The plants the colonists brought from Earth aren’t providing enough nutrients to sustain life. And they’re planning to freeze most of the colonists to preserve the real food. And on top of that, a huge ship that was supposed to be bringing help from Earth went missing a while back. Oh, and they’re using a lottery system to select colonists for “early retirement,” which sends them into a big room where robots blast them to bits.
All paths lead to the Hope, the lost colony ship that I was originally taken out of. The plan here is to couple the Unreliable with it to help the Hope skip jump within the system to land next to Terra 2 so that the people can be rescued.
Logs aboard the Hope tell a grim tale. The ship didn’t arrive on time but woke up the crew far too soon anyway. Without an option to go back into hypersleep, the crew tried to find solutions for food. And hey, there’s a whole bunch of frozen meat-people ready to eat. You connect the dots.
Soon after, the Board storms Phineas’ lab — possibly because I led them there — and hauled him off to a maximum security planet. But before I get to that, I’ve got to get some DLCs done!
Bio Break 