it's fun but there just isn't enough. The Outer Worlds features approximately zero interesting characters, and you are very rarely given a reason to care about anything that's going on in a grander context. the Biting Satire on Capitalism endures until you realise that toothless jokes about clocking in and shoddy working conditions are pretty much the full spread. Obsidian’s trademark gallows humour is there in all its gory glory but few moments are really laugh-out-loud funny.

occasionally, you’ll meet an interesting NPC and some of their side/faction quests will be genuinely brilliant (the cannibals in the ruins side quest and the MSI-Iconclasts arc both stuck out) but they’re too few and far between. the crew that man your ship are neat riffs and variations on the archetypal gang yet they’re as void as the infinite space around you and nowhere near as intriguing.

perhaps the greatest feature in the entire game is the ability to firmly tell a crewmate to leave the ship permanently: nothing in the entire story gave me as much satisfaction as when Nyoka, the Very Badass bounty hunter, asked if she could become a permanent fixture on the ship and I told her to get fucked.