The corporate nightmare sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds was a big hit for Obsidian. It's not the deepest roleplaying experience ever, but it's gorgeous, sharply written, and maybe most impressive of all, it's relatively bug-free. It's just a really fun game: We called it "an entertaining, uncomplicated RPG in a colorful universe" in our review, and that really nails it.

In the wake of that success, Obsidian announced today that the adventure will continue. "We want to take this opportunity to thank the incredible team behind The Outer Worlds. It is because of their hard work and dedication to this project that we received the Best Narrative, Best Performance - Ashly Burch, Best RPG, and Game of the Year nominations at The Game Awards," Obsidian social media manager Shyla wrote.

"To all of those who voted for us in The Game Awards, you are all fantastic and we are so grateful for your support. The reception to The Outer Worlds has been unbelievable to see, and even just being nominated means a lot. However, the journey isn't over yet as we are excited to announce that we will be expanding the story through DLC next year! Details will be made available at a later date."

The Outer Worlds didn't win any of the awards it was nominated for, but in its defense the competition was fierce: Best narrative and best RPG went to Disco Elysium, the best performance award was given to Mads Mikkelsen (for Death Stranding), and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice claimed game of the year honors. There's no shame in losing to any of those.

"We just wanted to personally thank our team for doing a wonderful job and our fans for their tremendous support," The Outer Worlds co-director Leonard Boyarsky said. "And Tim would like to say what an honor it was to work with me."

"Whatever, Leonard," co-director Tim Cain added. "Now that we’ve finished, I expect that certain photographs will be destroyed, as per our agreement."

Despite its healthy state at release, The Outer Worlds wasn't entirely without issues. Q&A lead Taylor Swope recently offered some insight into the headaches of troubleshooting with a discussion of one particularly tough bug to squash that was causing companions to die, even when they weren't actually dead.

This week, version 1.2 of The Outer Worlds, Obsidian's enjoyable spacefaring RPG, was released. It featured a bunch of fixes, big and small, including one that QA lead Taylor Swope described as "the dreaded 'the game thinks my companions are dead' bug", which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

Swope believes he spent more time investigating this than any other single bug in his career, and outlined the process of identifying and squashing it on his Twitter feed. "The gist of the bug was that, for some players, a companion quest would be marked as failed in the quest log," he says. "With the reasoning that the companion was dead, despite the fact they were very much alive."

This was particularly confusing because, outside of the game's extra tough SuperNova mode, companions can't actually die. Apparently this enigmatic bug happened a couple of times before launch, but the QA team was unable to recreate it, or even learn anything concrete about it.

When the bug started showing up after launch, the team tried to isolate everything that could cause a companion to die. "Investigating it involved figuring out the location of every script and line of code that could possibly make the game think that a companion was dead," says Swope.

The devs came up with a number of theories, and worked out that the bug was likely related to companions taking fall damage while on the player's ship. "The problem with that is that there are no spots in the player's ship that are high enough to result in a lethal fall," Swope notes. It wasn't until he spotted an off-hand comment from a player, who "mentioned seeing a weird bug where a companion was climbing nothing", that he eventually figured it out.

"On the dev side of things, the system for NPCs interacting with the environment is called furniture," Swope says. "Sometimes this is literal furniture, like sitting in a chair. But it covers everything from using a terminal to leaning on a wall."

Somewhere "deep in the complex beast that is the furniture system", Swope explains, there's a piece of code that disables all NPCs, including companions, from starting new furniture interactions if the player is in a conversation.

"The problem was that using a ladder is considered two different furniture interactions," he says. "One for getting on the ladder and starting to climb, and one to stop climbing and get off. So if someone started climbing a ladder and the player entered a conversation before they stopped, they wouldn't be able to exit the ladder, and, well…" Then he tweeted a video clip.

What you're seeing there is an NPC trapped on a ladder in a void outside the player's ship, cursed to climb it until the player has finished their dialogue interaction, at which point they fall to their 'death'—which is what was causing their associated companion quest to fail. And the fix? "We just re-enabled furniture interactions during dialogue."

Stuff like this makes me glad I'm not a game developer. I can only imagine the trauma of shipping a game, only for a bizarre bug like this to emerge. But at least Swope and his team managed to squash it in the end.

You can read Swope's full Twitter thread here.

In the months leading up to The Outer Worlds' release, Obsidian was keen to tell us all the wacky ways that the game could be completed, up to and including killing absolutely everyone. In an RPG that allows players so much freedom to approach quests how they choose, naturally someone would have to try the exact opposite by killing absolutely no one. If you were holding your breath for that feat to be completed, you can stop now because Kyle Hinckley has done so (on the hardest difficulty, no less) and uploaded the results to his YouTube channel The Weirdist. 

This is not Hinckley's first time playing pacifist in an open world RPG. He's also completed Fallout 4 on its hardest Survival difficulty without killing anyone. As with completing Fallout 4, Hinckley's playthrough of The Outer Worlds isn't completely devoid of violence. NPCs can still kill one another or wind up dead and the run is considered a success. Hinckley just isn't the one to pull the trigger. It may be less pacifism than plausible deniability, but it turns out that completing either game without cracking any skulls firsthand is still a feat. 

“Doing a challenge that does away with one of the two sources of experience (combat, quests) leaves your character pretty under-leveled,” Hinckley tells Polygon. Instead of leveling up through killing (or completing quests that require killing), Hinckley had to rely on gaining experience through things like lockpicking, hacking, or speech checks. As you might imagine, that's a much harder row to hoe as it doesn't generate levels nearly as fast as violence does. 

Hinckley also made sure that the violence ban applied to his companion characters as well. He set each to passive mode, meaning they wouldn't attack even when being set on fire, as you can see Vicar Max resolutely doing in the video below. Hinckley had to solve problems where quests were specifically designed with combat in mind and discover alternate options.

In the video above, Hinckley's quest "Space-Crime Continuum" requires that he interact with a terminal sandwiched between two very diligent mantipillars. The problem is, he can't interact with the terminal while in combat. The mantipillars need to either die or be distracted somehow. 

Hinckley briefly considers smacking them with his Shock-Stick weapon that is supposed to stun enemies. He's not certain that it won't also kill one of the pesky bugs in the process so he shelves that plan. Instead he attempts to dance around between the two mantipillars to either avoid their eyesight long enough to break combat or goad them into killing one another. Unfortunately that just results in he and Vicar Max both standing around being set on fire by the nasty hybrid caterpillars. Finally Hinckley devises a plan to use his time dilation ability before engaging the mantipillars. This slows down their movement, allowing him to reach the terminal and interact with it before the game considers him properly in combat with the nearby mantipillars.

Managing to get through The Outer Worlds without personally getting your hands dirty requires a lot of thinking outside the box as Hinckley demonstrates over the course of a lengthy 50-part YouTube playthrough. You're welcome to try this at home, but be warned that the challenge of avoiding combat for so long may put you in the mood to turn your pacifist playthrough into a much bloodier one.

The next time I tell someone I love chocolate, a voice in the back of my head will be calling me a liar. Love? It'll say. You only like chocolate. Tim Cain? Tim Cain loves chocolate. I talked to the co-director of The Outer Worlds a week after its successful launch, eager to ask what was next, but first we ended up talking about chocolate. 

It ties back into The Outer Worlds, though. I promise.

"We usually have chocolate meetings now," he says as soon as we start talking. "Every day at 2:30, I send out on a chocolate Slack channel that I have new chocolate. We had enough bandwidth it deserved its own channel. I usually send out the [details]: If it's single origin, what country it's from, the cacao percentage, any flavoring agents. We all eat a piece and we talk about it and then I blog it, and so that way I have a list of everything chocolate I've eaten since 1993 and whether I liked it."

That's a cool 26 years of dedicated chocolate logging, which means that since well before he made Fallout, Tim Cain has been refining his cacoa palate. With development wrapped, The Outer Worlds may not need daily chocolate meetings anymore, but the team at Obsidian still managed to immortalize this particular idiosyncrasy in the game itself. Like the best Easter eggs, this one only means something when you learn a little bit about the people behind it.

"We have our own chocolate variant called CCN 76" in The Outer Worlds, Cain says. "Right before we certed the base game, I caught my lead designer—he tried to sneak in 'Tim Cain's White Chocolate Yummies' and I found it, because it was a piece of text."

Important Tim Cain fact: He loves chocolate, but white chocolate? Nah. Mostly trash, though he admits he's had a few good ones in 26 years. Back to the Easter Egg."So I found the thing and I deleted it all. Unbeknownst to me, and I discovered this after we certed, he went to an artist and had them write that into the art. So you can't search for it and it's on a character that you were highly unlikely to kill. But he didn't know I was playing a game where I was killing everybody, because I wanted to make sure you could do that and it's fun. I killed that person and [saw it] and then I went to his office but it was too late, we had already certed. So it's in the game."

They got him.

It doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say that chocolate played an important role in The Outer Worlds' development. In the town of Roseway, there's a bar called the 17th Bar, and it, too, is the result of a complex prank on Tim Cain.

"Somebody, about halfway through development, hid 17 white chocolate bars in my office," Cain says. "There was a note on my desk made of cutout letters. They put a lot of time into this. It looked like a ransom note and said, 'I've hidden 17 bars of white chocolate in your room. Have fun.' Knowing I hate it.

"I looked everywhere. The first day I could only find 13. Over the next week, week and a half, I found another three. I never found the 17th one. So then Tyson, the level designer, he was sitting next door. He put a bar in Roseway called The 17th Bar, that you can go and get drinks at. When you walk in, it's got that big flickering light and he says, "I just wanted you to remember the 17th bar." So talk about an Easter egg that doesn't mean anything, except to people who were here at Obsidian working on this project."

Cain and his co-director Leonard Boyarsky knew what they had to live up to with The Outer Worlds, shipping an Obsidian RPG—especially since they created Fallout, and Obsidian hadn't made a game in this style since 2010's New Vegas. Before they even had concept artists, they'd written more than 100 pages of worldbuilding material, defining voice and technology and corporations down to specific word choices: Robots have circuit boards, but they don't have chips.

"We got really picky like that. For me, I want to know that 10 years from now, when I'm probably not working on this, that it's still the game I imagined," he says. "Plus, I saw Fallout going in a different direction. No fault of their own—we didn't leave a lot of notes around. So as people started working on it, they had to play the game and go, 'I think this is what they meant...'"

They did their best to cross every T and dot every I, but what ended up being most surprising about The Outer Worlds was its painless launch. That's the other thing Obsidian's games in this style, like New Vegas and Knights of the Old Republic 2, are known for: Being a bit buggy.

Cain says they were prepared to crunch after release, fixing crashes and issues players ran into. But it was so smooth, they've been able to take a breather and take some time before the first patch, which should be out soon, and respond to some more substantial feedback.

"Somebody found a place that it consistently crashed, but just on one platform, and then there's been another bug where sometimes companions get in a bad state in your ship," Cain says. "But for the most part the things we're fixing are things people have asked for, like larger fonts."

Another quality of life issue he intends to fix is that vending machines don't show how much you're carrying, which makes selling items while over-encumbered a tedious process. There's also difficulty, which came as a surprise: Many players have asked for a harder setting that doesn't come with the restrictions of the Supernova difficulty. He's got a list of UI things to address, and hopes to put out a second update around Christmas, once more player feedback comes in. But when we spoke, it was definitely time for a well-earned victory lap.

I asked Cain about the creation of one of our favorite characters in The Outer Worlds, the robot SAM. The idea for SAM, a no-personality no-illusions-of-humanity plain' ol robot, was to build a companion for players who wanted to play without the "peskiness" of companions having their own sidequests, but with some of their advantages.

Writer Megan Starks took on Sam, and Cain told her: "It's not sentient. But it's programmed to be upbeat, trying to be helpful. It seems everything through the lens of its programming, which is, 'I clean things."

"She wrote some really awesome stuff, Cain says. It says things sometimes that you're like, is it being meta? It's saying something just about cleaning but it's actually sometimes social commentary, too. We had originally thought he was going to be more robotic and it was Megan who said, 'I think it should sound like they recorded a salesman at the factory, who was super excited like, 'Oh my God, I get to be the voice of a robot.'"

So far The Outer Worlds seems to be the kind of success story that makes you wonder why Obsidian hadn't made a game in this style for so long. According to Cain, it wasn't for lack of wanting—it's just been hard to get them made.

"This is the form of a game I love to play," he says. "It's not necessarily open world, because we get tighter control over what kind of narrative we tell. Hub and spoke, is what a lot of people call it. First-person gives us a cool immersion. I know Leonard mentioned once years ago that we had already planned to take Fallout first person after Fallout 2.

"I don't know why a lot of publishers think nobody wants to play this. Part of the reason Obsidian hasn't done it, is because publishers didn't want them. Now Microsoft, I think, is going to keep making stuff in this vein, because this looks so popular. But I can tell you three years ago, not a lot of people were interested in this style of game and Private Division took a chance, and they were really good."

For now, he's got a few months of work ahead to take feedback on The Outer Worlds and prepare that second patch. After that? Well, nothing's official, but it sounds like there's more Space Capitalism ahead.

"I want people to play for awhile and then see what the friction points are and see if there are bugs we missed, put out something before or after Christmas and then think about sequel," says Cain with perhaps just a bit of a twinkle in his eye. "I don't think we're probably going to talk about that. But I'm thinking about it."

The Outer Worlds has obviously been made by people who love science fiction. It's a funny game that references its inspirations proudly. Environment designs, one-off lines and space gadgets frequently pay homage to some of the best science fiction films and television of the past few decades. You've probably spotted loads already, but let's celebrate some of the best.

Two TV shows have clearly had a big influence on The Outer Worlds. There's Joss Whedon's classic, tragically short-lived Firefly, and Futurama. 

Firefly stars a band of misfits trying to make a buck on the frontier of space. They mix it up with gangsters and flee the attentions of terrifying space corporations. It has more of a space Western feel than The Outer Worlds, but a few character archetypes carry over into your companions. In Parvarti you have a different take on the cheerful mechanic who just loves ships and machines—much like Kaylee from Firefly. Shepherd Book seems like a much nicer guy than Vicar Max, but both are men of the cloth who keep accidentally hinting at a murderous past.

If you squint, your Outer Worlds ship looks a bit like Serenity. If you notice your hold filling up with 'wooly cows', that's surely a reference to a Firefly scene that shows Serenity's hold full of cows about to be rustled to another planet.

In interviews Obsidian developers have named Futurama as an influence. It's another show about an unlikely band of friends (well, sort of friends) who barrel from planet to planet getting into scrapes. I mostly felt this influence in the tone of many of The Outer World's exchanges, but when one of your companions shouts "to shreds, you say" in combat, that must be a callout to a Professor Farnsworth quote from season 1.

I felt the presence of a third comedy TV show. Red Dwarf is an old British sitcom about—you guessed it—a band of misfits trying to survive in space. Though, likely for budget reasons, they rarely did much planetside. Some of the ship designs remind me a little bit of The Bug, but the most direct link is ADA. The idea of a sardonic ship AI is an old one, but the presentation reminds me of the acerbic, long-suffering Red Dwarf ship AI, Holly.

Of course there are a lot of visual callbacks. Stylistically The Outer Worlds harks back to the very first Fallout games. Thanks to the Bethesda Fallout games and Bioshock, the idea of old-timey posters making jokes about futuristic scenarios seems staid, but the Outer Worlds picks up that trend anyway. As for direct visual references your ship's navigation terminal sure does look like Hal 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. As for the overall aesthetic, it's impossible to see such beautiful bright, clashing colours (see above) and not think of the amazing Chris Foss.

All of this isn't to say that Outer Worlds is simply cobbled together from these influences, but it's fun to celebrate the little callouts that developers sneak into their games. I enjoyed its take on corporations in space. That's an idea that has been done to death in science fiction, but Obsidian brings its own take to an old idea (Tacoma also does something interesting with this). I'm sure there are loads of little nods and references I've missed, feel free to share any you've spotted in the comments.

I finished The Outer Worlds last night and the ending arrived a bit sooner than I expected. Unlike Steam, the Epic Games Store doesn't give you a time-played stat, so I'm not sure how long I took, but it felt brisk. Not quite as brisk as speedrunner It's Jabo's playthrough, however. He was done in under 25 minutes. You can give it a watch above.

[Turns out that you can totally see your time-played stat, it's just very well disguised. Click on the details button on an installed game and it's right at the bottom]

Jabo's run sticks to just the main missions, and he picked up a few tricks that allowed him to shave quite a bit of time off his previous attempts, including getting a special 'bad' ending where things don't go too well for the space-faring hero and pals. Obviously if you haven't finished The Outer Worlds yourself yet, you might not want to watch until the end. 

I imagine a fair chunk of my time playing was spent in fights I could have likely avoided, but when Jabo does get into a scrap, he's a lot more efficient at taking out pesky enemies. Luckily, nobody puts up much of a fight in The Outer Worlds, though there are some annoying bullet sponges. 

With a time of 24:21 set, Jabo's now looking to shave off some more seconds and get down to 23 minutes. 

Cheers, GamesRadar. 

Where is Roseway in The Outer Worlds? One of the first excursions you take in the main campaign of The Outer Worlds is to Roseway, in which you follow a distress signal. This triggers a series of missions concerning mad scientists creating experimental weaponry to deal with Raptidon hordes and pesky Marauders. In this guide, I'm going to run through how to get there from The Groundbreaker to help you progress the main campaign.

How to get Gladys’ Distress Signal

To start this quest you'll need to have progressed the main campaign as far as The Groundbreaker. This is directly after the events of Emerald Vale, where you have to decide the fate the town of Edgewater and the so-called Deserters. You’ll end up on a floating monument to capitalism which is full of vendors and evil gangs lurking beneath. Then, once you've cleared customs, you're directed to the office of a lovely old lady called Gladys.

Unless you’ve got 10000 bits on hand at this early stage (you absolutely won’t) you’ll have to bargain with Gladys to give you access to the Stellar Bay Navkey, which you need to progress the main story. Instead, talk to her about an 'opportunity' to help her acquire corporate secrets by answering a distress call coming from Roseway on Terra-2. If you follow this line of dialogue she’ll hand over the distress signal necessary to give you access to the Roseway Landing Pad.

The Outer Worlds Roseway location

Once you’ve picked up the distress signal, make sure you’ve spoken to Udom Bedford to unlock access to The Unreliable, which will be impounded once you land on The Groundbreaker. 

Once your ship is free, jump on board and speak to your navigational assistant, ADA. She’ll decipher the distress signal and you’ll meet Anton Crane, the aforementioned troubled scientist who rants and raves about the situation. This will give you access to the Roseway Landing Pad.

All you have to do now is look to your left from ADA and access the navigation terminal. Select Terra-2, then Roseway Landing Pad, and blast off to the newly-unlocked location. Now you can progress the main story as normal by resolving the conflict on Roseway and deciding what to do with the information you gain when returning to Gladys. 

Before you head out, consider talking to SAM the cleaning robot upstairs on The Unreliable, as they will provide you with a side quest that takes place in Roseway that will unlock the character as a companion. Safe travels!

The Outer Worlds is a fun romp around a solar system infested with capitalism and space cowboys. It lets me shoot stuff with my laser pistol and also loudly tell people that corporations are shit. Sometimes I do this while wearing a stetson that makes me good at dodging. This is all good stuff, but my heart isn't in it. It's been stolen by an alcoholic detective. Typical. 

An Obsidian RPG that vaguely evokes Fallout in space should absolutely be right up my street, but I keep daydreaming about weirder things. It's just too comfortable. It's polished and confident, ticking all the boxes for a modern RPG, but it's entirely absent of the subversiveness that Obsidian's best games are blessed with, leaving just the familiar, and now streamlined, formula. 

I had a negative opinion on a popular game, so I made sure to unleash my sizzling take on Twitter.

With six likes, it was clear that many people felt the same way. Six or more. For one of my tweets, the number was dizzying. "Yes, I am right," I thought to myself, once again vindicated. And then I went back to playing Disco Elysium, the real reason The Outer Worlds was leaving me lukewarm.

I started playing Disco Elysium before The Outer Worlds and would highly recommend not doing that. Gimme some of that booze-fuelled amnesia, please. I don't want to arbitrarily pit two games against each other, but their proximity in time and disparity in style make them interesting comparisons. The Outer Worlds is a known quantity. If you've played Fallout and watched Firefly, you're going to feel right at home. Everything from the broad structure of the story to character progression is safe. Disco Elysium, meanwhile, turns empathy and substance abuse into attributes and will gladly murder you with a ceiling fan in the first minute.

The popularity of RPGs, especially on PC, is driven by nostalgia. Pillars of Eternity had to be the new Baldur's Gate. Tides of Numenera was going to be the next Planescape: Torment. Lots of studios were going to make their own isometric Fallouts. Every Elder Scrolls gets compared to Morrowind. We've gotten a lot of great modern games out of the passion for classic RPGs, but it's also made the genre a bit homogenous, with the same archetypes and systems being repeated over and over.

The Outer Worlds, for instance, uses a Fallout-style skills and perks system, but stripped of any personality. Progression is slighter than it is in, say, New Vegas, but both are ultimately concerned with making you better at fighting, talking or tinkering, and The Outer Worlds presents this all in a very simple, matter-of-fact manner and none of it really matters anyway. Pump some points into dialogue skills, grab any old perk and then just get on with the much more engaging gallivanting around a solar system. If you're bored with making the same old characters, Obsidian is right there with you.

I don't want building my character to be an afterthought, though, and the issue is less that Obsidian took a utilitarian approach to skills and perks and more that the foundation itself is just a bit tired. Disco Elysium doesn't throw it out entirely—you're still putting points into skills—but how those skills and decisions manifest in the game is novel, unpredictable and quite often fatal.

Even nurturing Disco Elysium's more physical skills can have bizarre results. Shivers, for instance, is a primal instinct that's like a gumshoe's sense of the city they know so well, but supernaturally amplified. It'll tell you about the weather, but also lots of secrets about the city. Each skill is a character with a voice and personality, offering insight and encouragement rather than just passively waiting to be used. They crop up unexpectedly, sometimes offering case-breaking insights, sometimes telling you to become a paranormal investigator.

It's hard to go back from that to "[Persuade] Please let me have more money for the quest I did" straight away. OK, so The Outer Worlds is better written than that, but the function of skill checks in dialogue is largely to get out of fights or get extra cash, and often your choices will have no bearing on conversations at all. Any insight you get will probably be freely offered moments later. Conversations, then, feel like they're on rails, and while you can pretend that your character has a personality and certain traits, it's rare that the game will acknowledge that beyond some throwaway dialogue options. It's like nobody is listening to me—my worst fear, aside from spiders. 

The illusion of choice in The Outer Worlds is generally thin. There are several ways to complete most missions, but beyond a reputation system that you can largely ignore, your decisions spark very little reaction or comment. Regardless of the choices made, all our experiences of The Outer Worlds are going to be pretty similar. That does mean there's not much reason to burn through even more hours replaying it, but I wish it mattered more how I built my character or how I acted.  

In contrast, Disco Elysium immediately speeds off in loads of different story and ideological directions, letting you tug at strings as varied as the tenets of communism to the crime that it's your job to solve. Along the way, you'll build your detective from snatched memories and stray thoughts that you've internalised, transforming into an apocalyptic prophet or maybe a chemically-enhanced superman. Even seemingly incidental conversations with unimportant NPCs can teach you about yourself, and inform your development as a communist cop or super cop or really whatever kind of cop you fancy being.

Communism ended up becoming my detective's defining feature in the end, that and booze, but it all started organically when I started picking some slightly socialist dialogue choices, and then it began to seep into every conversation. This can happen with everything from political ideologies to finger guns. The game notices what you do and then adjusts, if you want it to. The dumbest stuff can be fixated on, but no other RPG offers up this much freedom when it comes to defining a character's identity.

RPGs aren't in some tragic state where they need to be rescued by a standard-setting new game—we're not in RTS territory—and there are exciting projects on the horizon, but Disco Elysium has fired me up for a change. A lot of RPG mainstays have become crutches, or even a hinderance. Why does an RPG need crafting? Or even combat? Disco Elysium has neither, and thus every moment is spent talking, investigating and roleplaying. There's still action and violence and pointing guns at people, it's just that it's all in service to the story. Shooting your gun is a big deal and the single proper fight I got into had horrific consequences. The action in Disco Elysium will stick with me more because it was used sparingly and given appropriate weight.

That's one of the reasons I'm keeping my eye on Gamedec, the investigative cyberpunk RPG. You'll hack and sleuth your way through cyber crimes, and while you'll be able to shoot people and hack turrets, there isn't a dedicated combat system. Like Disco Elysium, you'll find your solutions through dialogue and creative use of skills rather than fighting. I'm hoping we're starting to see a trend of RPGs that don't just offer peaceful paths, but skip combat entirely.

Would I be getting on with The Outer Worlds more if I'd played it first? I think so. It's Obsidian's most conservative RPG, but most RPGs look a little bit staid when they're standing next to ZA/UM's bizarre experiment. I've been spoiled by so many surprises, and now the whiff of convention makes me roll my eyes. 

I'm still working away at The Outer Worlds, though. I make it sound like a chore, but really I'm enjoying myself most of the time. Breezy is a word I've heard flung around a lot, and it's the perfect adjective. I can just go around shooting bandits and pretending to be Malcolm Reynolds, but with a handsome moustache. But my mind continues to wander. What about the plight of the worker? What about the mysterious locked door in the hostel? I've finished Disco Elysium, but there are still dangling threads and a communist utopia never completed. I suppose I'll have to play it again.

I'm not sure exactly when I first noticed it while playing The Outer Worlds. But along with all the perks your companions have for increasing their damage, decreasing their special ability cooldowns, and improving their health, they also have a secret, hidden perk. This perk allows them to get into elevators with you, no matter what, as if by magic. And this perk has a 99.9% success rate.

It's not that companions riding elevators with you is weird. They're your followers. They follow you everywhere you go. But this level of following hasn't been seen in games since Creepy Watson from Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments. It's downright supernatural.

No matter how far away from you they are, once you throw that elevator switch your companions will instantly be right beside you. It's spooky.

As often happens, once I notice something weird happening in a game, the weird thing itself becomes a minigame for me. So, every time I got into an elevator while I was playing The Outer Worlds, I'd try to prevent my companions from suddenly appearing in it with me.

It wasn't easy. Sometimes I'd send them way down the hall or across a planet's surface to see if I could sneak an elevator ride all alone. Sometimes I'd just run past them and try to flip the switch before they had time to even react. But it never worked, and I never saw them actually teleport. They'd only do it when my back was turned, even if it was just for a second.

Once I tried to avoid taking an elevator altogether. As my companions stood on an outdoor lift platform with me, I slowly sidled backwards off the edge, falling to the ground and casually shattering my leg while keeping an eye on them. Then I backed away slowly, always keeping them in my sights.

Their elevator magic doesn't let them flip the switch themselves—they remained up top on the platform, shifting around uncomfortably, obviously desperate to materialize at my side. But they resisted until I finally turned my head. When I turned back, SAM was now standing next to me, though Felix was still waiting on the platform. Another quick glance away, and Felix appeared next to me too. Clever bastards.

Finally, and this was very late in the game, my pointless persistence wore them out. I'm not sure why or how, because by this point I had attempted dozens of times to ride an elevator alone, but as I backed into this particular elevator and threw the switch, they both failed to materialize next to me.

Somehow, I beat the minigame of my own making.

I was so genuinely excited that I celebrated by jumping up and down and blasting electric goo everywhere. You've gotta revel in life's little victories. I still fully expected them to eventually appear, but they never did, even when I turned my back for several seconds. Even as I ran through the upper level, they still did not rejoin me. Only when I left the building completely did they return.

Why didn't they appear in this particular lift? I don't know. Maybe all the doors I was closing in their faces along the corridor finally made them take the hint. "The boss wants to ride this lift alone. Let's let the baby have his way. Just this once."

If the snarls and snuffs of The Outer Worlds' giant rodent-like raptidons sound very much of our world to you, then that's because the voice actor behind them is, in fact, a very good boy. 

The creatures were voiced by none other than Louie, resident Obsidian Entertainment dog, who you can watch mauling a smiley face below. (I initially wrote that it was a Pug, but it sounds like it's actually a French Bulldog—thanks to those who pointed out the mistake.)

Cute, eh? And inventive, too: it makes me wonder what other in-game creatures have been voiced by animals. What collection of beasts made the alien's gnashing noises in Alien: Isolation? Who's the groaner behind Minecraft's zombies? Answers on a postcard.