I finished The Outer Worlds. There is a degree of satisfaction in getting through a game with a somewhat depressing setting, and trying to achieve a "happy end", as far as that is possible. And the fact that I "rented" the game for €1 via the Xbox Game Pass for PC, instead of paying €60 to "own" it in a more permanent fashion, somehow encouraged me to play through the game to the end.

Having said that, through the whole game I never really clicked with the gameplay experience. As as shooter, The Outer Worlds isn't working all that great. In the last part, which is the only hard part if you play on "normal", many of my favorite weapons simply didn't deal enough damage per shot, and were thus ineffective against the armor of the enemies. I ended up sneaking through that last dungeon with a sniper rifle and using headshots to take enemies out. The exploration part of the game is marred by the fiddly business of picking up thousands of trash items as loot. And the puzzles are of the extremely simple variety, like hacking a terminal to unseal a door.

So in the end I felt as if I was playing a walking simulator, a game in which only the story is important, and the gameplay isn't. Not really my favorite genre. While I did like the dialogues, and the story is okay, The Outer Worlds for me compares unfavorably to a game like Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which offers the same good dialogues and story, but enhances the experience by tactical gameplay.