Is there a more fitting title for Outcast? A game so ahead of its time that you absolutely had to have the latest PC of the era to run it, running code that modern systems would struggle to run for the longest time should players have wanted to go back and find out what they were missing in late 1999.
Ignored by consumers for games that they could actually run, Outcast is one of those titles where I suppose you just had to be there to understand what all the fuss was about.
So here I am, twenty years later, trying anyway.
Fun Times
Outcast wasn't the easiest of games to get going until it saw a digital re-release on GOG and a few years later a 1.1 release, which I'm playing complete with native ultra widescreen support. Working ultra widescreen options. Not even Assassin's Creed Odyssey can achieve that. I digress.
I would say that an introductory movie sets the scene, but it kept going and going that I thought it was a short movie. Long short story short, this Major interrupts our drink with an important mission - we've found extra dimensions (I think), but there's a massive energy leak (I think) which means the Earth will effectively cease to exist within a month or so unless we go through a stargate (don't call it that though) and retrieve a probe which should just undo our problems.
Got that?
Also, there are aliens with energy weapons, your team is made up of scientists and someone you share an unexplained backstory with, and you've no choice but to get going now, c'mon, hurry up.
Expecting this to be a walk in the park, we get on with the task at hand, only for spanners to inevitably be thrown into the works.
We're alone, we don't know where our team is, but we have found ourselves in friendly territory, with aliens who can speak English.
Frustrations
There's a looooot of chatting to start Outcast off. I thought the CGI was long, but this plot dump seems to be on the rather thorough side. I hope you're taking notes about the... guys and their... hatred?... for some other bloke who rules with an iron fist?
I'll be honest, I finished playing this game an hour or two ago and clearly, nothing has sunk in. I know that we came to a deal - I'll help you if you help me - and that was about it. These guys will help find my scattered equipment and team members if I'll overthrow a tyrant. A fair trade.
But first, tutorials!
Outcast is a third person adventure, and it plays fairly well with modern controllers, complete with camera controls and dialogue options and all sorts. It feels ambitious. Jumping, swimming, shooting, sneaking, interacting with the locals in seemingly endless dialogue wheels - it has a lot going for it.
Even just looking at this first little starting village, you can see that the developers were trying something different with the geography and the environment. There's nothing that quite looks like it, and that's probably one of the reasons it was so hard to run.
Speaking of hard to run, if you ever get a chance to watch the animations of our character, Cutter Slade, do so. It's like he's shat himself and is obviously uncomfortable with his predicament. Anyway, tutorials are done, and I want to get this story going.
The world is split up and traversed by Daoka, if I recall. Stargates, to those of us more familiar with the clear inspiration for them. The locals shut theirs off to protect me until I was ready to get on with my mission, but now its open and they've pointed it towards some other land where I am to meet some other alien - they all look insanely similar and have ridiculously forgettable names that I'm just going to have to go with it - and talk about collecting some Mons.
I can't remember what Mons are, but there are five of them, and should I fail in my actual mission of getting a probe back to Earth, I've apparently agreed to this local mission of getting five Mons for some reason.
Further Fun Times
Immediately emerging into a pond - a nice touch, not having all gates be upright and obvious - we follow someone through a lovely looking environment to another safe village where we might find someone of use to us.
He's not, but we learn that the village leader is an idiot and might be persuaded to stop helping the tyrant and in turn help us, so if I can just find him and see if that's a thing, we can be on our way. It sounds like a mission out of modern titles - weaken Athenian forces by burning their war supplies, weaken soldiers by not producing anymore Riss. They're one and the same, twenty years apart.
After another short films' worth of dialogue - admittedly better written and funnier dialogue than we've heard so far - we're given so many options to further our chat that there is actually a conversation option to find specific characters in the world.
We need to find one of them to help us convince another to do something. I think. So I ask where he is and find out that he is on the other side of the map.
It is time to use the humorously named Gaamsavv to save our game...
... and then quit.
Final Word
Why quit? I had been playing this third-person adventure game for an hour or so and, barring tutorials, hadn't got to any adventuring. I'd shot a gun at three pots, jumped a gap a kid would hop over and crawled along the ground so that I could pick up a bit of fruit to prove my sneaking expertise.
I'm a former U.S. Navy Seal, for goodness sake, what is this? Why must I sit through pages and pages of lore, with names of places I couldn't hope to keep in my head, full of characters I literally couldn't identify even if they were wearing name badges.
Most of the backstory were optional dialogue options, I must admit, but this world is different enough from what you know that you have to ask at least something about how it works and that in turn leads to asking another question about this and that to get juuust that little bit more information you need... except that it comes in the form of a history lesson you couldn't hope to remember.
When I finally got to the second village, lead by the fool called Maar, the elements of a fun time was tantalisingly there. I was going to use my smarts to chat to the locals and convince them that I'm a better person to listen to than an idiot. Problem-solving through dialogue is far from a bad thing, but there's soooooo much dialogue and it feels like a chore to get anything done.
But it feels alright to control. It looks plenty playable. The graphics are pretty darn good (though I don't know how the original release looked). It's got something that piques my interest, but the walls that get in the way make me not want to reload and keep going.
Now, I'm someone who has put nearly sixty hours into running around Greece chatting to the locals and upsetting their plans for control of one area or another. I can see myself putting another sixty hours into it. Outcast is not, nor ever will be AC Odyssey, but the parallels are there. Both are massively ambitious games that aren't all about blasting your way through, but about exploring - adventuring.
One of them has the benefits of two decades of iterations and improvements upon the genre, and the other is clearly an outcast, who might have been a fantastic game well worth playing, had it gotten different luck upon its release.
You should play Outcast. I should play more Outcast. I should at least see how it fares as an adventure title before giving up on it entirely. That it is now playable and holds up well should be a good thing, and it clearly shouldn't be compared to modern releases. Maybe I'll fall through another stargate one of these days and see a little more of the strange worlds besides our own.
Maybe.
Fun Facts
The game had to be patched to actually run slower in order to get it to run on more up to date systems. How does that even work?
Outcast, developed by Appeal, first released in 1999.
Version played: Outcast 1.1, PC, 2014