Its not for me.

I am a little surprised how positively reviewed this game is. Ill try and break it down by parts:

Story - It feels very much like a persons first world building for a custom D&D game setting. In person, you can ask a question that the person probably never thought of, but seems obvious to you, and they give you answer. In a video game, that cant happen. There are a lot of eye brow raising logic in the way people behave that is hard to really take anything seriously. The corporations are comically evil, and everyone is just okay with it. like you would suspect there to be much more dissent in the populous the way they are treated and arbitrary penalties. Its a culture where Mass suicide would make sense because no sane person would look at the world and want to keep participating in it.

It has the same kind of energy of a horror movie where there is clearly a knife welding killer in the house and the characters all just kind of wander around in their undies saying "Hellllllo?". Just destroys any verisimilitude of taking the world seriously because the people don't act or behave like people. its a big pet peeve of mine.

Writing/Dialog - I found this to be pretty lack-luster too. There was never really a character I enjoyed. Similar to above with most of the characters - they seem unable to grasp that the corporation is clearly evil. Every one behaves like they need help using a microwave, or use only Velcro shoes. Even the 'smart' characters seem a bit too dumb. The dialog options are usually like:

1) Progress quest
2) Some boring world building in which the person will boot lick the corporations again
3) some other question which will end in a 2 word reply
4) leave

There may be some branching dialog, but I never found any of it interesting to listen to or surprising. it was all very 'meh'.

Every quest felt the same. It always person A tell you Person B is bad, but wont really tell you why or elaborate on it, usually some paper thin reasoning. you talk to Person B and they say the same but provide proof of person A. You confront Person A and they have this like scooby-doo monologue "I would have gotten away with it!" or something similar. All of the quests are like this.

gameplay/gunplay - I found the combat to be difficult until about level 4 or 5. at which point you get way better weapons and the combat becomes much easier. There is also this whole thing they are trying to sell you on when you play the game called something like "Taking flaws". basically when you are playing the game the way you like, pop ups will occur outside of combat when something happens, like you took 200 acid damage total, or something like that. It will ask you if you would like to take a flaw. The flaw will give you a negative to the way you currently play in circumstances related to the pop up - like when you take acid damage you have -1 perception and 10% more weapon sway etc - for 1 perk point. Normally you get 1 perk point every 2 levels, and the perks are very disappointing. There was never one I was excited for, or looking forward to getting. whenever I had to select a perk, it was always kind of a chore to find the least bad one / most helpful. Some example of perks are like "walk speed is 25% faster", "Carry weight is 30kg more", "you can move faster in slowmo mode". Nothing that gave me the feeling of "Wow! this will help me I cant wait to try it" It was really just for fixing inconveniences which, honestly, probably should have just been fixed without the need of perk points. The walking is slow, just make the default 25% faster.

You get companions, you can take 2 with you out of a selection of 6. They are all very bland. No one really had an interesting story. There is a crisis of faith priest who is/was a criminal - it was not totally clear to me. A ♥♥♥ engineer who wants a girlfriend. Doctor with daddy issues. The guy who gets fired from minimum wage jobs wants to me find his friend he has not heard from in a while. And Lady who wants to bury her old friends.

I don't think I am being too unfair with their characterisations because they felt very 1 dimensional. to be fair I used mainly doctor with daddy issues and ♥♥♥ engieer who wants GF real bad. They seem to try and do something like give the companions an "arc" in that they will bring up the same issues and stuff when you go outside of the ship. They also interact with each other when you enter the ship, but there seems to be like only 10 interactions when you enter the ship, and you will enter the ship a lot. The ship will inform you they are interacting when you want to go anywhere it becomes quite annoying.

Similarly annoying is that every companion has a special combat ability, and they shout 1 line every time you use it. some characters have a stun or do damage or something - its usually useful, so you will be using it a lot! I heard the same line like 25 times and I just muted the game. I had the companion for only their "companion missions" which was total like 1 hour it sucked. "AYYYYYAAAAGGHHHHYYYYY" please don't do this, i just need your damage. When you use their ability the camera pans on them and you have to watch them use their power for like 3-5 seconds which is also annoying when you are in a gun fight.

I just really did not enjoy the game so much. I felt like I was being hit over the head with ideas that are not subtle but the game thinks is. I don't know if its a case of "But the players wont get it unless we spell it out for them 3-5 times" I get it, the corporation is evil, but can they have a better reason? There is a "Twist" at the end, but it changes nothing and is not interesting. Your perspective on the factions should not shift at the revelations. I will spoil it to give you the whole deal and save you 10-15 hours of play. There are 2 twists. First is that they are starving due to the food not being nourishing enough. You think you would notice you are starving pretty soon. Their solutions is to kill all the guys already in frozen hyper sleep and put the current population in frozen hyper sleep. Pretty stupid. The second twist is it turns out earth is not responding - maybe destroyed to the colony messages. I mean what would they do if it was not destroyed, surely they are aware of the colony's work and approve of it. Typically a colony would send goods to the home world and have some communication. So even if they are not destroyed - they surely don't care about the suffering of the people. it changes nothing. . Overall its okay, but very disappointed its a 5 or 6/10 for me.

easily my favorite rpg and one of the few games i bothered to 100%, nothing else gets the vibe right quite like the outer worlds

It's a good game but not as good as you'd expect for an Obsidian game.
Bit of a let down really. Also unfortunately short.