Once upon a time the past was past but that’s no longer true. Listening to fifty-year-old music in the 1980s meant you were digging back to the very different era of the 1930s, but listening to a fifty-year-old song today just means a track from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon came on. Gaming isn’t quite at the point where it reaches back that far, with Space Invaders finally igniting the new medium in the public eye in 1978, but there are plenty of series still going today that were almost completely abandoned for stretches measured in decades. Atari has been doing the Recharged series with old arcade titles that are both well-known and much more obscure, Shenmue had the eighteen-year gap between II and III, and Psychonauts was dead for twelve years before the VR spin-off Rhombus of Ruin showed up as a precursor to Psychonauts 2. So long as someone on the creative end is interested it’s not entirely impossible that a fondly-remembered game isn’t as dead as it looks. The latest cult classic to get revived is Outcast and its sequel is looking to be a great continuation of the story.
Outcast came out originally back in 1999 and featured an open-world design on an alien planet that was hamstrung by tech just a bit too ambitious for the hardware of the time. Those who could play it were impressed not just by the story of ’90s-hero-name protagonist Cutter Slade’s journey to Adelpha, but also how the open world affected the approach to its missions and combat. A couple of years later Grand Theft Auto III showed up and introduced the whole world that type of gameplay design, but at the time it was mostly found in RPGs like Elder Scrolls and Ultima rather than more action-oriented gaming. Outcast’s problem, though, was that the voxel tech used to render its world was overly-ambitious, and having played it on a PC I’ll describe as “adequate for the time” I can confirm the single-digit framerate was too much to handle when the combat kicked in. Enough people could play it decently, however, that Outcast became a niche classic, eventually being rereleased as Outcast 1.1 on Steam and GOG (after an unsuccessful Kickstarter) and getting a full remake in the form of Outcast: Second Contact. All this, however, was in preparation for Outcast 2: A New Beginning, which recently had a playable demo to show off the first new content for the series in over twenty years.
Outcast 2 puts you in the role of a ’90s action movie hero, with Cutter Slade back in business to once again help his Talan friends on Adelpha rise up against their oppressors. In the first game Slade’s crew caused the entire mess and this time it’s a high-tech robo-army invasion, however, so there’s not much mostly-peaceful mystical aliens can do here. They need someone who understands the threat they’re facing, and Cutter has come through for them before. Admitted, he wasn’t as equipped to navigate open-world environments as he is this time around.
In the demo Cutter starts off in a technological training facility, getting the full rundown on his basic gear and how to use it in combat. It boils down to pistol, rifle and energy shield, plus melee attacks to round it out, forming a solid basis to build into more advanced skills as the game progresses. The combat felt good even with the starter-bots, and left me looking forward to seeing how it develops as new skills and upgrades come into play. Once out of the training area it was revealed that Cutter is in a small base high above Adelpha, and getting down requires breaking out the wingsuit to glide to the surface. It’s a lovely flight, aside from the bit where a Talan gets eaten by a giant toothy worm, and landing in the village soon leads directly to a quest to take the worm down.
Before doing that, though, it was worth looking around, both to chat with the villagers and explore. Adelpha is a world rich with detail, and while Outcast 2 lets you quickly get to the shooting, it’s hard not to get pulled away for a little sightseeing. The villagers all have something to say, although thankfully not too much, and Cutter Slade manages to come off as likeable rather than falling into the obnoxiousness that his character type can so easily devolve into. It makes for an inviting world, especially when coupled with a bright sun in an almost Sega-blue sky shining down on the hills, forests and towns of Adelpha, and the trailers show a good number of areas both cozy and exotic.
It’s been a long time since the original Outcast released, and there’s no question it’s a remnant of its time, but it was an impressive game then and still worth playing now. While Outcast 2 won’t be quite so ahead of the curve, thanks to open-world gameplay becoming a standard in the intervening decades, it still looks to be a fantastic adventure on a fully-realized alien world. There’s robots and monsters threatening the Talan and they could use a hand from someone of the appropriate level of technological advancement, and while Cutter Slade may have been out of commission for a while, he’s ready to get right back to saving the world again.
